Chris Caldwell has a good article on the Muslim underclass in France. Excerpt:
FRANCE HAS A PROBLEM with its Muslim population that may be too multifaceted to solve. There have been Muslims in France since the colonization of Algeria in the 1830s, and there were tens of thousands as early as the 1920s, when France officially welcomed Islam in a gesture of gratitude to the Algerian soldiers who had shocked the country with their patriotism, self-sacrifice, and bravery in the Great War. The government, which is working desperately to formulate an official policy on Islam, now estimates its Muslim population at 4 to 5 million. Most social scientists believe this number is too low, speaking of as many as 8 million Muslims in France (and 12 to 20 million in the European Union). These numbers underestimate the weight of French Islam, since the population is concentrated and--thanks to a birthrate that, while falling, remains a multiple of the native-French one--extremely young. In parts of Paris, Marseilles, Rhone-Alpes, and Strasbourg, between a third and half of people in their teens and twenties are Muslim. These offspring of immigrants are referred to (and refer to themselves) as beurs. More invidiously, the word jeunes (or "youths") has come to be used as a euphemism for "Arab thugs," much as "inner city" served for decades as an American code word for "horrible black neighborhood."
France's Islamic immigration has been until recently something the country literally could not bear to think or talk about. This is largely a problem of historical guilt. Most Arabs in France are economic migrants from North Africa, where France waged a brutal counterterrorist war in the late 1950s and early 1960s against Algeria's FLN independence movement. The war involved widespread torture in Algeria (a subject painfully reopened two years ago in a memoir by Gen. Paul Aussaresses), the drowning of Algerian protest marchers in the Seine (revealed during unrelated investigations into the World War II activities of Maurice Papon, who was Paris's police commissioner during the murders), and the abandonment of Algeria's harkis, those who had fought for France against the FLN. Vast numbers were slaughtered, sometimes along with their entire families, for their loyalty to France. Those who succeeded in escaping across the Mediterranean were often greeted as an unwelcome reminder. When President Jacques Chirac declared a day of national recognition for the harkis last fall, it was hailed as the brave breaking of a taboo.
As far as Islam is concerned, France has had a tendency to avoid looking at problems until they rear up on several fronts. First, France now has an underclass, made up of jeunes issus d'immigration. Second, there is an ongoing problem of racial discrimination, which is both a cause of Arab/Muslim poverty and an effect of Arab/Muslim crime. Third, there is Islam itself, which has confounded every governmental attempt to assimilate it into France's sternly secular constitutional order. Fourth, there is the rapidly increasing influence of conservative Islam in France, in the context of a global terrorist war that certain schools of conservative Islam have declared on the West. Solving some of these problems means exacerbating others. That may be why, according to a poll taken in 2000 by the National Commission on the Rights of Man, 63 percent of French people think there are "too many Arabs" in the country. This may be evidence of racism, but not of knee-jerk racism: Only 43 percent of Frenchmen say the same of blacks, only 21 percent of Asians, and only 19 percent of Jews.
What worries people at the most visceral level is the growth of a real Muslim underclass. In his book La France et les beurs, Zair Kedadouche, a former professional soccer player who has become an adviser to the mayor of Paris, refers to the housing projects of suburban Paris as "a Soweto that dare not speak its name."
theweeklystandard.com |
