A fair analysis of the French riots:
Nov 9, 2005
Why Paris is burning
By Ehsan Ahrari
Why is Paris burning? That's the red-hot question. Newsweek, in its latest edition, showed its ignorance and insensitivity by coming up with an Islamophobic slant: "Will the riots swell the ranks of jihadists in Europe?" The question remains, why is Paris burning?
The answer goes to a detailed description of the hypocrisy of French political culture, which gleefully depicts itself as too civilized, too secular and too "sophisticated" to nurture hostility or animus toward any ethnic group or religion, including Islam. The reality, alas, is quite the contrary.
The demonstrators, to be sure, are young men, mostly of North African origin. Almost all of them are second- or even third-generation Frenchmen, but that depiction remains only in the government record of birth certificates. For the blue-eyed, blonde-haired French, all those young people of North African origin will always be "Africans" or "Arabs", words that manifest their not so latent disdain.
These people of North African origin form 10% of the total population and unemployment among them runs at 21%. The number of underemployed is considerably higher. Most of them hold "dead-end" jobs as janitors, grocery store clerks and other oddjobbers. The French middle class did not expect them to register any protest. They were expected to consider themselves much too lucky to be living and breathing on French soil.
The very reason why they are in France today is because France direly needed them during the glorious days of economic expansion of the post-World War II decades - the so-called "les trentes glorieuses". During that era, the ancestors of today's protestors were brought to France not only to serve as cheap laborers, but also to make up for the loss of native French manpower following that war. Moreover, their usefulness also stemmed from the fact they were passive and not expected to strike, unlike those Frenchmen and women who were members of the country's communist unions.
Many of these immigrants were known as "Harkis"[*], ie, those Algerians who sided with their French colonial masters during Algeria's struggle to overthrow the yoke of French colonialism. More than 100,000 Harkis were massacred by the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) for being "collaborators". Those who entered France "were parked in unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never benefited from any government aid - a nice reward for their sacrifices for France, of which they were, after all, legally citizens".
Today's "ghettoized" protestors and arsonists are the children and grandchildren of those Harkis. Naturally, they "harbor certain resentment" toward France, which long pretended they didn't even exist, as long as they were willing to suffer silently the malignant racism of official and unofficial France.
Unlike the racism against African Americans, no North African version of Martin Luther King Jr heightened the political and moral consciousness of the French middle class by declaring, "I have a dream!" The leftist French Catholic priest, Father Christian Delorme, called for the integration of those French people of North African origin, but that did not create a lasting political movement, as with the American civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Now the "wretched" - to paraphrase Franz Fanon's classic Algerian war of independence study, The Wretched of the Earth - of contemporary France have turned to violence in order to claim what should be theirs to begin with, a dignified existence in their homeland. But they are not treated as if they are in the country of their birth. Reading the French press, one is shocked by the contemptuous behavior of today's French police, similar as it is to the conduct of racist cops in the American "Deep South" of the 1960s. The youngsters of North African origin are referred to by French police as "bougnoules", which is a verbal equivalent of the American racist slur for Arabs, "rag heads". As one report states, they (the youngsters of North African origin) are told to "Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes! - as if they had no right to look a police officer in the face. It's utterly dehumanizing. No wonder these kids feel so divorced from authority."
The official French response to this violent outburst was epitomized in the petty and selfish ambitions of two French politicians. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy - two contenders for the presidency of France - did not manifest any amount of sophistication or a genuine desire to take immediate proactive measures to calm the situation.
On the contrary, both of them used the unfortunate outbreak of violence to placate the racist feelings of the French extreme right wing. Then Sarkozy decided to outbid his rival, de Villepin, by declaring he would "karcharize" the ghetto (Karcher being the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peals away the outer skin of encrusted dirt - such as pigeon droppings - even at the risk of damaging what's underneath). The protestors' response was: "It's us who are going to put Sarkozy through the Karcher."
This type of puerile, political one-upmanship is both highly deleterious to the French populace in general and the rioters in particular. If France is serious about integrating its citizens of North African origin, its politicians must immediately deviate from racist and hyperbolic sound bites. For its French Muslims, cooler and mature heads must also prevail in calming the anger of the youngsters.
On the part of the Western media, there is that unfounded concern about these young protestors becoming jihadis in order to seek justice, as seen in the aforementioned Newsweek report. Such simplistic analyses are not based on any evidence or hard facts. The causality that is assumed in such reports is fictitious at best.
The threat to France is not from any purported springing up of jihad. Rather, the chief problem is its refusal to face the fact that multi[racialism] is a fact of life inside its borders. The London Economist notes:
As a result, there are no programmes to promote ethnic minorities out of their ghettos. The state keeps officialdom and religion firmly apart, and Mr Chirac has banned Muslim headscarves [as well as "conspicuous" crucifixes] in state schools. Many Muslims have come to feel stigmatized since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, as France, along with other European countries, has cracked down on suspected Islamic extremists.
Consequently, there is an immediate need to stop rejecting the reality of multiculturalism and start taking steps to integrate its citizens from different cultures into the economic mainstream. If their economic lot is improved, they will learn to identify themselves with French culture without necessarily abandoning their Islamic identity. If they remain on the economic fringes, they will not only become even more voluble than they are right now about their Islamic identity, but might adopt even more violent tactics to make themselves heard.
The continued arson in Paris and its outskirts are manifestations of decades of bottled-up frustrations, heightened feelings of alienation and neglect, as well as a desperate longing to belong to an economic class, where youngsters can dream of having productive careers and happy family lives for themselves.
Their parents and grandparents could not live those dreams. The least today's France can do is work sincerely and assiduously to realize those dreams of the current generation of Frenchmen and women of North African descent. That is the least a democratic polity can do for all of its citizens.
Ehsan Ahrari is a CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, VA-based defense consultancy. He can be reached at eahrari@cox.net or stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. His website: www.ehsanahrari.com.
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