Doug Ireland
Unfortunately, not a single major political figure or party supports adopting an affirmative action policy -- and it is unlikely to happen any time in the near future. Affirmative action runs counter to that "archaic republican discourse" which, in asserting all French citizens are "equal," refuses to recognize race or ethnicity as the basis for any government action --and which even prevents the government from gathering statistics based on race or ethnicity, making the socio-economic and educational progress of minorities impossible to measure, and rendering them officially invisible for all intents and purposes. (Unofficially, of course, people of color are routinely targeted by the police on the basis of ethnicity, and frequently discriminated against by government agencies.)
It wasn't until the 13th day of the rebellion -- when arson, vandalism, and rioting, which had begun in the suburban ghettos of Paris, had spread right across the country... that the French government finally reacted. The aristocratic Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (right) at last went on television to announce the government's response to the racism and social rot that had caused the rebellion: repression. The conservative government of President Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency, using a 1955 law passed during France's colonial war in Algeria that permits the imposition of a Taistoi curfew and suspension of civil liberties, including those of the press, and permits detention without trial, the use of military tribunals and bans on public meetings. The Syndicat des avocats and the Syndicat de la magistrature (the lawyers' and judges' unions) issued a cry of alarm, denouncing the "disastrous war logic" inherent in invoking the law. Pointing out that this law was not even used in the May 1968 student-worker rebellions, their joint statement said: "Stopping the violence and re-establishing order in the suburbs is a necessity. But must that imply submitting them to emergency legislation inherited from the colonial period? We know where the cycle of provocation and repression leads.... The ghettos have no need of a state of emergency. They desperately need justice, respect, and equality."
[...]The ghetto youths' violence was already diminishing significantly when the state of emergency was declared -- even as anti-Arab incidents reflected the sharp increase in racism which the rebellion had motored. In the waning days of the youth rebellion, three mosques were firebombed within days: two Molotov cocktails were thrown into a mosque in Carpentras at the hour of prayer, when the house of worship was filled with the faithful -- and France's largest mosque (left), in Lyon (France's second-largest city), was firebombed, as was a mosque in a ghetto suburb in the Loire.
The curfew authorized by the state of emergency was imposed by prefects -- who are closer to the situation on the ground than their Paris-based masters -- in only 6 of France's 92 departments. Clearly, the prefects thought it a useless and needlessly provocative measure when aimed solely at the ghetto youth. But among the repressive measures adopted by the government was the punishing of parents for the alleged crimes of their children, including curfew violations. For example, on the 13th night of the rioting, the prime time newscast on France 2 public television profiled the arrest of a single mother of four -- a simple, working-class Pakistani woman overwhelmed by the task of raising her large brood alone. Her crime? Her 16-year-old son had been arrested for crouching behind a car, which -- the police claimed -- he was about to set aflame (even though no incendiary equipment was found on the youth.) "I can make him behave when he's at home," the woman weeped, "but when he's in the street with his pals I have no control over him" The woman was hauled off in front of her minor children, incarcerated, sentenced to a training course in how to control her kids, and finally released. Every ghetto kid in France who saw this (and repeated similar arrests) on TV could easily imagine his own mother being carried off in a police paddy wagon -- a sure prescription for further bitterness and alienation from authority. Such repressive actions may have contributed to ending the riots -- which were already sputtering out -- but at what social cost?
It strikes me that the problems in France are not unique to that country. Immigrants and their children born to European and American citizenry, even if educated, have a difficult time finding jobs. "Here in Denmark, a last name that is not Olsen or Rasmussen is not going to get your CV noticed." According to WorldNetDaily,
there are more than 14 million Muslims in the European Union. The Central Institute's Islam Archives in Soest, Germany, says the number of Muslims in Europe has increased by 800,000 over the last two years, reports the German evangelical news agency IDEA. The institute’s director, Salim Abdullah, says that among the 25 EU states, France has the highest number of Muslims – 5.5 million – followed by Germany with 3.2 million, the United Kingdom with 1.5 million and Italy with 1 million.
Meanwhile falling birth rates have created the economic necessity of increasing immigration. This trend is likely to increase on coming years as ethnic European populations actually start to shrink in size.
Europe has a long history of racism. Anti-semitism has been around since the Middle Ages. Twentieth century racism in Europe has manifested in its most perverse forms, from Nazism that murdered 6 million Jews, to still widely held beliefs that eugenics and Social Darwinism are not immoral. Europe is a relatively small area of land that has seen many conflicts over the centuries over trade and resources mixed with volatile belief in the superiority of one's national identities and ethnicity. Though technically not racism, the passions ignited were no less explosive and results bloody. neo-Nazism is on the rise in Europe with racism, violence and neo-nationalism incorporated into social norms in some communities. Violence is on the rise all over Europe. Extreme right-wing politicians have had much greater success in recent times. Backlash towards immigration is supporting new laws limiting entry.
