Their reaction will bring more horrors

FOR THE third time in just over 18 months, France has been the target of a horrific massacre, raising questions about terrorism and the government's response to it.

On July 14--the French national holiday of Bastille Day--Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a Tunisian-born émigré, used a 19-ton refrigerated truck to plow through crowds gathered to watch fireworks in the coastal city of Nice. Careening from side to side to maximize the devastation, his rampage left some 84 people dead and hundreds more injured, scores of them critically.

Before Lahouaiej Bouhlel's identity had even been confirmed, French officials had labeled his action a "terrorist attack." President François Hollande of the center-left Socialist Party went on national television afterward to declare that "the whole of France is under the threat of an Islamic terrorist attack."

Prime Minister Manuel Valls later told reporters, "We would like to tell the French people that we will never...give in to the terrorist threat. The times have changed, and France should learn to live with terrorism."

The nightmare in Nice follows the January 2015 massacre at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the November 2015 coordinated attacks on the Bataclan theater, a soccer stadium and several cafés in Paris.

But unlike those attacks, even days later, Lahouaiej Bouhlel's motivations for causing such terrible and indiscriminate carnage remain unclear.

While the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) reportedly claimed Lahouaiej Bouhlel as a "soldier," the group has a history of making such proclamations regardless of whether there are any actual ties to those who have carried out violent acts. As this article was being written, no evidence has emerged to show that Lahouaiej Bouhlel had any contact with ISIS, considered himself a supporter of the group, or was even a follower of a fundamentalist version of Islam similar to the one that ISIS espouses.

He was not known to have attended his local mosque, though French authorities now claim that he had recently "radicalized very quickly." Lahouaiej Bouhlel's ex-wife, who was taken into custody by authorities following the attack, has reportedly said he was physically abusive and that she had thrown him out as a result.

And Lahouaiej Bouhlel reportedly had at least one violent outburst with a coworker--raising the possibility that he may have been a disturbed and isolated individual whose attack was prompted by some combination of personal factors, rather than being a political act connected to some terrorist organization.

BUT THE political figures who rushed to label the attack in Nice as "terrorism" weren't concerned about Lahouaiej Bouhlel's motivations. Simply put, they want to put this horror to political use.

The death toll hadn't even been determined when right-wingers--not only in France, but around the globe--jumped in to accuse all Muslims of bearing responsibility.

Speaking to Fox News' Greta van Susteren just minutes after Lahouaiej Bouhlel's rampage ended, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump--who has called for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.--blamed "radical Islamic terrorism" before bashing refugees fleeing from war zones like Syria. "[The refugees] may be ISIS," Trump said. "This could be the great Trojan horse of all time."

Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders likewise seized the opportunity to further scapegoat desperate refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere who travel via a dangerous voyage across the Mediterranean Sea in the hopes of reaching the relative safety of the European Union. Wilders called for the Netherlands to "close our borders for Islam and de-Islamize our societies."

In France, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, said in a statement, "The war against the Islamic fundamentalism has not begun yet, now it is necessary to urgently declare it."

Such responses show how, for the right wing, the deaths in Nice aren't so much a horror as an opportunity. Far-right leaders like Le Pen and Wilders have seen their fortunes rise in recent elections in no small part due to the deliberate whipping up of Islamophobia and the scapegoating of immigrants and asylum-seekers.

Yet the truth is that one of the first victims in Nice was Fatima Charrihi, a devout Muslim woman who wore the hijab and was the mother to seven children. "She was an extraordinary mother," her son Hamza told L'Express. "She practiced an Islam of the middle ground. A true Islam, not that of the terrorists."

In all, at least 12 Muslim families lost loved ones in the attack.

If Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel cared not at all about who his victims were--and it's clear that his target wasn't selected for the national origin or religion of those who would be celebrating that day--those blaming Islam now likewise ignore that, globally, the main victims of ISIS and other reactionary fundamentalist forces that engage in terrorism are themselves Muslim.

In fact, in the month prior to Lahouaiej Bouhlel's attack, there were major terrorist bombings claimed by ISIS in Istanbul, Baghdad and Dhaka, Bangladesh. The deadliest of them, just two weeks before Nice, was in Baghdad--some 300 people were killed when a car bomb exploded in a crowded commercial area during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The attack was called the worst terror attack since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Yet none of these attacks received even a fraction of the attention that Western politicians and the media focused on France.

One of the stated goals of reactionary forces like ISIS is to spread hatred, fear and suspicion between Muslims and others in the West in order to undermine any hope of Muslims living peacefully in the West. If the as-yet unproven assertion that Lahouaiej Bouhlel shared the same ideological commitment as the Hebdo and Paris killers turns out to be true, then he will have likewise succeeded in this mission.

