Category Archives: France

Scholar warns against putting Islamic spin on French riots

Posted on by Bob Pitt

From his current vantage point at Oxford University, Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan cautions against putting an Islamic spin to the unrest that has swept France’s downtrodden surburbs.

In an interview with AFP, Ramadan said the French authorities will need to embrace a more sophisticated approach if they want to respond effectively to the rioting that has run for a dozen nights straight.

“In all that is happening, there are of course groups who are in it for pure vandalism, for wild violence,” said the scholar, named by Time magazine as one of the leading thinkers of the 21st century but barred from the United States.

“But the phenomenon doesn’t stop there,” he added, citing “objective events” involving the relationship between those living in the grim suburban housing projects and French society as a whole.

“People (in the suburbs) have the impression that they count for nothing, that they can be looked down upon and insulted in any way.”

He added: “We’re in the process of losing a footing in the suburbs. Even so-called Muslim associations are more and more disconnected. The fracture is profound… We are seeing an Americanisation in terms of violence.”

“Above all, one must not Islamisize the question of the suburbs,” Ramadan stressed. “The question that France must answer is absolutely not a question of religion.”

Asked where the roots of the malaise lie, Ramadan said the entire political class in France has been “blind” to what has been happening in the suburbs, with their unemployed youth of Arab and African origin and bleak high-rises.

“There’s an obsession about a religious divide, but no one sees the socio-economic divide in France, with places in the process of becoming ghettos with the suburbs on one side, the better-off areas on the other.”

“There must be a struggle against this institutionalised racism. There are second-class citizens in France. That is the reality.”

AFP, 8 November 2005

‘Muslim groups may gain strength from French riots’ WSJ warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

FireThe right-wing myth that the unrest in France is the result of an “Islamic uprising” has been rather undermined by the observable reality that French Muslim organisations have all intervened to oppose rioting. So some “Islamic conspiracy” theorists have found it necessary to shift their ground. Now, it seems, the real danger lies in the fact that Muslim organisations have intervened at all:

“These groups don’t preach violence, but they do advocate something that is troubling Europe’s secular democracies: that Muslims should identify themselves with their religion rather than as citizens. Effectively, they are promoting a separate society within society and that brand of Islamist philosophy is seeping into many parts of Western Europe. Countries from France and Germany to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands haven’t succeeded in integrating their Muslim minorities – and Islamic organizations have carefully positioned themselves to fill the breach.

“The riots ‘are a blessing for them because it gives them the role of intermediary’, says Gilles Kepel, a scholar who has studied and written extensively about the rise of Islam in France. That, in turn, puts them in a stronger position ‘to force concessions from the state’, such as demanding a repeal of the law France passed last year banning headscarves from public schools, he says.”

Wall Street Journal, 7 November 2005

Robert Spencer, though, has carefully considered the evidence and, on balance, prefers to stick with the view that it’s probably the result of a carefully prepared jihadist plan.

Front Page Magazine, 8 November 2005

Blame mass immigration and cultural diverity – Leo McKinstry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“France’s experiences are hardly unique. Throughout western Europe, societies are scarred by tension. In the past week, there have been Muslim-led riots in Denmark, while in Holland the assassination of film-maker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fundamentalist last year left a legacy of racial divisions. Britain is still struggling to cope with the fact that we have home-grown Islamic terrorists in our midst….

“The growing strife points to a comprehensive failure in social and immigration policies. France and Britain should be enjoying the stability brought by decades of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Instead, we are living in the shadow of fear because of our rulers’ attachment to the twin dogmas of mass immigration and cultural diversity. Without giving us any say, they have imported wholesale the problems of the Third World – from corruption to superstition, from tribalism to misogyny – into advanced, democratic, Christian cultures. In large swathes of urban Britain and France, the indigenous people can feel like aliens…. Through our welfare systems, taxpayers of Britain and France are subsidising idleness among those who appear to despise Christian civilisation.

“With lies, twisted ideology and institutional capacity for self-loathing, the political establishment has erected this vast edifice of cultural diversity but it is the ordinary people of Europe who have to live with bombs on our trains and burnt-out cars on our streets.”

Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express, 7 November 2005

Writers like McKinstry and Melanie Phillips almost succeed in making the BNP sound moderate.

‘Why France is burning’ – Melanie Phillips explains

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French riot police (4)“Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-minded Interior Minister, has been blamed for inflaming the situation by his uncompromising language. French policy in general has been blamed for herding poor Arabs into suburban ghettoes where they have been left to fester in high unemployment and poverty. The disturbances are thus being portrayed as race riots caused by official discrimination and insensitivity.

