France's Ugly Imperialist War of Arrogance and Aggression in Mali

By Khalid Amayreh

PIC, January 20, 2013

France is regurgitating its colonial past

The current war France is waging on Islamists in Mali and Sub-Saharan Africa is not a war of necessity. It is rather an ugly war of arrogance and aggression, bearing a conspicuous whiff of traditional colonialism.

There is no doubt that justice is an extremely thin feature in the ongoing French assault on Malian and other Islamists seeking the application of Sharia in that vast predominantly Muslim region.

French President François Hollande exposed his malicious intentions toward Islam recently when he said he ordered the war against the Islamists in the region because he wanted to prevent the application of Sharia. His foreign minister described the Islamists as "our enemies."

I believe the war in Mali is a miscalculated feat involving excessive adventurism on the part of the socialist government in France. Mali could become France's Afghanistan because the Islamists won't forgive or forget. They are utterly unlikely to raise the white flag.

To begin with, neither France nor any other country, western or otherwise, has a right to intervene in Muslim countries to prevent the application of Islamic law. Muslims all over the globe consider Sharia to be the ultimate divine law.

I know this language doesn't suit Hollande and the generally atheistic French culture. But Paris has its ways and we have ours and France has no right to tell African Muslims, or Muslims anywhere, they have no right to apply Islamic law in their respective countries.

I know that by interfering rather provocatively with this most sensitive matter of Sharia, France is putting itself on a definitive collision course with hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world.

Indeed, does a given country or group of Muslims become enemy to France by deciding to apply the Sharia to Muslim lives? If the answer is "yes," then I am afraid we are all bound to become enemies of the French Republic.

There are many countries in the Middle East that more or less view Sharia as Law of the Land, but France says and does nothing in terms of objecting to these countries applying Islamic laws in these countries. In fact, we see France salivate for all sorts of commercial deals and investments with some of these countries.

Some French apologists may argue that Mali is not Saudi Arabia or Qatar. Well, Mali belongs to its Muslim people. It is not a French fiefdom.

Muslims haven't forgotten France's ugly record vis-à-vis Muslim peoples. The French government and people must never forget even for a second that they still carry on their hands the blood of over one million Algerians as well as that of hundreds of thousands of other African Muslims.

Notwithstanding the diplomatic niceties and pleasantries often heard in our public discourse, the brutal ugliness of the French colonialist legacy is still imprinted in the mind of every Muslim. The latest French aggression against the Muslims of Mali will only perpetuate this legacy and make it indelible.

Moreover, France should realize that bankrupt leaders such as the Presidents of Algeria and Mali, don't really represent true Muslim conscience. They are in their respective positions of power due to the manipulation of the political game by Western powers, primarily France, not because they came to power through legitimate means.

The truth of the matter is that France has been provoking and infuriating Muslims everywhere. In 1991, France carried out a blatant interference in Algeria, leading to the decapitation of democracy in the North African country. Tens of thousands of Algerians were massacred as a result of that criminal intervention.

France had supplied the criminal state of Israel with a nuclear plant, enabling the Nazi-like state to develop a huge nuclear arsenal, threatening hundreds of millions of Muslims in the Middle East with nuclear annihilation.

France had also sold fighter aircraft to Israel prior to 1967, enabling the criminal entity to murder more poor Arabs and seize Arab land.

So, even if France were to atone for her crimes and sins against Muslims, it would need ages to do so.

Cowardly war

The French war against the Muslims of Mali is undoubtedly a cowardly war. France, like Nazi Germany and Israel, is using its advanced war machine to murder people from high altitudes.

This is happening while France and the rest of Western democracies are watching, perhaps enjoying, the real holocaust in Syria, where the Hitlerian regime of Bashar Assad is slaughtering his own people en mass.

Indeed, the Syrian genocide is so evil that it can be compared with Nazi concentration camps in Europe in 1943-5. This is while the west is watching passively, begging the tyrant of Damascus just to refrain from using his chemical stockpile.

In other words, what the whoring international community, including France, is telling the Hitler of Damascus is that he may exterminate as many of his people as possible by using "conventional" means of war, including tanks, MIGS and artillery.

Well, suppose for the sake of argument there is a problem in Mali. But is that problem graver and more urgent than the genocide in Syria where thousands of innocent children are murdered every month at the hands of a merciless tyrant who would destroy his county and annihilate his people in order to stay in power?

Indeed, which installations and troops deserve to be bombed, the Nazi-like child killers of Bashar Assad or the peaceable Malian rebels who have not committed a fraction of the evil that has been and is being committed by the sadistic Nazi regime in Damascus ?

The ongoing French Malian aggression underscores the utter hypocrisy of France and other influential powers of this world. It also serves as an unmistakable warning to Muslims all over the globe that they can't take their safety and sovereignty for granted.

I am not saying this in defense of al-Qaeda or any other real or imagined terrorist group operating under Islamic titles.

The issue here encompasses the entire Muslim community since we are supposed to be like one body, as the Prophet of Islam said: when one limb aches, the whole body aches, because of sleeplessness and fever.

Today, Muslims are being targeted every where. Apart from the Syrian genocide, Muslims are being targeted in Burma, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine, Central Asia, western China , Somalia and now in Mali. In all these, lands, Muslims are the victims of aggression and oppression. Their families and children are being murdered, their homes are being demolished and their livelihoods being destroyed.

Muslims need protection. Protecting them is a task that couldn't be entrusted to a pornographically hypocritical international community that constantly harrows after geopolitical interests.

Unfortunately, the bulk of Muslim nation-states are failed states. A nation-state by definition is not an Islamic nation. Territorial nationalism is incompatible with Islam because Muslims are supposed to be one not 60 Ummas.

Hence, Muslims must strive to reinstitute the ultimate mother state, the Caliphate which would cater for and protect Muslims from the hostile designs of criminal predators.

I know that I am probably day-dreaming. But I also know that dreams, even grand dreams, can be fulfilled.

The dream of the Caliphate must be realized sooner rather than later because the survival, dignity and safety of 1.6 billion Muslims are at stake.