If anything, North African statesmen are the ones who should urge their fellow immigrants to come back home (before it's too late).... perhaps a wave of "Islamic" terrorist bombings stage-managed by the European Gestapo will do the trick??
February 24, 2002
THE WORLD
Bias Breeds Bitterness, French Muslims Warn
Culture: Post-9/11 climate makes life even more difficult. 'How do we fit into a society that despises us?' one asks.
By MORT ROSENBLUM, ASSOCIATED PRESS
AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France -- A hulking tin-sided factory that once made brake parts is now a holy place. Each Friday, Muslims file inside to escape for a while from a world they see turning against them.
"We are the enemy," said Munir Mouiseddine, 24, a skilled maintenance technician with no job. "It was bad enough before. Since Sept. 11, it is impossible. How are we supposed to earn a living?"
He graduated first in his engineering class of 60. But at job interviews, he is told vacancies have been filled. "As soon as they see my Arab face, I'm out," he said. "That makes you jealous, bitter, desperate." Another young Muslim in Aulnay's immigrant quarter, who would call himself only Abdul, repeated the lament: "How do we fit into a society that despises us?"
Social workers say racism is a significant part of the problem, and is being worsened by the terrorism scare.
Abdul makes pizzas at Charles de Gaulle Airport but fears for his job. Other airport employees say police have canceled security clearances for many young Arabs, usually without explanation.
"We hate what terrorists did in America in God's name as much as anyone," Abdul said. "And we pay the price."
The northern end of Aulnay is a banlieue, French for suburb and now code for any of the crime-plagued slums that ring large cities, whether in France or elsewhere in Europe.
Government employment figures make no ethnic breakdown, but economists see a wide gap between francais de souche, meaning European Frenchmen, and les immigres, which refers essentially to Arabs and Africans, whether they are French citizens of long standing or have just arrived in the country.
"People think these are all bad kids, and that's totally wrong," said Stephane Girard, an Aulnay city consultant. "Some employers tell me outright they don't want Arabs. Some just quietly discriminate."
France's 5-million-strong Muslim community is Europe's largest. Most originate from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, former French territories, living in banlieues or run-down inner cities.
Although one young man from Aulnay was seized in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, police investigators say that so far, relatively few operatives of terror networks such as Al Qaeda come from these destitute areas.
Al Qaeda recruiters have focused most actively on large South Asian and Arab communities in Britain, police say. Even there, recruits apparently number in the hundreds from a total population of 2 million.
"Sleeper" cells uncovered in Germany and Italy seem to have reached a limited few. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Algerian arrested in Minnesota and allegedly linked to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is from a middle-class family in southern France.
But unless things get better, police and social scientists warn, the potential in France--and elsewhere in Europe, with an additional 9 million Muslims--is hair-raising.
"Of course, terrorism is a natural outlet if someone sees no future, no way out, in an atmosphere of exclusion," said Lucienne Bui Trong, recently retired as head of France's urban violence intelligence unit.
She said Muslim extremists began recruiting in the banlieues in 1992 but until recently had little success. Now, she added, authorities are treating the threat with new urgency.
Terrorism is only one fear. Police worry that the banlieues, still a cultural mix of immigrants and European French, will become desperate ghettos with warring gangs.
Already, handguns and even semiautomatic rifles appear with alarming frequency. 'Le drive-by shooting' is now a familiar French term.
L'insecurite, meaning a generalized fear of violent, disaffected juveniles--already dominates the French presidential campaign, months before the final vote May 5.
A harsh stand against North African immigration has restored the extreme right-wing candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to lost limelight. Opinion polls suggest his support is back at 10%.
Sophie Body-Gendrot, a Sorbonne University professor who has studied urban violence across America, warned in a comprehensive report for the French government of worsening problems if there are no changes.
"These kids have no future, no dignity, and they have no release for their violence," she said in an interview. "They live in cement blocks with nothing else. What can you expect them to do?"
Police often worsen the situation by humiliating youths, she added. "They provoke. They order kids to look down, to avert their eyes. They insult them. This creates an obvious mistrust and tension."
So far, she said, the worst of European slum violence still does not approach that of large American cities. But while U.S. figures are stabilizing, armed robbery and assault are rising fast in Europe.
Body-Gendrot says home-grown peculiarities, such as starting fires and then ambushing the firefighters, suggest a nihilistic rejection of social values that leaves youths vulnerable--not just to traditional predators such as drug dealers, but to Islamic zealots in search of recruits for holy war.
This in turn poisons the image of the overwhelming majority who reject extremism.
"Sure, there is the occasional hard-core fanatic, but that's the rare exception," said Mouiseddine, the jobless technician. "For most of us, the mosque is the only place where we feel some hope. It makes us better, not worse."
A two-year French government study of 48 sermons in 23 mosques found that imams preached nonviolence and civic responsibility, linking evils of the world to humankind's general failings.
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