Category Archives: France

Mad Mel finds a co-thinker …

Posted on by Bob Pitt

… and no, we’re not talking about Nick Griffin. Mel has found an interview with French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz that she claims supports her own view that it was Islam, not poverty, discrimination and alienation, that was behind the unrest in France.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 21 November 2005

In reality, Finkielkraut’s take on the riots, bad though it is, still falls some way short of Phillips’s unhinged Islamophobia: “I have not spoken about an ‘intifada’ of the suburbs, and I don’t think this lexicon ought to be used.”

Finkielkraut’s main concern is to “wage war on the ‘war on racism'”. You can understand why he might not be happy about anti-racist campaigns. On the subject of football, he offers the following insight:

“People say the French national team is admired by all because it is black-blanc-beur [black-white-Arab]. Actually, the national team today is black-black-black, which arouses ridicule throughout Europe.”

‘The French insurrection: cars burn, Islam benefits’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Riot police“… for a white Frenchman who’s technically a Catholic but probably an agnostic, it must be depressing to open the newspaper each morning and read yet another headline about an alien creed that seems intent on imposing itself on his country. If it’s a really ‘class’ newspaper like Le Monde, the editorial will probably inform him that the fault for this state of affairs is largely his own and that he will soon be expected to pay the price economically while redoubling his efforts to be exquisitely sensitive about all things Muslim. How long he’ll put up with this, that is the question.”

Brendan Bernhard in LA Weekly, 18 November 2005

French Muslim leaders reject blame for riots

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French Muslim leaders denounced on Thursday efforts to blame Muslims and Islam for recent riots in the country’s rundown suburbs and said they saw worrying signs of growing prejudice against their faith here.

Many young rioters may have been from Muslim backgrounds, but their violent outburst was a protest against unemployment, poor housing and other bias they faced because of their foreign origins, they told journalists.

Urban violence, which some politicians in France and some media abroad portrayed as a kind of Muslim uprising, fell back to normal levels on Thursday after three weeks in which 9,000 vehicles and many buildings were set on fire.

“They didn’t act like that because they’re Muslims, but because of the misery they’re living in,” said Kamel Kabtane, rector of the Grand Mosque of Lyon in eastern France.

“There weren’t just Mohammads and Alis in those groups (of rioters) – there were Tonys and Daniels too,” said Dalil Boubakeur, the Paris Grand Mosque rector who is also head of France’s official Muslim Council (CFCM).

When the riots broke out after the accidental deaths of two youths apparently fleeing police in a poor Paris suburb, some conservative politicians publicly suggested radical Islamists were either behind the unrest or exploiting it to win new supporters.

When little proof for that emerged, some then began singling out polygamy – which is illegal but practiced among some black African immigrants – as a factor slowing integration here.

“This problem is tiny,” Kabtane said of polygamy, which unofficial estimates say concerns about 15,000 families around the country. “They just want to start a controversy.”

Reuters, 17 November 2005

Hijab costs woman French residency

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A Moroccan woman living legally in France for eight years has been refused a long-term residence card because she covers her hair with an Islamic headscarf, says her lawyer.

A regional government official wrote in a rejection letter this month that the scarf worn by Chetouani El Khamsa was a sign of Islamic fundamentalism, her lawyer Pascale Torgemen said on Thursday.

Torgemen said El Khamsa planned to appeal and to file a suit for what she contends is a discriminatory, racist and sexist decision. “Does this mean that a man with a beard is systematically Islamist, a fundamentalist?” the lawyer said.

El Khamsa has lived legally in France – where her four children were born – since 1997, employed by her husband’s business. To replace her current residence card, which must be renewed annually, she wanted a residency permit that is valid for 10 years, like the one accorded her husband.

But in a 2 November letter refusing her the 10-year card, Francois Praver, sub-prefect in the town of Raincy outside Paris, noted that during her interview, El Khamsa wore a headscarf “entirely covering your neck and the roots of your hair, comparable to a hijab, sign of belonging to a fundamentalist Islam”.

