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In any catastrophe, rage triumphs over reason in the early going.

That’s why society loses so much to war generation after generation. Rage gets us into conflict, reason eventually gets us out.

And so it is in the wake of the Paris massacre of editorial staff at Charlie Hebdo and the killing of two French police officers.

Let’s start with the big winners, the political opportunists on the far right. The leader of the Front National party, Marine Le Pen, is stoking the view that immigration is an “invasion” — a coinage of her father, the party’s founder, Jean-Marie LePen. Her ‘ban refugees’ message is aped by the leader of the United Kingdom Independent Party of Nigel Farage, and the Dutch Party of Freedom led by Geert Wilders.

Among other things, Le Pen wants to bring back capital punishment to protect what she calls the “countrymen.” Islam, she proclaims, is an evil ideology. Perhaps that’s why her father wanted Muslims expelled before they “took over” France.

Meanwhile, the “countrymen” have already made a few moves of their own. Following last Wednesday’s attack, several mosques have been attacked, including one that was hit by gunfire. In the French city of Le Mans, four training grenades were thrown into the courtyard of another mosque. There were also reports that an unknown assailant opened fire near a Muslim prayer room in the Port-la-Nouvelle district near Narbonne in southern France.

Earlier predictions that the Front National will take the lead in the 2017 presidential elections have only been reinforced by the mayhem of the last few days. It is not Kristallnacht, but neither is it business as usual.

The low point of the rage reaction in Canada came with Calgary MP Michelle Rempel’s call for Canadians not to try to “explain away” the terror attacks in Paris … Instead of taking narcissistic selfies from the comfort of her bedroom, Rempel should do some reading.

This is very bad news for France’s more than 5 million Muslim citizens who are neither terrorists nor extremists. Nor is it good news for Europe’s largest Jewish population. France now faces an unbearable internal pressure to find scapegoats and somehow keep the whole country from going up.

More than 60,000 troops and security personnel were mustered to join in the search for three suspects responsible for the murders of 17 people in cold blood. The suspects were shot dead by security forces — two in a printing plant outside Paris, and another in a kosher market in the city. Stories have already appeared in the French press describing these deadly attacks as France’s 9/11.

The CBC’s Peter Mansbridge made the same reference on the day that Michel Bibeau shot a soldier in Ottawa and then squeezed off a couple of shots in the centre block of Parliament Hill before being killed himself. Viewers were told that everything had changed — even though no evidence has yet been produced tying the crime to “terrorism,” which has pretty much come to mean any violent act perpetrated by a Muslim.

In both cases, the comparison to 9/11 was at best feeble-minded, at worst, cynically manipulative. More than 3,000 people died in the destruction of the Twin Towers, and over a million more over the next decade in the wars precipitated by that dread event. Although 15 of the 19 hijackers who perpetrated 9/11 were citizens of Saudi Arabia, it was Iraq and Afghanistan that paid the price of their monstrous attack.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has claimed that the extremists have declared war on the West with their atrocities in Paris. That claim comes as the allied coalition including Canada dropped bomb number 5,000 on ISIL in the ongoing war in Iraq and Syria — a conflict in which al Qaida has suddenly become viewed by U.S. officials as a “moderate” terrorist group that might be of assistance in fighting ISIL.

Yet it was a branch of al Qaida in Yemen that has praised the murderous acts in Paris. It has also been reported that unnamed ISIL spokesmen have warned that these “lone wolf” attacks will be the response to the widespread use of drone attacks against them – attacks that have raised fury in Muslim countries like Pakistan for the toll they have taken on the civilian population.

The low point of the rage reaction in Canada came with Calgary MP Michelle Rempel’s call for Canadians not to try to “explain away” the terror attacks in Paris. It is not often that a public figure openly advocates adopting a policy as draconian as war over something that she expressly decides no one should try to understand.

Calling the opposition’s position “deeply ignorant,” (both the NDP and Liberals voted against the latest war in Iraq) Rempel went on to advise total ignorance in dealing with ISIL. Don’t bother trying to understand what happened, just experience the horror of it all. Channel the victims. Rempel’s advocacy comes down to this: kill the evil-doers before they kill us. Where have you heard that before?

After 13 years of the War on Terror, the Rempel Doctrine has given the world a fractured Iraq never far from civil war, a dysfunctional Afghanistan, chaos in Libya, horrendous civil war in Syria, excruciating pain in Gaza, and radicalized an even more vicious strain of fundamentalism that is so bad that it makes Al Qaida look moderate.

Instead of taking narcissistic selfies from the comfort of her bedroom, Rempel should do some reading.

A good place to start would be the brilliant work of journalist Eric Margolis. Starting with the premise that absolutely nothing justifies the savagery that took place in Paris last week – (and let me stress those word “absolutely nothing”), Margolis educates rather than incites. He points out that France has emerged as one of the most active interveners in the Muslim world, with military operations in Libya, Mali, Ivory Coast, Central African Republic, Djibouti, Abu Dhabi, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

And behind all that, there is of course the bloody legacy of Algeria, where liberation fighters were tortured by electro-shock occasionally with the assistance of psychiatrists. The French military presence has been so pervasive, Margolis points out that critics have accused the country of a new era of Mideast and African colonialism.

As horrified as anyone on the planet was by what happened at Charlie Hebdo last week, Margolis nevertheless offers some timely advice for those erstwhile supporters of freedom of the press who may have forgotten a little of their history. Like those torture photos out of Abu Ghraib. Like the damning U.S. Senate report on torture by the CIA. Like that giant electronic ear pressed to all our pillows these days that goes by various acronyms – NSA, CSEC, etc. Here’s Margolis on the hot button issue of protecting freedom of the press. “Those lamenting freedom of the press should not forget western attacks on al-Jazeera’s bureau in Baghdad, and against Serb, Iraqi, and Libyan TV.”

Rempel might also reflect on what the great Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco had to say about murder most foul in Paris. Sacco’s first reaction was sadness about the brutal killing of members of what he called “my tribe.”

But with grief, Sacco also thought about the nature of some of Charlie Hebdo’s satire. A lot of it had nothing to do with humour, and a lot to do with inflaming emotions with derogatory depictions of the prophet Mohammed, including a pornographic cartoon.

“It has never struck me as anything other than a vapid way to use the pen,” Sacco wrote. In other words, just because you have a right to say and draw outrageous and offensive things, does that mean you should?

To make his point, Sacco drew a few outrageous “satirical” cartoons of his own – one of a black man falling out of a tree with a banana in his hand, and another of a Jew counting his money in the entrails of the working class. Under the cartoon of the black man, he wrote “I’m allowed to offend, right?” Under the cartoon of the Jew, he wrote, “And if you can take the ‘joke’ now, would it have been as funny in 1933?”

Disgraced press baron Rupert Murdoch (he of phone-hacking-for-profit infamy) , like Michelle Rempel, is probably not interested in the thoughts of people like Margolis or Sacco. In fact, Murdoch has said that all Muslims are responsible for the deeds of the monsters in their midst.

Funny, I must have missed his declaration that all Roman Catholics were responsible for the slaughter in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh. But then, that’s different, right, satirically speaking?

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Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. His new book on the Harper majority government, Party of One, recently hit number one on Maclean’s magazine’s top ten list for Canadian non fiction.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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