Exactly and this is despite his protestations in hiding his intentions in vague language exactly on the point.
Ramira is charging you with racism, and on what basis is not difficult to infer, but on what basis are you turning it around?
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If you believe nationality is a mostly empty matter of strictly paperwork and juridical bureaucracy, or akin to belonging to a fitness club, savings club or Frequent Miles club or something, then yes. Most people put more into it than that. Many people have even been willing to risk life and die for their nation (La Résistance française for instance) - probably more than would be willing to die for their fitness club membership.
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North African Muslims (and blacks from Congo, and Mali, and the Ivory Coast…) have bled for this country. We sent them to charge up the Siegfried Line, first into the breach, promising them their sacrifice would be remembered - we were just coming around to the idea of ponying up widows’ and veterans’ benefits on par with those of, yanno, “real” French soldiers when Jacques Chirac was president. And *that *took a particularly moving movie reminding people that, hey, guys, colonial troops were a Thing. FFS, the cops that died in those attacks, or those killed by Mehrah in 2012 were of North African descent. So is the guy who saved most of the customers of the kosher market by hiding them in the cold room - shit, *that *guy didn’t have an FR on his ID card. He does now.
They’ve rebuilt this country, just as we were busy stealing theirs and parking them in concrete jungles.
Their culture is part of our culture - kebab stands are the linchpin of French education and night life, couscous-merguez is a more popular staple dish than cassoulet.
When we banned their hijabs in schools and told them that they should strive to “be more part of the Republic”, Muslim women demonstrated with tricolour headscarves in a perfect demonstration of gallic wit.
They vote and go on strike every other day, just like “us”.
So don’t come and tell me they’re not French.
But when people opine that you can’t be *really *French with a name like Mohamed Benmimoun, when journalists describing a doctor born and raised in France on national TV as “a Muslim married to a French woman” then yes, yes there is indeed a problem.
It’s pretty obvious the way she throws around race in this and other threads (in this case being white - and in fact also being man, and not-Muslim) to single out particular groups of people for specific abilities and rights. I quoted the specifics so it shouldn’t come as a surprise.
“based on the wisdom of the white non French” “white men not of our religion”
It’s double silly not only for being obviously racist, but also since there are plenty of white Muslims (and a great deal of black immigrants to Europe are in fact Christian) but apparently to her being white still such a negative that it’s problematic the way they voice their opinion.
Now, for what reason do you find it so easy to infer my racism?
I don’t know why you direct this to me. Where I have I claimed otherwise? Although a little bit amusing that your “we” when it came to banning hijabs, apparently did not include Muslims.
Anyway, your post has nothing to do with anything I have written. It’s quite simple: you chose to equate nationality with meaningless letters on a legal document (If it says “FR” on their ID, then they’re fucking French. End of discussion); I believe there’s more to it than that. And that more requires at a minimum that the person self-identify as the nationality. It’s a little ironic that you insist that a person who does not want to be, and does not consider himself to be French, that he is French. He’s of course legally French if his ID card says so, but as I said, I think there’s more to it than that. Feel free to disagree and consider being French on par with being member of Air France Frequent Flyer miles club.
There are no Muslims in French government. Not a single one. There is one (1) Muslim mayor, in a one-horse-village in the Tarn.
So that’d be part of the problem, surely ?
What else would he be ? You can object to any or every part of the culture you’re part of and still be a part of that culture. When I hear the public discourse going on these days, I don’t identify with any of it either. When I’m told that it’s perfectly OK to throw people in jail over Facebook posts, all in the name of national unity, I feel like throwing Molotovs. And I wouldn’t ever “die for France”, not for a big clock.
Am I not French enough, then ?
I would also opine that when neo-nazi scumbags torch a synagogue or rough up random non-whites, nobody tells them they’re not *really *French. When cops shoot a young North African in the head while he’s handcuffed to a radiator, nobody on TV pontificates about the Policeman Problem. When some jerk rips away the headscarf of a Muslim woman, nobody tells him he should “better integrate into the Republic and learn its values”. When ultra-Catholic idiots disrupt abortion clinics with tear gas or petrol bombs, nobody questions their citizenship.
So cut the shit, will ya ?
Oh, and
Because your words strictly echo the various dogwhistles of our beloved (and most certainly French !) Front National.
Because the notion that some people, you know, *those *people have to earn their citizenship by various means while others, like me, are just born with it is fundamentally xenophobic. Hell, it’s the definition of xenophobia.
