Alain Badiou: Let’s imagine that you’re a young black man, or a young man of Arab appearance, or perhaps a young woman who’s decided to cover her hair because it’s forbidden and she wants to rebel. Well, in that case you are seven or eight times more likely to be stopped in the street by our democratic police (and very often detained at the police station itself) than if you look like you’re ‘French’ – which means, and only means, that you have the features of a person who is probably neither ex-colonised nor proletarian. And not Muslim, either, of course. In this sense, Charlie Hebdo is just imitating the police’s old habits. Here and there, people say that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons aren’t attacking Muslims as such, but rather the fundamentalists’ terrorist activity. That is objectively false. Let’s take a typical example of their cartoons: we see two naked buttocks and the caption ‘Et le cul de Mahomet, on a le droit?’ (‘And what about Mohammed’s arse – can we use that?’). So is the Muslim faithful’s Prophet, a constant target for such stupidity, a contemporary terrorist? No, that’s not any kind of politics. It’s got nothing to do with the solemn defence of ‘freedom of expression’. It is a ridiculous, provocative obscenity targeting Islam itself – and that’s all. And it’s nothing more than third-rate cultural racism, a ‘joke’ to amuse the local pissed-up Front National supporter. It may be amusing for the comfortably-off, but it is an indulgent ‘Western’ provocation against not only vast popular masses in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but also a very large section of the working population in France itself: the people who empty our bins, wash our plates, man our pneumatic drills, hurriedly clean luxury hotel rooms and clean the big banks’ windows at 4 a.m. […] If we want to reduce the risk of fascist crimes, then we have to draw some lessons from the picture I have just outlined. We can clearly see the factors that were decisive in allowing these crimes to take place. There is society’s negative image of these young people – with their background in global poverty – and the way in which society treats them. There is the unconsidered way in which we throw around questions of identity, and the unchallenged – or even, encouraged – use of racist and colonialist categories, and the truly criminal laws that impose segregation and stigmatisation. There is also, without doubt, the consideration that political proposals apart from the ruling consensus – proposals of a revolutionary and universal nature, able to organise these young people around an active, solid, rational political conviction – are disastrously weak, internationally. (That is not to say they do not exist at all – in our country there are activists full of ideas, and who are linked to real people). Only on the basis of a constant activity working to change all these negative factors, with a call to change the dominant political logic from top to bottom, might public opinion have been made to understand the real importance of what was going on. This could have allowed for the subordination of police activity – which is always dangerous when it’s left to its own devices – to a capable, enlightened public conscience. Yet now the government and media reaction has done exactly the opposite. More here.