France Now Forming Ethnic Ghettos
the moderate voice
More evidence of disturbing domestic political and social trends in France.
A new report finds many French city suburbs are becoming ethnic ghettoes. Was a news agency, researcher with dubious credentials or some anti-France group issuing this report? Hardly: according to the BBC, this report is by "French domestic intelligence services."
And if you read down in the news report, it refers largely to the country's Muslim population which enjoys growing political clout amid signs of its radicalization.
This report is not connected to recently well-publicized reports dealing with French Jews. Those reports (in the New York Times, Jeruslam Post and various blogs) centered on calls by prominent Jewish officials for French Jews to leave France, indications many French Jews are reading to leave -- and reports that French Jews were buying land outside of France preparing to leave due to growing anti-semitism there.
Among this report's conclusions:
--Many areas are populated by poor, young French of north African immigrant backgrounds.
--At least half of the 630 suburbs it looked at had already become separate ethnic communities.
The report was leaked to the French newspaper Le Monde. The BBC also reports:
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The intelligence service report deals with an extremely sensitive issue for France: just how bad the sense of alienation has become in the suburbs, among the French-born children of north African immigrant background.
Sometimes, besides the withdrawal to the culture of origin and the rejection of Western values, a kind of negative identity is built which mixes the cultures of origin, the values of the public housing projects and rudimentary references to Islam.
The report - given to the interior minister, Dominique de Villepin - concludes that the situation is actually worse than previously thought.
Of the suburbs studied, the report says at least half could already be called ghettoes, whose inhabitants felt rejected by, and were in turn rejecting, mainstream French society.
The areas studied were chosen because they already had problems with unemployment, crime and violence, had a high proportion of immigrant families - some still practising polygamy - plus a growing number of Islamic prayer rooms as well as frequent anti-Western and anti-Semitic graffiti.
The intelligence services noted that many families of immigrant origin were rejecting French values and even the French language, following instead more traditional ways of life associated with their ethnic origin - including an increasing religious radicalisation among young Muslims, and a backlash against young Muslim women who wore Western clothing.
Better-off families, mainly those of white European origin, were leaving such suburbs, creating an even greater sense of isolation.
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Bottom line: it's bound to influence French internal political pressures...which are bound to eventually impact French foreign policy.
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