France has had a very conciliatory attitude towards Muslims. Hell, they aren’t even involved in the Iraq war, so why the riots?
“All politics is local.”
A lot of the problem is that, basically, the French don’t really want them there and never did. They were willing to allow them in as workers, and as refugees, but only grudgingly. The Muslim community, which is very conservative (in a fashion familiar to neither France nor the US), doesn’t fit in.
Also, don’t be too all-fired about French tolerance. The French are quite vocal about everyone in France being French or noone, and the immigrants are resentful. This is not to say it’s been totally unsuccessful - it seems that those born in France tend to consider themselves French first, Muslim second if at all - but it has resulted in a continuing underclass. In the US, by contrast, immigrants can often move up the ladder quickly, not remaining poor for successive generations.
Thus, it’s somewhat similar to the LA riots of '92. An underclass, filled with thuggish, bored kids and pissed off by perceived unfairness, is willing to take it out on everyhting around them. It is potentially exacerbated in this case by the significant possibility of radical islam. While likely few in number, a few such radicals can potentially push the rest to more violent acts. This is not absolutely certain, BTW; I advance it as a possibility only. Britain actually is worse off in this regard, with London being a major center of radical islam itself.
Add this to the pathetic response by French authorities. They are re-enacting the end of WWI: responding with enough violence to keep the enemy enraged while not doing enough to stop it once and for all. Worst of both worlds. They can’t decide what to do, and in the meanwhile the violence is spreading.
In case someone wants to read about it, here is a link to an AP article talking about the riots. Looks pretty nasty to me.
-XT
What will be interesting is to see how Bush is to blame for this. 
-XT
Though this should be taken with a grain of salt - at least in terms of the youngsters who are rioting. Apparently some of the “Islamists” are more cultural Muslims who have embraced radical Islamism as a sign of disaffection without necessarily being all that pious, similar to how a lot of Iranian college students acted in the 1970’s under the Shah.
A quoted piece from an earlier post for which I’m afraid the original cite has vanished from the web:
Not exactly unselfishly, the French political class then directed most policies towards these young beurs, which they saw as making radical Islam the rallying point for their political mobilization, testing severely the limits of the new tolerance in France (Hargreaves 1995, 125;Ireland 1996, 39). While it is correct that Islamic institutions made particular inroads in schools, factories, sports clubs, welfare offices, and mosques, it is by no means the case that the young beurs rejected the French political system or republican values (Van Zanten 1997, 351, 357) - the enforcement of the model still produces the desired manifestations. Only about one third consider themselves believing Muslims, the rest consider themselves “Muslim atheists,” thereby transforming their religious affiliation into the indication of an ethnic belonging (Hargreaves 1995, 121; Silverman 1992, 14-5), mythologizing the Arab world. Islam has become for these youngsters mainly a battle cry, a bargaining tool in their painful process of integration through protest (Basson 1996, 5; Schnapper 1991; Van Zanten 1997, 368).
- Tamerlane
Even if this is only a quasi-religious issue its still a bit ironic to hear about riots in several towns in France (of all places) because of diseffected and dissatisfied minorities. More ironic is the religious or quasi-religious overtones. Schadenfraud you know. (I’m just kidding here for the humor impaired…its really a serious subject. It will be interesting to see if this thread dies as fast or faster than the one on the UN oil for food thing…)
-XT
Why not?
Well, there doesn’t seem to be much debate and smiling bandit seems to have explained it pretty well. It’s bad. Thugs stopped a bus and set a middle aged woman on crutches on fire. This is not a rational process of protesting for a reason. It is an out of control riot that allows the worst of people to come out without fear of consequences. Humans can be very ugly animals when they are outside of society’s constraints.
The Islamic angle to this can easily be overstated. The French made the mistake – same as we did in the States – of building massive public housing projects. These vast concentrations of the poor, the alienated, the disaffected were a tragically bad idea. Fortunately, in the U.S., we’ve moved on to other, more succesful planning models for public housing. The French will ultimately be forced to do the same.
