In retaliation for Friday’s attacks in Paris, France launched its heaviest airstrikes yet against the Syrian city of Raqqa, which has long served as the de facto capital of the so-called Islamic State. Friday’s attacks came just a day after the Islamic State claimed credit for a double attack in southern Beirut that killed at least 43 people, and two weeks after the group claimed responsibility for bringing down a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board. Over the weekend, French President François Hollande described Friday’s attack as an act of war. Speaking in Turkey at the G20 summit, President Obama described the events in Paris as “an attack on the civilized world.” We speak with Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College and columnist for the Indian magazine Frontline, for more on the response to the attacks.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. Tings Chak is the art director and a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and lead author of the study “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China.” She is also a member of Dongsheng, an international collective of researchers interested in Chinese politics and society.
Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Perhaps most well known as the main host of Democracy Now! since 1996. She is the author of six books, including The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America.
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