Re: I agree. I don't think the German Muslims are likely to explode like their French counterparts. They are better integrated into the mainstream society.
Huh?! Check again:
"We came as guest workers and 40 years later we are still guest workers," says Recep Tuerkoglu, head of the Islamic Turkish Association. "But it will change, the third generation will be German."
news.bbc.co.uk
I think the difference between Germany's Turkish minority and France's Muslim one is a matter of numbers... Some French cities like Marseille already harbor a majority (50%+) of immigrants. There's no German Marseille. That's why Germany's Turks keep a low profile and, somehow, acquiesce in their discrimination... The very word Gastarbeiter (guest worker) tells a lot about the Turks' status in Germany. Contrariwise, France's North African and sub-Saharan (black) immigrants feel strong enough to rock the boat (of France's race relations) --they're much closer to cracking France open than their fellow Turks are in Germany --so close, yet so far:
The Crescent and the Tricolor
France today has more Muslims than practicing Catholics, and couscous has arguably become the country's national food
by Christopher Caldwell
WHEN, two days before Bastille Day in 1998, the French national soccer team upset Brazil 3-0 to win the World Cup, a million people staged an impromptu parade on the Champs-Elysées. Within days it had become a cliché to call it the most important demonstration since the liberation of Paris from the Germans, in 1944. It was a celebration less of French sports than of French society -- and of immigration's role in that society. As people poured into the streets from all corners of the capital and the country, it became clear what a multiracial society France had become. About 13 percent of the population is immigrant, but the percentage in Paris is much higher. Tens of thousands of blacks and tens of thousands of Asians and hundreds of thousands of Arabs were in the streets along with native-born whites, who call themselves Français de souche ("root French"). They were celebrating a team that included players born in Ghana and Guadeloupe. And they were celebrating especially the brilliant midfielder Zinédine Zidane, born in Marseille of Algerian parents, who had scored two goals in France's triumph.
[...]
Not since fifteenth-century Spain has any Western European country had so substantial a Muslim presence. And for years immigration from the Islamic countries has looked destabilizing, as tension has increased between the children of Arab immigrants (beurs and beurettes, as they're called) and alarmed whites who question their assimilability. In 1990 the Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin saw days of looting and burning. Although unorganized, it was understood less as a rampage than as a protest against the beurs' marginalization. Last year violence erupted in France's small towns -- most spectacularly Vauvert, a village between Montpellier and Nîmes, where "bandes de jeunes" (French journalistic code for nonwhite youths) trashed the center for several days. Strasbourg has seen a New Year's Eve tradition develop that resembles Halloween Devil's Night in Detroit. Bonfires are lit, buildings are vandalized, and last New Year's Eve dozens of cars were set on fire. Other small cities suffer sporadic sprees of vandalism, which their perpetrators call "rodeos" -- Nancy, for instance, and Rennes, which is now patrolled by gardiens de nuit, a sort of French version of New York's Guardian Angels. At times France's racial problem appears to resemble the situation in America in the 1960s.
But the comparison can be misleading. Generally speaking, it's a smaller problem than the American race problem. Beurs are less visibly different, discrimination against them tends to be on the basis of class rather than race, and when they assimilate into society (or make a pile of money), they're French, period.
[...]
IN some places France already looks like a Muslim country. One of these places is La Bricarde, a cluster of semi-public low-income apartment towers built in the early seventies at the far northern edge of Marseille. This is part of the Bricarde-Castellane-Plan d'Aou complex, where 8,300 of the poorest people in France live, and where Zinédine Zidane grew up. A quarter of Marseille's population of 800,000 is Muslim, and La Bricarde is a mixture of North African exoticism and Continental decadence. Lotto tickets are the most popular commodity in the rinky-dink variety store that serves the complex. On a fall day recently, in the blistering heat of the central courtyard, a teen-age girl in a tight black sweater walked with two pregnant friends past an old lady in a djellaba. Satellite dishes run up the sides of the towers like buttons on a shirt. There are 700 apartments in La Bricarde, and at least 200 dishes, all of them aimed skyward to pick up signals from Africa: France has one of the least developed cable networks in Western Europe, and Algerian television can't be picked up there except by satellite. Rock bluffs reminiscent of Arizona loom behind the towers. On several hot summer nights in recent years the residents of La Bricarde have staged their own spectacular variant on Strasbourg's rodeo, stealing cars from the city below, setting them on fire, and launching them from the bluffs.
"The future of the city is in north Marseille," says Didier Bonnet, the long-haired and dashing director of the Régie Services Nord Littoral, a social-service organization founded in 1988 to serve the housing projects at Marseille's northern edge. Bonnet also has clients in the center city, but La Bricarde is the focus of almost all of his work, and it worries him. "Unemployment is twenty percent in Marseille," he says, "and fifty percent in certain neighborhoods. This is one of those certain neighborhoods." A quarter mile from La Bricarde is a five-year-old shopping center that is one of the largest in Europe. It was built with government help, on the condition that the store owners hire half their employees from the projects nearby. But the residents have begun to drift back into unemployment. Still, some business gets done. Nordine Taguelmint, who lives in La Bricarde and works for Bonnet, shouted "Journaliste!" to reassure a cluster of four alarmed-looking North Africans whom we interrupted in the middle of what looked like a dope deal as we came down a hill behind the projects. A hundred yards farther on Taguelmint pointed out a brand-new Porsche 911 Carrera, owned by a resident of the project.
Juliette Minces, a sociologist who studies Muslim women, reports that a progressive "ethnicization" of these housing blocks is under way. They have become associated with particular ethnic groups -- Senegalese here, Algerians there -- much the way that American public housing became associated with blacks and Hispanics in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The residents of Marseille's projects are mostly Muslim, and a majority of them come from the Maghreb region of North Africa. Taguelmint estimates the population of La Bricarde at 60 percent foreign. Of the remainder, 25 percent are beurs and 10 percent are French blacks. Only about twenty white families are left in the projects, and all of them, Taguelmint says, feel trapped and bitter. Asked how many belong to the hard-right National Front, he replied, "All of them." All of them? He thought for a minute and revised his opinion: "No fewer than fifteen."
[snip]
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