This January 7th of 2015, the Charlie Hebdo journal was victim of a true massacre that took 12 deaths and several more wounded. Two men in skimasks, armed with Kalashnikovs made themselves present at the redaction meeting and opened fire, murdering the main chiefs of the publication. While leaving, they yelled “we avenged the prophet Muhammad”, referring to the publishing of cartoons featuring him by the Charlie Hebdo, which earned them recurrent threats.

This aberrant attack is an expression of the worst reactionary ideas and we firmly condemn it. The murder of journalists as a method to silence critics is not shared by most Muslims and will only serve as an excuse to deepen the oppression on this group. The shooting constitutes a grave attack to freedom of speech, a will to resolve differences with war-like methods: we defend freedom of speech not as an abstract concept, but as a conquest of the worker movement in its fight for emancipation.

On the other hand, these reactionary sectors that claim to be Islamist, have put ultra-reactionary governments on their feet wherever they find themselves in power. The minimum democratic freedoms are not respected (no chance to organize politically or in a union); the women are hugely oppressed (which does not mean that in imperialist countries women live emancipated). Barbarities are carried out against religious minorities, barbarities of which Jean-Marie Le Pen serves himself cynically to carry out an islamophobe campaign.

On the other hand, these sectors are not at all anti-imperialists. A great deal of financing of the reactionary movements of Middle East comes from the petromonarchies of the Gulf, reactionary to the bone and allies of western imperialist powers, or from the selling of petrol to Turkey and other imperialist powers. The alleged «religious war» against imperialism denials any possibility of tending bridges with oppressed sectors of other religious or secular traditions, or with the workers and people of Europe. We reject then this attack that doesn’t work in the slightest for the causes of oppressed peoples and plays into the hand of islamophobia.

The islamophobe campaign has already begun. Philippe Val, former chief of the journal, declared that «it’s not an integration problem, but about their civilization [of the immigrants]»; Jean-Marie Le Pen spoke of “the war that has been declared by Islamism” and describes the attack as a consequence of massive immigration; Le Figaro writes that we are in the midst of a «civilization war» and that it must be won by any means necessary.

The government, number one in deportations of gypsies and which has always been a part of institutional trivialization of islamophobia, calls for national unity, to unite in the face of the “enemy”. In his television intervention, François Hollande, made a reference to the French military intervention abroad, in defense of «democracy».

Now, it is precisely this policy of the French imperialism and other imperialist powers in general in the middle east, the state racism that immigrant people suffer on a daily basis, the social inequities that strike these people particularly hard, which play into the hands of reactionary ideologies that present themselves as the only ones that defender arab-muslim people.

The policy of the Sacred Unión defended by the government and greeted by the right wing parties is a policy of a counterproductive nature. This policy will contribute, on one hand, to deepen the repression and stigmatization of these people; in the other hand, it will give even more arguments to extremist and fascist groups that present themselves as the true protectors of oppressed peoples.

This is why we reject the policy of Sacred Unión defended by the bourgeoisie, in the same way we reject the islamophobe campaign unleashed by the media that only aims to divide workers, youth and poor people by their national, ethnic or religious traits, when the fight against this regime of exploitation and oppression must unite us.

We call for the broadest mobilization of workers and youth, to face the divisions that the ruling class tries to impose on us, and to denounce this reactionary attack that has nothing to do with the methods of movements that fight for the emancipation of society.