01/23/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Eric Margulies, our good friend, Middle East correspondent, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm just fine, Scott.
It's good to be back with you as always.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
I should also mention that you write at your website, ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And also for lourockwell.com and unz.com, unzunz.com as well for Eric's great articles.
Now, I'm sorry, first and foremost, for you that you were sick, that you had to feel sick.
And I hope you're feeling much better, are you?
I'm on the way, Scott.
Thank you very much.
I hope you don't sound 100 percent.
But anyway, you're doing well enough to do the show.
I sure appreciate that.
Thank you.
But we were all suffering for the lack of your verbal insight here on the situation in France, because what I know about you is you're a big free speech guy and you love the Muslims and you love the French.
And as I read in your first article on the subject, and of course, I could have guessed this, right?
You were there at Charlie Hebdo headquarters only a year ago before the massacre.
You knew these guys.
Of course, you did.
Of course, you do.
So I just want to hear everything in the world that you think and have to say about this situation.
And then maybe in the next segment, we'll get into Al-Qaeda in Yemen and the Houthis and some of this other craziness going on that's tangentially related.
That's fine.
By the way, I don't love the Muslims, but I've spent so much of my life in the Middle East and in the Muslim world that I have an understanding, a sympathy for them, as the French would say.
And I think they're getting the short end of the stick.
I really don't love anybody except for the Italians, of course.
I didn't really realize those were the rules of how it goes.
But all right.
What about the Americans?
You don't love us anymore, either?
No, I love America, my country.
But I remind you that our great Thomas Jefferson said, every decent American has two homelands, America and France.
So that's how I feel, too.
All right.
Yeah, and I know you do, because oftentimes I've interviewed you from France, where you go for seemingly business and pleasure.
You always seem like you're having a good time.
But then you also write stories like in the summer of 2011 about the French special forces and spies helping the rebels in Syria and that kind of thing, because I know you get your work done over there.
But so, yeah, it's not even a coincidence or something.
It's just, yeah, absolutely par for the course that, of course, you even knew the guys who were the victims, or at least, you know, as acquaintances, you had met them before the guys who were killed by these wannabe jihadis back, what, three weeks ago now?
Yes, well, I met I was at the Charlie Hebdo studio when I was promoting my most recent book, American Raj.
And I'm well aware of the publication.
It really had a very small circulation.
It was not of much consequence, but it became what the French call a succès de scandale, a success caused by scandal, because their whole stock in trade was insulting and defaming people and their religion.
And finally, some people took action against them.
Not surprising.
Right.
Yeah, predictable enough.
And I guess they'd been attacked before and that kind of thing.
But I know you're a big free speech guy, too.
So I wonder, you know, how all that shakes out with the right of people, of course, to blaspheme however they feel like.
I haven't really felt like blaspheming so badly since I was about 14 or whatever, but I don't know.
Maybe people want to do that.
They got the right to do that.
And they shouldn't have to be intimidated by government or anybody else from doing something like that.
Right.
I agree entirely.
I am, as you say, a total free speech advocate.
I hate heresy laws and censorship.
Being the victim of censorship myself, I'm totally in favor of free speech.
However, comma, what Charlie Hebdo was doing went beyond the bounds of propriety and good taste and common sense.
It made a profession out of insulting Muslims.
There's a similar right wing newspaper in Scandinavia that was doing exactly in Denmark.
It was exactly the same thing.
And the, you know, insulting the prophet of Islam is a sure way to get a lot of people angry at you and death threats.
But they kept themselves on the map that way.
What is noteworthy was that they said, well, we're with free speech.
You can say anything you want.
Yeah.
But a cartoonist for Charlie Hebdo last year was fired for anti-Semitic drawings, as they called.
So this is kind of a limited free speech, not the whole thing.
Yeah, it seems like.
Well, I guess what's most notable is journalism in the West as a whole, as a community.
You know, I follow as many journalists as I can on Twitter, for example.
And they all just in solidarity with the victims, which is understandable, though, they just completely put the blinders on to the fact that what we're really talking about here isn't even just insult.
It's insult to injury.
You know, not only is it our side killing their side.
And I know in France, marginalizing the Algerian community and that kind of thing.
But in the in in Libya, in Mali, in Iraq and Syria, now you have the French government and the American government that, you know, it's an auxiliary of basically killing people.
And then so you kill somebody's family or, you know, kill a generation and then go ahead and add the insult of and screw your God, too, at the end.
And, you know, again, I don't think this is a matter of justification at all.
I know that a right winger listening might want to pretend so.
It's just a matter of how predictable is it that when you're picking on people when from the privilege of the right, as you say, to pick on people who are the official out class, the official state sanctioned kind of outcasts that are pick honorable as opposed to French Jews, for example.
You know, what do you think is going to happen?
People are just going to take that forever.
And I'm an atheist.
So to me, it's kind of silly to think how much people really believe in God and and and how severely their feelings get hurt if you contradict them.
But on the other hand, I'm not ignorant about how much they believe.
You know what I mean?
I'm not blind to the reality just because I can't personally fathom it.
Well, Scott, as an observer of the Muslim world, I really don't think that Allah and the Prophet Muhammad need anyone to protect them from insults and brickbats and other things like that.
And it's foolish and wrong for the for Muslims everywhere to burn and shoot and loot and you know, go violent over these insults.
But, you know, we're looking at it from our point of view.
You have to see that in France, where there are six and a half million Muslims.
They are the absolute bottom of society.
They're the poorest of the poor.
