Thursday Reads

painting by Vladimir Tokarev

Good Morning!!

I’m getting a slow start today. I guess it must be because I’m so cold. I’ve been up since 6AM, but I’ve been dawdling around reading the news, sipping hot tea, and writing nothing. It’s still only 66 degrees in my house even though I have the thermostat turned up pretty high. My furnace isn’t build to handle below zero temperatures, and at 9AM it is still -3 degrees where I live.

The local NPR weather reporter warned that frostbite can happen in minutes when the temperatures are this low and the wind chill factor is much lower. Schools around here are closed, as are many schools around the country. I need to go out sometime today, so I’m hoping the temperatures will get into the teens by this afternoon. The good news is, there isn’t any snow out there.

According to Dave Collins of the AP, via the Charlotte Observer things are going to get worse before they get better.

Another Alberta clipper barreling down from Canada is bringing more bad winter weather to the Dakotas.

The National Weather Service has posted a variety of blizzard and winter weather advisories, watches and warnings for the Dakotas through Thursday. Not a lot of snow is expected, but winds gusting to 50 mph will blow around the snow that’s on the ground.

In Minnesota, forecasters expect blizzard conditions to develop in a portion of the River Valley. Weather officials say wind gusts of 40 to 50 mph combined with fresh snow will significantly reduce visibility, especially in open, rural areas. A blizzard warning was posted in an area from Granite Falls southeast to Mankato and Albert Lea.

Thank goodness I live in temperate New England, and not the upper Midwest!

Besides the weather, the big story in the news today is the shooting rampage at Charlie Habdo magazine in Paris yesterday.

Vigil in Paris for the Charlie Hebdo victims (NPR)

Some background from BBC News:

Charlie Hebdo: Gun attack on French magazine kills 12.

Four of the magazine’s well-known cartoonists, including its editor, were among those killed, as well as two police officers….

The masked attackers opened fire with assault rifles in the office and exchanged shots with police in the street outside before escaping by car. They later abandoned the car in Rue de Meaux, northern Paris, where they hijacked a second car….

Witnesses said they heard the gunmen shouting “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” and “God is Great” in Arabic (“Allahu Akbar”)….

Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier, 47, had received death threats in the past and was living under police protection.

French media have named the three other cartoonists killed in the attack as Cabu, Tignous and Wolinski, as well as Charlie Hebdo contributor and French economist Bernard Maris….

The satirical weekly has courted controversy in the past with its irreverent take on news and current affairs. It was firebombed in November 2011 a day after it carried a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.

The latest tweet on Charlie Hebdo’s account was a cartoon of the Islamic State militant group leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Cartoonists responded to the killings by posting cartoons on twitter. You can see some of them at the links below.

From Euro News, The power of the pen: Cartoonists worldwide react to the Charlie Hebdo attack.

From Buzzfeed, 23 Heartbreaking Cartoons From Artists Responding To The Charlie Hebdo Shooting.

One of the gunmen is in custody, but two are still free, NPR reported yesterday.

French police have taken Hamyd Mourad, 18, into custody after he surrendered to authorities, according to multiple French news outlets. Mourad had been sought in relation to a murderous attack on a satirical magazine’s Paris office Wednesday, but it’s not certain whether he was involved. An ID card belonging to Mourad was reportedly found in the gunmen’s car.

The two central suspects in the attack remain at large; regional police issued a new plea for help in finding two French-born brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, both in their 30s.

They’re believed to be the gunmen who used powerful assault rifles to kill journalists and police officers at the office of the weekly Charlie Hebdo around midday Wednesday.

A police bulletin sought the public’s help in finding two suspects in the deadly attack on a satirical magazine’s Paris offices Wednesday. Pictured are brothers Cherif (left) and Said Kouachi.

La prefecture de Police

The Kouachi brothers are said to be French citizens.

This morning, news broke that a policewoman had been killed in Paris, but it was not yet clear that the perpetrators of the magazine attack were involved.

A policewoman was killed in a shootout in southern Paris, but police sources could not immediately confirm a link with Wednesday’s killings at the Charlie Hebdo weekly newspaper that marked the worst attack on French soil for decades.

National leaders and allied states described the assault on Charlie Hebdo, known for its lampooning of Islam and other religions as well as politicians, as an assault on democracy. The bells of Notre-Dame cathedral rang out during a minute’s silence observed across France and beyond….

Montrouge Mayor Jean-Loup Metton said the policewoman and a colleague were attending a reported traffic accident when Thursday’s shooting occurred. Witnesses said the assailant fled in a Renault Clio and police sources said he wore a bullet-proof vest and had a handgun and assault rifle.

But one police officer at the scene told Reuters he did not appear to resemble the Charlie Hebdo shooters.

The Guardian is covering this story heavily, with  live updates on the manhunt.

A recent story from The Guardian: Police place security cordon around Paris in hunt for Charlie Hebdo killers.

The French president, François Hollande, has led a minute’s silence for the victims of Wednesday’s attack on the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, as police placed a tight security cordon around Paris amid an atmosphere of heightened tension and confusion.

With the search for the gunmen in its second day, there were unconfirmed reports that the suspects had been seen in the Aisne region of north-east France.

In a briefing on Thursday morning, Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s interior minister, said that seven arrests were made overnight, but the two main suspects, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, were still at large.

There was a heavy police presence at each of the “portes” – the main roads leading into the city – amid unconfirmed reports that the suspects were heading back towards the French capital “at high speed” in a grey Renault Clio.

The two men were reportedly seen in the Aisne region, but the reports were confused. Some French media suggested they had been picked up by cameras at a péage (road toll) stop. Others said they had been identified by the owner of a petrol station near Villers-Cotterêts and a number of reports went even further, suggesting the two men had robbed the petrol station and made off with fuel and food.

The reports suggested that heavy weapons including, allegedly, a Kalashnikov and a rocket launcher, could be seen in the rear of the vehicle.

However, apart from images of areas of Paris, like the north-western suburb of Levallois, completely sealed off and heavily armed police and armoured vehicles at the portes of the city, the reports were unconfirmed and there was no indication that police had located the vehicle.

Two reactions to the Paris killings:

Juan Cole, Sharpening Contradictions: Why al-Qaeda attacked Satirists in Paris.

The horrific murder of the editor, cartoonists and other staff of the irreverent satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, along with two policemen, by terrorists in Paris was in my view a strategic strike, aiming at polarizing the French and European public.

The problem for a terrorist group like al-Qaeda is that its recruitment pool is Muslims, but most Muslims are not interested in terrorism. Most Muslims are not even interested in politics, much less political Islam. France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.

This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of how he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to provoke militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would later be Stalinists– the fact that most students and workers don’t want to overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.

More at the link.

George Packer at The New Yorker, The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders.

The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that. They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West—the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be “understood” as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists.

They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.

Because the ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what the violence does, or doesn’t, have to do with Islam. Some well-meaning people tiptoe around the Islamic connection, claiming that the carnage has nothing to do with faith, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that, at most, the violence represents a “distortion” of a great religion. (After suicide bombings in Baghdad, I grew used to hearing Iraqis say, “No Muslim would do this.”) Others want to lay the blame entirely on the theological content of Islam, as if other religions are more inherently peaceful—a notion belied by history as well as scripture.

A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique.

Click on the link to read the rest.

What else is happening? Let us know in the comment thread and have a great day!