And with their response, Western political leaders are helping to deepen the divide from the other end.

WITHIN FRANCE, Nice is already being used to justify a new wave of state repression and attacks on civil liberties, particularly against Muslims.

French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was typical--he said after the attack, "Even if [ISIS] doesn't do the organizing, [ISIS] inspires this terrorist spirit against which we are fighting."

But with that logic, all kinds of acts of violence could potentially be labeled "Muslim terrorism." As New York Times correspondents Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt wrote this week, the question of who is labeled a terrorist, and under what circumstances, is more often about politics than the facts of a given crime.

As Daniel Benjamin, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and now a professor at Dartmouth College, told Mazzetti and Schmitt, the rationale seems to be that if "there is a mass killing and there is a Muslim involved, all of a sudden it is by definition terrorism."

"A lot of this stuff is at the fringes of what we would historically think of as terrorism," Benjamin continued. But "the Islamic State and jihadism has become a kind of refuge for some unstable people who are at the end of their rope."

Mazzetti and Schmitt expanded on the point:

At the same time, governments also see a benefit in linking the Islamic State to what are sometimes random and unconnected acts of violence. It is a way to project order amid chaos, and to try to assure jittery citizens that there is a strategy to end the violence. For example, in the days since the Nice attack, French officials have pledged to increase the resources that the country is devoting to the bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq...

But...there are limits to how much any military campaign in Syria and Iraq can reduce violence carried out in other countries on the group's behalf.

Yet this is precisely the course of action that French President Hollande is vowing to pursue after Nice.

LAST NOVEMBER, following the coordinated attacks in Paris, Hollande declared that France was "at war," and stepped up air strikes in the U.S.-led war on ISIS. Already, France is the second-biggest contributor to coalition attacks against ISIS. And now, after Nice, Hollande has vowed a further escalation.

The French government also announced it was calling up 12,000 police reservists to boost security inside the country, with an appeal from Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to "all willing French patriots" to sign up as reservists and help protect the country's borders. (Never mind that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was in France legally.)

As Philippe Marlière, a professor at University College in London, wrote in the Guardian, Hollande has sought to use his response to terrorism to shore up his government. But his actions have only shifted the political discussion around terrorism further to the right--opening the door for those like Le Pen to drag it further toward reaction.

After November, for example, the government's emergency laws and orders led to an increase in house raids and searches, mainly targeted at Muslims--as well as restrictions on the right to protest.

Demonstrations against the UN climate summit in Paris later in the month were banned or curtailed, and the masses of people who opposed a neoliberal labor code "reform" proposed by the Hollande government faced more drastic repression. Meanwhile, thousands of homes were raided, and hundreds of Muslims were placed on house arrest.

"The Muslim minority in France feels like it's being treated as the public enemy," Yasser Louati, spokesman for the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, told the New York Times in December.

Just hours before Lahouaiej Bouhlel carried out his murderous rampage in Nice last week, Hollande had announced that the emergency laws would be allowed to expire. But immediately after, he announced that they would be extended for at least another three months.

This will only further isolate and oppress an already persecuted Muslim minority in the country--and open even more ground for the right wing in France and beyond to whip up anti-Muslim hate.

THOUGH WE don't know for certain why Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel committed his terrible attack, this latest horror shows how the "war on terror"--whether waged at home or abroad, in France or the U.S. or any other country--only adds to the violence, hate and suffering.

As France's New Anticapitalist Party said in a statement:

Once again, it is men, women and children who suffer, innocent victims, scapegoated for crimes they did not commit. This ugly violence is creating an irreversible spiral of terror and violence by sowing hatred and fear.

The only response that our government can imagine is to tighten security measures: It is prolonging the state of emergency for three months, which of course was already in effect and has prevented nothing. Its only purpose was to increase pressure police used against protesters opposing the El Khomri anti-labor law. Despite all this, Prime Minister Manuel Valls has the audacity to call for "national unity."

French President François Hollande wants to mobilize the military reserves and intensify the war in Syria. But isn't it the barbarity of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Africa that is spawning the social and political chaos, the misery upon which the Islamic State feeds? Haven't these wars set the killers in motion, animating their apocalyptic and bloody ideology?

As the NPA suggests, the answer to stopping terrorism lies not in more bombings and repression, but in ending the policies that drive the rage, suffering and despair that produces these spasms of violence:

This latest attack will be used to justify any and all sorts of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, ant-Muslim, racist, nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric. The NPA will stand against this and will continue to put forward internationalist solutions to the imperialist wars that victimize refugees above all else. We will continue to mobilize our peoples for a progressive world based on solidarity, freed from the barbarity that capitalism produces.