In the wake of the shocking murders in Paris I was requested to write an article and an illustration for the Rio Negro daily. So, I called my beloved Escher to help me with such a task. Here is a translation of the last paragraphs I wrote:
And it’s hard to consider the effects of Islamist religious radicalization (of young French citizens) without doing the same with the ‘clash of civilizations’ announced after the Cold War, when supposedly we had reached the end of history. It was in these early years of the 90’s that sociologist Olivier Mongin noted that behind the ‘flowing of a placid river’ which it thought it had reached, the French society incubated a kind of violence, but no longer to be manifested as confrontation between states, but as an ‘internalized’ and particularistic one, caused by a ‘fear of emptiness’ previously unknown. The fires lit in the Middle East found suitable material into the millions of young immigrants workers from North Africa marginalized in the ‘banlieues’, the non-places of a society indifferent to the inclusion and recognition of differences. What may have begun as moderate cultural claims (such as the use of headscarf by scholar girls) ended up becoming the claim for anachronistic values, assuming a tradition mystified by hatred and contempt.
GLORIA MUNDI 
garrixtoonz
January 10, 2015
The Kouachi brothers, who returned from Syria after training there, were born in France. Actually they did not speak Arab very well. ISIS is still recruiting not only a third generation of Arab or African young individuals but a wide array of people too. Not all of them are poor and many of them have not suffered slavery or colonialism in the form their grandparents did. Not to mention the Americans and Europeans who converted to Islam and have no cultural ties to the background history of the Middle East other than the messages and external references. They are not immigrant workers. No members of their families are. So the Islam is the common denominator at the core of the many problems here. To point at a few: The moderate Muslims are trapped in their own religion that establish tight rules and boundaries for any timid reform. Even the ones who live, work or study in very open environments compared to a village controlled by a nasty cleric (open and relatively free like college campuses, for instance) are hand tied by these stages and by his own religion. And we all know how practical or useful are the peaceful majorities. They did nothing to stop Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al. The other point is every time we fail to connect the dots between a religion and an ideology that turn a a civilian, a regular citizen into a terrorist, we are looking the other way and kicking the can down the road from a growing problem sometimes for the sake of political correctness.
bennythomas
January 11, 2015
Civilization of the West on the springboard of Enlightenment ( despite certain crises as French history would prove a reign of Terror,L’affaire Dreyfus and debacle of the Third Republique) has not crashed. The deep rooted ill-will between classes in the French society did not go off with Enlightenment. The Gallic spirit held up the spring of civilisation but the trouble is: how effective is it if people are not personally civilised? Gallic spirit in their colonies is not same as what we see in Paris. The same case of Great Britain necessitated a multicultural society. Marginalised immigrant workers are ripe for plucking and these radicalised sector is the underbelly of France. Comparing the kind of retrogressive Islam bound by some illiterate mullahs a civilisation that is ever ready to explore frontiers of any idea( be it the prophet or Sharia laws )is desirable.