Al Jazeera, 17 November 2005

Mad Mel strikes back

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The attitude of much of the liberal media in Britain, France and the US to the French riots is now clear. The riots have nothing to do with Islam. The fact that most of the rioters are Muslim is irrelevant. The riots are about poverty, unemployment and discrimination. Anyone who says there’s an Islamist agenda here is a far-right bigot peddling patent and dangerous untruths.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 14 November 2005

Mel also accuses Jason Burke of arguing that “my analysis is rooted in a barking mad species of conservative thought”. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 13 November 2005

It’s the latest disease: sensible people saying ridiculous things about Islam

Posted on by Bob Pitt

David Aaronovitch“It’s time, apparently, that I woke up and smelt the cardamom, or whatever scent it is one associates with Islam. I’m wasting my time, some people reckon, stuck in a cushioned ante-room off a corridor leading away from reality while asserting – as I did last week – that the French riots were not to be explained by the religion of many of the rioters. Last Tuesday my e-mail box declared itself full after a small deluge of readers wrote in, most declaring that, although they weren’t French and hadn’t been there for a while, they knew – absolutely knew – that Islam was behind it all. And that those who thought otherwise were in a state of denial.”

Times, 15 November 2005

Who’d have thought it? An article by David Aaronovitch I actually agree with – well, apart from the implication that Rod Liddle is to be included in the category of “sensible people”.

French minister says polygamy to blame for riots

Posted on by Bob Pitt

France’s employment minister on Tuesday fingered polygamy as one reason for the rioting in the country.

Gérard Larcher said multiple marriages among immigrants was one reason for the racial discrimination which ethnic minorities faced in the job market. Overly large polygamous families sometimes led to anti-social behaviour among youths who lacked a father figure, making employers wary of hiring ethnic minorities, he explained.

The minister, speaking to a group of foreign journalists as the government stepped up efforts to improve its image with the foreign media, said: “Since part of society displays this anti-social behaviour, it is not surprising that some of them have difficulties finding work … Efforts must be made by both sides. If people are not employable, they will not be employed.”

The riots, and the government’s slow reaction to the violence, has led to widespread criticism that France’s ruling class is out of touch with the rest of the country. Mr Larcher’s comments could further fuel the debate and are likely to outrage Muslim and anti-racism groups in France.

Financial Times, 15 November 2005

French problem affects rest of Europe as well

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Haroon Siddiqui“France is proudly mono-cultural, insisting that its residents shed all their identities and ‘be French’…. Yet, when facing social problems, the French attribute them to their pluralism. To a lesser degree, Germany and others do the same. ‘Multiculturalism has failed, big time’, said Angela Merkel, on her way to becoming chancellor. But Germany never had a policy of recognizing all cultures. What it has is an immigrant population that long ago ceased to be only white and Christian. That’s what she was complaining about. So was former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, 85, saying of the 2.6 million Turkish Germans, that it had been a big mistake to have let them in.

“Immigration was fine until the wretched Muslims came!

“A second theme coursing through public debate concerns the adaptability or otherwise of immigrants/Muslims: ‘They do not integrate.’ ‘They do not fit in; they cannot fit in.’ ‘They live in France but are not of France’ (or Germany, Holland, Belgium, etc.). ‘They don’t consider themselves French’ (or German, Dutch, etc.).  But it is the French, the Germans and others who deny jobs to Arabs/Turks/Muslims because of who they are, while the latter cry out to be treated as the French/German/Dutch citizens and long-time residents that they are.

“This is a neat trick. You won’t let them forget their ethnic/religious identity but blame them for keeping it. You won’t give them jobs but blame them for not having any. You build barriers to integration but blame them for not integrating. You pursue policies of social and economic segregation that produce poor, crime-riddled ghettoes, but you accuse them of domestic Balkanization.”

Haroon Siddiqui in the Toronto Star, 13 November 2005

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‘Liberals are causing a European jihad’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“After more than two weeks of nightly violence, the rioting of Europe’s Muslim minority has finally begun to subside. While the French government and Main Stream Media may be eager to pretend that the events of the last month were an anomaly, or persist in the notion that the underlying issues that incited the violence are now being addressed, the current lull in the violence in Europe is just that; a lull. The violence is doomed to return in the future. Europe is fast becoming ground zero in clash of civilizations between two equally intolerant cultures, radical Islam and Liberalism.”

Renew America, 13 November 2005