This has little to do with the Iraq war, and more to do with the economy. Unemployment in some of the North African/Arab communities is as high as 30%. I think it’s common for 2nd and 3rd generation children of immigrants to feel disaffected if they don’t integrate well into their society, or if the society seems uninterested in integrating them.
The Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, is viewed by many of these youths as being overly hardlined and insensitive. How much of that is real and how much of that is perception is hard to say. But, as we all know, perception **is **reality in politics.
And it must be noted that both Smiling Bandit and Tamerlane have downplayed the importance of that angle. The place of Islam in this is that it identifies this population, both to themselves and by others, as “different”, not fully existing as part of the national identity, and not fully entitled to equal opportunities. Having percieved themselves as being kept outside of mainstream French society, some have embraced an outsider identity. In another time and place the religious identity would have provided enough of a community norm to provide its own constraint against acting on disaffection, but the shard of Islam that these youths have glommed onto is not that Islam.
The public housing aspect is just one small bit. Part of it is also that the French version of “secularism” is being used as a means to enforce national identity as the sole group membership identity one must have. Here in the US we take for granted that one can hold many identities at the same time, be Jewish and American, be Irish and American, be whatever and be American too. This is American secularism. We are intrinsically pluralistic. In France any expression or display of another group membership identity is held as a sign that French identity is held less securely, and must therefore be squashed. Or the holder of any additional identity held as a mere provisional member of the society.
On further reading, I accept Dseid’s and Tamerlane’s posts. They explain some specifics better than I. Thank you very much.
The Muslims in France are revolting!
Eh, ya racist. Stinky maybe, but not revolting.
Seems that they are avoiding mass murder (on both sides) but I’m afraid the rioters could be in a bad situation. Right now the fuse is burning very short, and it may only take a small spark further to set off the whole powderkeg. If that happens… well, Jaques Doe may not be so forgiving as Dominic Villepin*. This will likely have vast repercussions for internal French policy. External, I don’t know.
As usual, I’m ont talking about whether or not the situation is “fair” or any such idea. This is about power and danger, and the rioters’ poer is mostly illusion, currently being given reality only because the government has not dispelled said illusion. Things could get much uglier very quickly.
*I’ve heard from several sources that Villepin and his faction’s influence has held back oin the use of force, barriers, etc to contain the trouble.
There’s no religious undertone in these riots. At best very vague political undertones since they want Sarkozy (the Interior minister) to go away.
These people are (for the most part at least) second or third generation immigrants, living in disfranchised housing project in suburbian areas, with no real perspective of a better life, alienated from both their parent’s culture and french society at large and who happen to be muslims (in name, because I doubt a significant number of them is actually religious) because most of the immigrants in France came from muslim countries.
It’s not a “muslim” issue and I definitely dispute the title of this thread. The only part Islam plays here is in the rejection they face (or sometimes use as an excuse) from french natives, and even then, the problem will be the same for say, a “christian” sub-saharian African. And actually, you’ll find him too rioting with his buddies.
Actually, it wasn’t originally a bad idea. There was a shortage of housing, and these were intended for working class people, immigrants and french alike. For a lot of people when they were build, they were a significant improvment over old, crowded, lacking basic amenities housing they had to live in. But the actually working class and even more specifically the french native working class moved away in a number of these housing projects, turning them into ghettos for unemployed immigrants who can’t afford to live somewhere else, with a degrading environment, and and without easy access to many services (be them public services or businesses).
What used to be the dream of a car industry worker around 1965 turned into the nightmare of the son of an unemployed for 15 years immigrant in 2005.
I might be partisan, but I share this perception. Sarkozy is a fucking ambitious populist without principles who learnt during the last presidential elections (when the extreme-right leader made it to the run off) that a hard stance would get him popular support and votes for the next one (and he indeed gained so much popularity that he became politically unavoidable, despite his strong enmity with both the president and the prime minister).
Sarkozy is indeed ambitious and populist, but I wouldn’t say without principles. Regadrless, there has been a definite move up into bigger property damage.
Fromt what I hear, much of the rioting is being done by small groups. They go out, burn something, come back.