Professor Bennoune Comments for MSNBC and Other Media on Paris Terrorist Attacks
Professor Karima Bennoune commented widely for media including MSNBC, the Huffington Post, HuffPost Live, and Open Democracy on the terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalist radicals in Paris at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7 and at a kosher grocery two days later. Her work was also mentioned on LiveMint, a website of the Hindustan Times.
Professor Bennoune made six separate appearances on MSNBC during the week following the attacks, including three on All In With Chris Hayes. In an interview broadcast as part of the network's news coverage, Bennoune said that the tragic incident confirmed her belief that "Muslim fundamentalist movements and the armed wings in particular are one of the major human rights threats that we face around the world, and we absolutely have to defeat these movements." She talked about the need to discredit, dismantle, and defund these groups, and said that people of Muslim heritage like herself had a responsibility to speak out against them.
Speaking on the MSNBC program The Cycle, Bennoune talked about the need for people in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to support the Muslims who are standing up to fundamentalist extremists. "I think what we need to do is to support the many people of Muslim heritage around the world who are pushing back, who are challenging these movements and find ways to support them," Bennoune said.
"Many people of Muslim heritage, from Saudi Arabia to Sudan, from Afghanistan to Algeria, have been in the frontlines of the fight against terror and extremism. But so many more of us in the diasporas need to find the courage to speak out in support of them," Bennoune wrote in an essay for Open Democracy. She published two essays on the site, along with an interview Caroline Forest, an expert on religious fundamentalisms and the far right in France and a journalist who worked at Charlie Hebdo.
Professor Bennoune also emphasized that the attacks must not be taken as an excuse to discriminate against Muslims. In an Open Democracy essay, Bennoune wrote that "the extreme right wing and other anti-Muslim forces in the West cannot be allowed to overlook [opposition to violence and extremism] among people of Muslim heritage, or to smear all of Islam or its adherents--or immigrants writ large--because of attacks like the one in Paris."
Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She recently was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, now available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company.