They're excluded from almost everything.
They live in these slums outside of Paris.
They're petty criminals.
They have no hope of work.
They're discriminated against.
Nobody will hire them.
It's a terrible situation.
And so by kicking these people while they're down, it's absolutely the worst thing that the French can do, particularly when all these self-righteous people talking about free speech ignore the fact that making anti-Semitic remarks in France is illegal and that a pro-Palestinian parade was recently denied by the government.
These are two-way laws, one law for Muslims or against Muslims and one to protect Jewish people.
One of the things that it seems like because the target was the media, then that makes it very difficult for them to look objectively at this, Eric.
And I mentioned the refusal to see the insult to injury angle there when here you got people who, as you describe them, they have nothing but Islam to have dignity about in their life anyway.
And then here is the insult to that as their government oppresses them at home and kills people just like them.
Not that far away when we're talking about France compared to, say, Texas or something like that.
The Middle East might as well be another planet to Texans, but to French Muslims, it's certainly not.
But also, and of course, because it's very self-serving and what do you expect and that kind of thing, I guess, that everybody seems to confuse the target with the motive that the reason that the attack happened was just because, hey, you insult Islam, you got to pay.
So says, you know, Al-Awlaki or something in Inspire magazine.
And so they carry out their order.
But it seems like, well, I guess it's really a question for you.
Do you think that that really was a motive as simple as that?
Just simple revenge or is it like I tend to try to assume there's a more complicated answer.
Terrorism is a tactic in a war and it's typically meant to provoke an overreaction or some specific kind of reaction out of the targets or those claiming to be the security forces of the targets.
So and then I guess, of course, that goes to the question of who was behind the attack in the first place and whether, you know, what are you think of the claims of responsibility out of Yemen by al-Qaeda, et cetera?
Scott, you cited one of the major reasons for the attack, which was a revenge attack in the fact, as I've written, that France has adopted a very aggressive policy towards the Muslim world.
President Hollande's popularity ratings were down to eight miserable percent.
He was even talking about resigning.
He was so unpopular.
Then he lit on this thing of fighting terrorism and French forces have been sent all over West Africa now to East Africa, to the Middle East and even in Afghanistan, where the French are supposedly withdrawing.
France has become, after the United States, the most aggressive military power in fighting in the Muslim world.
The reason that Hollande has done this was because he's petrified that the French right wing is coming down like an avalanche on him and the right wing in France is extremely anti-Muslim and he was being called a weak and a wimp.
So he kicked off this anti-Muslim campaign rather like George Bush did after the 9-11 attack.
Here was a useless president who had no one in any respect for him.
He was floundering.
Then along came 9-11 and all of a sudden he was a war hero.
Same thing for Hollande, whose popularity ratings have gone up from eight percent to almost 50 percent because of this Paris shooting.
That's a catastrophe.
It works so well and every time.
Interestingly, it's working now on the people who sat back and, because their leader at the time seemed to know better, Jacques Chirac, they got to all be high and mighty and very French and rude about what rubes the Americans were for falling for this kind of thing.
Now look at them.
Well, yes, unfortunately, politicians, a very low order of the human race, immediately try and exploit something like this.
It was a godsend.
I called him Lucky Francois because Hollande's chestnuts were pulled out of the fire.
Remember that, speaking of Chirac, in 2003 when the U.S. was planning to invade Iraq, it was the French, President Chirac and other senior French officials who were completely dead set against the invasion.
They wouldn't go along with the American plans to invade Iraq.
France warned the United States, if you invade Iraq, you're going to open a terrible Pandora's box.
The gates of hell will open in Iraq and it will spread this poison across not only the Middle East, but it's then going to blow back into Europe.
And we are seeing precisely this happening now.
Yeah, it's terrible.
And now, so what about Al Qaeda's claim of responsibility here?
I guess maybe a better way to phrase it would be, do you believe what the intelligence agencies are saying that, yeah, this guy, at least one of the brothers, was palling around with Al Qaeda in Yemen back a year and a half ago or whatever?
Scott, it's really hard to say because some of these extreme groups traditionally take credit for attacks that they were not responsible for.
Just to keep their name in the public view, they may have been responsible, they may not have been responsible.
What's typical with these attacks is they're done by a bunch of amateur, loosey-goosey guys who are not a well-organized outfit.
But somebody says, oh, go and smite the unbelievers and off they go.
So it's very hard to say who was really responsible.
All right.
And now, what do you think is the most important thing for people to know about the death of the king in Saudi Arabia and the rise of his successor?
Very interesting event.
So far in the last few days, the transition has moved very smoothly because the king has been terminally ill since December.
So there was plenty of time to get ready and prepare for the succession.
What is interesting about it is that no open fight has broken out yet, that a man regarded as a sort of sensible, level-headed Prince Mukrin has now been named the number two.
And it looks like things are in reasonable hands.
What we have to look for now is discontent in the military and the security forces, because as I've been saying for years, one of these days, there is going to be a revolution in Saudi Arabia and we may be facing a new Colonel Qaddafi.
Ah, that's interesting.
Well, and I've already kept you over time, but that sounds like a subject of, well, this is a developing story.
So maybe soon we can talk about that, the different generals and the relative strength of the military and the princes and the wealth and the shakeup there in Saudi Arabia.
Eric, I'd look forward to that.
You're on, Scott.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, Shaul.
That's the heroic Eric Margulies.
He's at ericmargulies.com, at lourockwell.com and unz.com, unz.com.
The books are American Raj and War at the Top of the World.
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