As I said, I am in many ways, and certainly in the ways nationalist cunts think “those people” are, not a good Frenchman. I don’t go to July 14 marches. I don’t vote, I don’t believe The Republic is worthy of any particular respect when it doesn’t act in ways that merit it. I’m wary of and uncomfortable in the presence of cops, and once upon a time I even threw kerbstones at them, back when I thought demonstrations meant anything. I don’t think the language or the culture needs to be preserved, perfect and immutable, for now and forever amen. The Marseillaise makes me cringe. I don’t like wine and I don’t eat cheese. I’m certainly not actively proud to be French nor of its history, and when I hear the words “patriot” and “national” I reach for my gun.
And yet nobody, in my life, **ever **insinuated that I was anything other than French. Never in my life have I been told to “go back to my country” (they are in their country, tossers !) or “love it or leave it”, even when my opinions were… not well received by my peers, to say it diplomatically. Nobody ever suggested that my citizenship was suspect or subject to revocation, nor that it should be contingent on any ideology whatsoever besides having been born here.
So that’s a whole spectrum of reasons why I get pissed off when you suggest it should be so for others. Who are more my brothers than you are. Even when they hate that fact.
Correction : upon double checking, that would be “cobblestones”, not “kerbstones”. I ain’t that strong 
Poseur!
OK, OK, I eat the pizza kind. You know, the tasteless, smell less, pure texture kind. Same goes for cheddar or US burger cheese because, well, it’s really more plastic than cheese, innit ?
Don’t talk to me about *camembert *or roquefort though. How people can hoover that oozy, oogy pestilence, I cannot conceive. It’s just raw shiver to me. Like roasted crickets or oysters or still-twitching sushi. WAKE UP, SHEEPLE ! IT’S DISGUSTING, ROTTEN MILK !
Ahem
Snails are the shit, though. De gustibus…
Ah, how soon they forget, these Americans, their own South Bronx, how it died in the 1980s and everyone was afraid to enter it, including the police.
Also, Americans, have you heard of Kiryas Joel and New Square? Probably not. In 2005 the latter community’s religious court ruled that women should not drive cars. And then you come crying about “Shari‘a.” :dubious: Dearborn, to take one alleged example, has never pulled any religious-law monkeyshines like that. Dearborn is not monolithically Muslim, anyway. Half of the Middle Eastern peoples in Dearborn are Christian Assyrians and Lebanese.
That’s like a nudist camp declaring, “thou shalt be nude.” Whatevs.
Yes, we here in America do remember ghettos where the cops don’t even go. That’s because they sucked. Bad.
You had me wondering. :eek: And it’s the pestilence that makes cheese good.
Lemme guess: it’s a Berthier, never been fired, dropped once?
What’s far too often misunderstood about Islam is that it is not merely a dogma preaching afterlife salvation, à la other Abrahamic faiths. Islam encompasses governance, law, faith and an overall way of life. As such, the establishment of “Caliphates” is an inherent modus operandi in any genuine Moslem’s agenda. (NB: “Moderate Islam” is a term coined by non Moslems for those who espouse the Islamic faith but choose to coalesce with their non Islamic surrounds. A practice that, in the eyes of fundamnetalist followers, relegates such purported adherents of the faith to the same level as the “kufur” or “infidel”.)
Sure, Yala (Thailand) or Zamboanga (Philippines) -esque militants do not exist in every Moslem enclave. But provided the weight of numbers (a 5% Moslem population is a “tipping point” I’ve heard mooted), political and societal motivations are satisfied, a push for Sharia law, and everything that encompasses thus, is essentially inevitable.
Viewing Islam through any other religion’s prism is to misunderstand it; dangerously so. Such a Draconian and intolerant system of control predicated upon superstition has not managed to exists for 1,400 years because it was pliant and yielding to compromise.
Ah! The “no true Muslim” argument, again.
Of course, the reality is that, based on that argument, probably fewer than 5% of Muslims in the last 1100+ years have been “true” Muslims.
Wahhabism is barely 200 years old and only spread out of the Arabian peninsula in the last 70 years. Discussions of (reviving) the Caliphate have only begun in the last few years. Any such talk of “genuine” Muslims is based on a fundamental distortion of history.
ETA: I should say the current efforts to revive the Caliphate are only a few years old. There have been periodic “Caliphate” movements throughout history, appealing to an ideal that never seems to materialize, because few Muslims outside the area where they have been proclaimed agree with or pay attention to those promoting one–just as the current “Caliphate” has been condemned by religious leaders throughout the Muslim world.
Gee, no, never heard of Christians like that. Or Jews.:rolleyes:
FWIW, a little over a year ago, the French government declared three inner-ring suburbs of Cleveland – Cleveland Heights, Lakewood, and Euclid – to be no-go zones. Cleveland Heights and Lakewood are middle- to upper-middle class; Euclid more lower middle- to middle-class. None come close to being “ghetto” in the American sense.
I hear they’ve now corrected the travel advisory. Now it just says, “don’t go to Cleveland.” 