Richard Boyd Barrett, People Before Profit TD, spoke today to the Trinity Socialist Worker Student Society on the dangers of Islamophobia in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday.
On Friday November 13th a series of coordinated terror attacks took place in Paris, killing 129 people. Islamic State (ISIS) have since taken responsibility for the attacks.
Speaking at the society’s “No to War, No to Islamophobia” event today, Boyd Barrett warned that the “the drums of Islamophobia are beating” and called on students to “challenge that”.
Boyd Barrett was speaking ahead of a candlelit vigil to be held tomorrow in Front Square in memory of the victims of recent attacks in Paris, Beirut and Baghdad. The vigil is being held in association with Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union and the Society for International Affairs.
He condemned the response of the French president, Francois Hollande, to the attack. Boyd Barrett called the French response to the attacks “deeply hypocritical”, considering their lack of acknowledgement of the deaths that have resulted from their bombing campaigns in Syria. He was also heavily critical of the response of the United States, arguing that their invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan had precipitated the rise of Islamic State. He argued that the attack in Paris represented the “bitter, bitter fruits of the Iraq and Afghanistan war, and the manipulation at the hands of the big powers”.
While acknowledging that the attacks had “no justification” and should be “utterly condemned”, Boyd Barrett mentioned the 459 people who have been killed in Syria in bombings by the West in the last year, 100 of whom have been children. He stated that there should be “no hierarchy of tragedy, when it comes to innocent people being killed”.
Reiterating the position of People Before Profit, Boyd Barrett labelled the French response “completely counter productive, dangerous, likely to fuel conditions that led to the growth of ISIS in the first place, and likely to make the sort of attacks that we saw in Paris more likely, not less likely.”
Boyd Barrett likened the conflict in Syria to a fire, and likened the French response of bombing to “pouring petrol on the fire”, branding the action “a misguided and very dangerous response”.
