Why is Paris burning? That's the red-hot
question. Newsweek, in its latest edition, showed
its ignorance and insensitivity by coming up
with an Islamophobic slant: "Will the riots swell
the ranks of jihadists in Europe?" The question
remains, why is Paris burning?
The answer
goes to a detailed description of the hypocrisy of
French political culture, which gleefully depicts
itself as too civilized, too secular and too
"sophisticated" to nurture hostility or animus
toward any ethnic group or religion, including
Islam. The reality, alas, is quite the contrary.
The demonstrators, to be sure, are young
men, mostly of North African origin. Almost all of
them are second- or even third-
generation Frenchmen, but that
depiction remains only in the government record of
birth certificates. For the blue-eyed,
blonde-haired French, all those young people of
North African origin will always be "Africans" or
"Arabs", words that manifest their not so latent
disdain.
These people of North African
origin form 10% of the total population and
unemployment among them runs at 21%. The number of
underemployed is considerably higher. Most of them
hold "dead-end" jobs as janitors, grocery store
clerks and other oddjobbers. The French middle
class did not expect them to register any protest.
They were expected to consider themselves much too
lucky to be living and breathing on French soil.
The very reason why they are in France
today is because France direly needed them during
the glorious days of economic expansion of the
post-World War II decades - the so-called "les
trentes glorieuses". During that era, the
ancestors of today's protestors were brought to
France not only to serve as cheap laborers, but
also to make up for the loss of native French
manpower following that war. Moreover, their
usefulness also stemmed from the fact they were
passive and not expected to strike, unlike those
Frenchmen and women who were members of the
country's communist unions.
Many of these
immigrants were known as "Harkins", ie, those
Algerians who sided with their French colonial
masters during Algeria's struggle to overthrow the
yoke of French colonialism. More than 100,000
Harkins were massacred by the Algerian National
Liberation Front (FLN) for being "collaborators".
Those who entered France "were parked in
unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps
for many long years and never benefited from any
government aid - a nice reward for their
sacrifices for France, of which they were, after
all, legally citizens".
Today's
"ghettoized" protestors and arsonists are the
children and grandchildren of those Harkins.
Naturally, they "harbor certain resentment" toward
France, which long pretended they didn't even
exist, as long as they were willing to suffer
silently the malignant racism of official and
unofficial France.
Unlike the racism
against African Americans, no North African
version of Martin Luther King Jr heightened the
political and moral consciousness of the French
middle class by declaring, "I have a dream!" The
leftist French Catholic priest, Father Christian
Delorme, called for the integration of those
French people of North African origin, but that
did not create a lasting political movement, as
with the American civil rights movement of the
1960s.
Now the "wretched" - to paraphrase
Franz Fanon's classic Algerian war of independence
study, The Wretched of the Earth - of
contemporary France have turned to violence in
order to claim what should be theirs to begin
with, a dignified existence in their homeland. But
they are not treated as if they are in the country
of their birth. Reading the French press, one is
shocked by the contemptuous behavior of today's
French police, similar as it is to the conduct of
racist cops in the American "Deep South" of the
1960s. The youngsters of North African origin are
referred to by French police as
"bougnoules", which is a verbal equivalent
of the American racist slur for Arabs, "rag
heads". As one report states, they (the youngsters
of North African origin) are told to "Lower your
eyes! Lower your eyes! - as if they had no right
to look a police officer in the face. It's utterly
dehumanizing. No wonder these kids feel so
divorced from authority."
The official
French response to this violent outburst was
epitomized in the petty and selfish ambitions of
two French politicians. Prime Minister Dominique
de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy
- two contenders for the presidency of France -
did not manifest any amount of sophistication or a
genuine desire to take immediate proactive
measures to calm the situation.
On the
contrary, both of them used the unfortunate
outbreak of violence to placate the racist
feelings of the French extreme right wing. Then
Sarkozy decided to outbid his rival, de Villepin,
by declaring he would "karcharize" the
ghetto (Karcher being the well-known brand
name of a system of cleaning surfaces by
super-high-pressure sand-blasting or
water-blasting that very violently peals away the
outer skin of encrusted dirt - such as pigeon
droppings - even at the risk of damaging what's
underneath). The protestors' response was: "It's
us who are going to put Sarkozy through the
Karcher."
This type of puerile, political
one-upmanship is both highly deleterious to the
French populace in general and the rioters in
particular. If France is serious about integrating
its citizens of North African origin, its
politicians must immediately deviate from racist
and hyperbolic sound bites. For its French
Muslims, cooler and mature heads must also prevail
in calming the anger of the youngsters.
On
the part of the Western media, there is that
unfounded concern about these young protestors
becoming jihadis in order to seek justice, as seen
in the aforementioned Newsweek report. Such
simplistic analyses are not based on any evidence
or hard facts. The causality that is assumed in
such reports is fictitious at best.
The
threat to France is not from any purported
springing up of jihad. Rather, the chief problem
is its refusal to face the fact that
multiculturalism is a fact of life inside its
borders. The London Economist notes:
As a result, there are no programmes
to promote ethnic minorities out of their
ghettos. The state keeps officialdom and
religion firmly apart, and Mr Chirac has banned
Muslim headscarves [as well as "conspicuous"
crucifixes] in state schools. Many Muslims have
come to feel stigmatized since the terrorist
attacks of September 11th, 2001, as France,
along with other European countries, has cracked
down on suspected Islamic extremists.
Consequently, there is an immediate
need to stop rejecting the reality of
multiculturalism and start taking steps to
integrate its citizens from different cultures
into the economic mainstream. If their economic
lot is improved, they will learn to identify
themselves with French culture without necessarily
abandoning their Islamic identity. If they remain
on the economic fringes, they will not only become
even more voluble than they are right now about
their Islamic identity, but might adopt even more
violent tactics to make themselves heard.
The continued arson in Paris and its
outskirts are manifestations of decades of
bottled-up frustrations, heightened feelings of
alienation and neglect, as well as a desperate
longing to belong to an economic class, where
youngsters can dream of having productive careers
and happy family lives for themselves.
Their parents and grandparents could not
live those dreams. The least today's France can do
is work sincerely and assiduously to realize those
dreams of the current generation of Frenchmen and
women of North African descent. That is the least
a democratic polity can do for all of its
citizens.
Ehsan Ahrari is a CEO
of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, VA-based
defense consultancy. He can be reached at
eahrari@cox.net or stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His
columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. His
website: www.ehsanahrari.com.
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