Muslim immigrants have been less than welcomed. A recent economic downturn has increased unemployment, disproportionately for minorities. Socially and economically unwelcome, Muslims began in the 1980's to renew their ties to Islam as a source of strength, social and political organization.
There is no call for jihad or violence and the message is delivered by local citizens, not outside agitators. Yet the message is radical: People who are different are held in contempt. Mingling with mainstream society is frowned upon. Society should be founded on one religion: Islam. Magnified by the power of demographics, messages like [this] are presenting a profound challenge to Europe's secular democracies.
[...]some of Europe's Muslims are drifting off into separate troubled societies. In some European cities, nearly half of Muslim youths drop out of high school and unemployment rates are high. Racism is on the rise, helping to drive Muslims back into their communities. The situation was crystallized in a report last year by the French domestic intelligence agency, which surveyed 630 communities with a heavy concentration of Muslim migrants. Half of them, the report said, are "ghettoized" along religious lines.
In Paris, this parallel society is centered in a string of suburbs along the capital's northern and eastern fringes. There, amid housing projects slapped up a generation ago to accommodate a booming immigrant population, the signs of fundamentalist Islam are on the rise. Women who don't wear head scarves are harassed. People who consume food or beverages during the month of fasting, Ramadan, are publicly criticized. And some families refuse to let women be treated by male doctors or nurses.
This development is a paradox to many sociologists, who figured that such behavior was confined to newcomers who brought it with them. With time, the theory went, immigrants would moderate their views. Instead, it is Europe's second- and third-generation Muslims who are the most radical. "Often young Muslims in the West are unmoored from their traditional beliefs and ripe for recruitment by radicals," says Olivier Roy, a leading expert on political Islam and an adviser to the French government.
[...]Instead of integrating Muslims, this all-embracing form of Islam [native to Muslim countries and without competition in isolated suburbs], builds a cocoon in which people have little contact with mainstream society, she says. Education is often stunted and the chance of professional success limited, Dounia Bouzar, a prominent French Muslim social scientist says. "It's a vision of society that separates people into two camps, Islamic and non-Islamic," says Ms. Bouzar. "They have a need to Islamicize everything."
[...]In France, foreign youths from predominantly Muslim countries have a particularly high rate of unemployment. Rates for ages 15-29: Foreigners from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Turkey 40 percent Foreigners (all nationalities) 26 percent French by birth 16 percent French by naturalization 15 percent.
Many observers have worried that France signaled the beginnings of Jihad in Europe. Extreme right-wing pundits have been quick to see the worst through their paranoid filters. At Captain's Quarters, the author takes reports of rioter coordination by cell phones and instant messaging as proof of Al Qaeda in Europe.
[...]both American and French media sources warned of coordinated Islamist action against France in the weeks before the riot. [...]That prelude certainly seems more than a mere coincidence to me. Within six weeks of the GSPC announcement, we see a massive and coordinated uprising originating from the ghettoes in which Algerian and other Muslim refugees and their families live.
Mr. Spencer, director of Jihad Watch and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith, writes:
[There has been] massive Muslim immigration into Europe without assimilation. Would the new European Muslims accept European pluralism? That was assumed -- betraying a shocking naivete and ignorance of what Islam has historically taught about the nature of society and the proper relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims. The problem is not racism, but precisely a clash of civilizations, or a clash between two radically opposing views of how society should be ordered.
Fortunately, even some conservative writers have a clearer head and broader perspective. Gregory Djerejian at THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH writes a good analysis without being specific about solutions.
[...]the now even more apparent alienation of disaffected youth grappling with high unemployment, endemic racism and feelings of 'otherness'--all these bad tidings have now culminated in a very dramatic break-down of basic law and order through significant swaths of France.
Now, I am not one who believes that some pan-Eurabian intifada is in the offing, or that the implications of these riots rival 9/11, or that Shamil Basayev's guerilla tactics are being adopted off la Place de la Republique--as breathless, under-informed 'commentary' has it in some quarters of the blogosphere. But we certainly have a pivot point here, one where the ruling elite's inefficacy and ineptness is being laid crudely bare for all the world to see. They have been tone-deaf and caught off guard by the depth of the alienation in their midst, and it has now caught them very much unawares and seemingly clueless on how next to respond.
[...]The scope of the problem is quite daunting, as this excerpt from a Washington Post article makes clear:While French politicians say the violence now circling and even entering the capital of France and spreading to towns across the country is the work of organized criminal gangs, the residents of Le Blanc-Mesnil know better. Many of the rioters grew up playing soccer on Rezzoug's field. They are the children of baggage handlers at nearby Charles de Gaulle International Airport and cleaners at the local schools. "It's not a political revolution or a Muslim revolution," said Rezzoug. "There's a lot of rage. Through this burning, they're saying, 'I exist, I'm here.' "
Such a dramatic demand for recognition underscores the chasm between the fastest growing segment of France's population and the staid political hierarchy that has been inept at responding to societal shifts. The youths rampaging through France's poorest neighborhoods are the French-born children of African and Arab immigrants, the most neglected of the country's citizens. A large percentage are members of the Muslim community that accounts for about 10 percent of France's 60 million people.
