I've figured out the Charlie Hebdo killings

Broadly speaking, I've figured out a theory that explains the Charlie Hebdo killings. Obviously, it doesn't involve the specter of murdering Muslims haunting Europe, so bandied in the popular media.

The ancient Romans had a method of inquiry for dealing with events of this nature in which the actors were known, but the motives and implications murky. They asked: Qui bono? (who benefits?)

Set aside whether the artists and writers of Charlie Hebdo magazine had exceeded the bounds of good taste and were providing a safe haven for Islamophobia to white, formerly Christian Europeans who styled themselves too intellectual to be merely prole racists. (They were, but that's not important.)

Set aside whether the killers, for their part, were the most ordinary of youthful, largely jobless non-white, non-Christian (and non-former-Christian) immigrants in Europe, full of rage toward a social environment in which their ethnicity and religion is largely despised and disparaged as a matter of routine. (They were, but set it aside.)

Who benefits from stirring up Islamophobia and sending cadres of police stormtroopers all over Europe hunting Arabs who are allegedly extremist?

I've figured it out: people who possess and sell oil.

Think about it. The price of oil has been falling. In some parts of the United States (unfortunately, not where I live) people can buy a gallon of gas for less than $2.00, a price not seen in years!

For North Africa and the Middle East, however, this is an unmitigated disaster. Similarly, oil stocks have been plunging and petroleum extraction companies have begun laying people off.

Who need a war to stir up insecurity in oil supplies and jack up the price again?

Saudi Arabia, ISIS (which now controls oil wells and refineries), Iraq and Iran, but also Exxon, Shell, Chevron and all the biggest environmental pollution makers.

These are not exactly nice people. Ask the birds of the Gulf of Mexico or ask the subjects of the Saud royal family. These are people who connived and plotted to bring about the permanent instability and ebullience of the Middle East, in the service of oil production.

These are people who overthrew neutralist Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953 and gave the world decades of Shah rule under the savage SAVAK secret police ... until youthful Muslim mobs in the 1970s asserted popular sentiment and put in the Ayatollah and the Muslim constitution.

These oil-profit-driven conspirators are also the same people who have given weapons equal to those used to protect the president of the United States (remember AWACS?) to an absolute hereditary monarchy, that of the Sauds, which forbids the practice of other faiths.

We shall never know exactly who wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq. But we have the body counts: hundreds of thousand of Iraqi dead and the 5,000 or so Americans.


Is it inconceivable that the Mafia-like combination of commercial interests and hegemonic families of the Middle East and West conspired to arrange that someone pick some disgruntled, Arab ghetto youths in France, put weapons in their hands and direct their rage against "innocent" satirists?

This, I contend, is what happened.

Some people stand to benefit from killings, persecution, more or less contained but permanent regional wars that make the supply of the world's largest reserves of oil unstable. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, the "Arab Spring" and the decimation of the leadership of Al Qaeda were bringing to a close the so-called "war" against "terrorism."

Even the price of oil was dropping to levels seen when prosperity was shared somewhat more equitably. Peace was budding.

Can't have that, can we? Next to oil, war is one of the most profitable businesses.

All the rest, the noise on TV, radio and the newspapers, is merely a smokescreen meant to distract the populace, us, back into fearful social compliance.