One of Rezzoug's "kids" -- the countless youths who use the sports facilities he oversees -- is a husky, French-born 18-year-old whose parents moved here from Ivory Coast. At 3 p.m. on Saturday, he'd just awakened and ventured back onto the streets after a night of setting cars ablaze. "We want to change the government," he said, a black baseball cap pulled low over large, chocolate-brown eyes and an ebony face. "There's no way of getting their attention. The only way to communicate is by burning."
It is indeed sad when a country's citizens have become so removed from an esprit of fellow-feeling with their common citizens that they must lash out in anarchic fashion to get attention and communicate. But this is where France now finds itself, as it wakes up Monday morning wondering where the tumult and mayhem may hit next. No, what is needed now is honesty and straight-shooting and a real sense of urgency. The violence the roving gangs of youth are engaging in is borne of various causes and grievances. This profound alienation needs to be analyzed, to be sure. And at the end of the day, while there is some room for jihadist radicals to play on these sentiments to lure more towards piety, the book and perhaps terror--what this is really about is not some religiosity-infused intifada on the Seine but bread and butter issues of jobs and racism. Sarkozy is right that so called positive discrimination (affirmative action), at least in calibrated fashion, needs to be experimented with. But he is also at least equally right that criminals, even young ones just 18, must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Stoking mayhem cannot be rewarded. Such 'chantage'-like tactics should not be in the cards. And yet, there is reason for some of the fury, and I'd hazard most of it stems from unemployment in the 30% zone among many in their early 20s. This is likely the largest variable that must be addressed head-on, but also, let us be honest here, the feelings of 'otherness' that stem from largely North African communities believing they are viewed by many as, more or less, barbarians at the gates--too near the prim and proper bourgeois districts of the fabled capital.
[...]It's more a tragic result of a Hobbesian, gritty life in satellite towns devoid of hope and jobs and dignity--where youth feel disenfranchised, unmoored, without a nation really. Indeed, too many of the young see themselves as 93'ers (the postal code most afflicted by the violence to date)--before they are Frenchmen. Somehow, this must change. Part of such change must be ensuring that moderate Islamic tenets are allowed a place at the table in modern France. Part of it is dealing with the racial aspects of ensuring Arabs and Africans are not thought of as second class citizens. Part of it is jobs, obviously. And a sense of dignity. But there must also be a sense of responsibility in all of this. Not just cries about rights, in other words. A nation that takes in immigrants, provides housing and welfare and other assistance, will not sit contently while it is spat on in return. Charges of ingratitude, even if unfair, will ratchet up. And openings for the far right, it is not hard to see, will therefore present themselves.
It is little wonder that Jean Marie le Pen, of course, has been quick to issue this rather fiery statement:The government is fatally incapable of facing the insurrectionary situation that is reverberating through the anarchic zones, because the government itself is the primarily responsible party, and the entire political class with it. This government is not even capable of maintaining an appearance of cohesion. These internal ruptures are for the insurrectionists an enticement to profit from the too obvious fragility that, in a time of crisis, becomes a grave peril for all of society. Because, through the agents and symbols of the state, it's France herself that is attacked, by hordes that the so-called anti-racial laws prevent us from designating as foreigners. As for the sad Sarkozy clones that, to give themselves publicity, stroll around the burned suburbs whilst reciting in 'play back' the positions of the National Front, their protestations are indecent and low.
The west has serious problems with disenfranchised minorities we are increasingly dependent on to work in our service and manufacturing jobs. People have been assimilating into America for a very long time. However, what is changing is the amount of culture shock the immigrant must face. Moving to America today from Somalia, Kenya or Nigeria involves absorbing a change whose breadth is significantly more challenging than the Irish potato farmer faced more than a century ago. Jews world-wide have found difficulty integrating into most cultures, found a particularly good match in the business, service, and industry oriented Americans. Despite maintaining significant social segregation, they have all but disappeared as an identifiable minority.
The challenge of assimilation is much greater when there is obvious visual identification as witness by African Americans for hundreds of years. Social integration appears to be necessary, including inter-marrying to begin successful integration. That solution had been blocked for many years by social pressures that only now seem to be lifting. It will be several generations before we see significant progress I fear.
Muslim immigrant bring an expectation of continued social segregation and are much less prepared for assimulation into well paying jobs. Add to that their visual difference makes a triple challenge and is sure to prolong the integration. Social pressures from the Patriot Act and the increased suspicion since 9/11 threaten to further isolate and prolong the process.
The West needs re-examine their tolerance for and institutional barriers to diversity. Institutional prejudice in this era where ideology, dogma and tactical and strategic methodology fly across international barriers via the Internet feeds a volatile mix of social disenfranchisement and dreams of jihad in Muslim communities worldwide.
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