“But this is a gross misreading of the situation. It is far more profound and intractable. What we are seeing is, in effect, a French intifada: an uprising by French Muslims against the state….

“M. Sarkozy and the police are determined to take back the streets. The Muslims are equally determined to keep territory they feel they have conquered from the French state…. For more than twenty years France’s Muslim areas have been out of control. Indeed, they only turned into Muslim ghettoes in the first place because Muslim violence and harassment forced everyone else out…. The fact is that French Muslims want to be segregated. The ghettoes are a way of ensuring a separate Islamic existence without having to assimilate into French society….

“This is all bound up with the erosion of national identities across Europe. This has affected even France, once a ferocious proponent of French culture which was imposed through a centralised schools system, a strong police force and national military service…. Banning the hijab (Islamic headscarf) in schools represented a flickering of the old national certainty as France sniffed the danger that had arisen in its midst. But it was too little, and maybe too late.

“Even now Britain, France and the rest of Europe are still in varying stages of denial over Muslim unrest. Reluctant even to admit that religion is central to this phenomenon, they look instead for ways to blame themselves and use the insult of ‘Islamophobia’ to shut down debate. The warning for us from the disturbing events in France could not be clearer. We must end the ruinous doctrine of multiculturalism and reassert British identity….”

Mad Mel rants on.

Daily Mail, 7 November 2005

For a contrary view – which is based on interviews with the youth involved in the disturbances, as distinct from Phillips generating Islamophobic fantasies out of her own head – see Molly Moore’s piece in the Washington Post, 6 November 2005

The threat to ‘Western Culture’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Not only don’t the Western Nations – and this is especially true of the European Union – attempt to fight the cultural invasion facilitated by millions of Muslim immigrants that has flooded their countries after WWII, but they actually seem to exhibit enviable enthusiasm and willingness, when it comes to helping Islamics expand their cultural and religious influence in the Dar Al-Harb. Tariq Ramadan, the inventor and active pursuer of the doctrine of the ‘quiet takeover’ – according to which Islam will be established in Europe by making it an integral part of everyday European (or, rather, Eurabian) life – couldn’t be happier. He can relax in his cozy professor’s chair behind the walls of the Oxford University in England and watch how the European governments together with the mainstream media will do his job for him….

“The riots that have already engulfed over 20 Parisian suburbs are not simple protests of the ‘oppressed’ and ‘disaffected’ immigrants that are supposedly deprived of opportunities for advancement by the ethnocentric French society. For the Western Nations and France in particular they have much more far-reaching and ominous implications. They are a challenge thrown today to the Western Culture. They are an act of defiance, rejection, and outright expression of scorn for the traditions and values that have allowed these very Muslim immigrants to join the club of the Golden Billion. They have refused and ridiculed this invitation. Instead, the majority of Muslim immigrants, whether they come from Africa or the Middle East, have arrived in Europe not to enrich the existing society, but to expand the domain of Islam, and effectively transform that society into the one that would conform to the norms of the Islamic Law.”

American Daily, 6 November 2005

The week Paris burned

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“For years, French integration policies have been based around the republican tenet of secularism. On the basis that France should be indivisible and able to assimilate all its components by officially erasing their particularities, the government does not allow official statistics to be broken down by ethnicity and religion…. Christophe Bertossian, an immigration specialist at the French Institute for International Relations, believes it is time for a rethink: ‘Part of the problem is the French approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal. The idea that we are equal is fiction. Ethnic minorities keep being told they do not exist’.”

Alex Duval Smith in the Observer, 6 November 2005

‘Eurabia on the rampage’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Mad Mel offers her take on the French riots, drawing her inspiration from Jihad Watch and Bat Ye’Or. “Multiculturalism, the doctrine that governs Britain and Europe and which grew out of a war upon their values from within by allowing the values of minorities to trump the majority, has been applied by the west to appease an ideology that has declared war upon its values from without.”

Melanie Phillips’s Diary, 4 November 2005

Of course, the distinguishing feature of French policy is in fact that it rejects multiculturalism in favour of secular nationalism. As a number of commentators have pointed out, this is a contributory factor in the current unrest, as it is difficult for the government to address the problems of oppressed communities when officially these minority cultures do not exist – everyone is supposed to be a French citizen and by definition enjoys equal rights.

When Melanie Phillips and her fellow right-wingers rail against multiculturalism, it’s clear that what they’re really having a go at is the existence of a multicultural society rather than multiculturalism as a policy. It is essentially a racist argument against the very existence of minority communities – at least when those communities are Muslim, that is.

Islam: Tony Blair’s challenge

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French journalist Claude Askolovitch is appalled by the concessions made to Muslims in Britain. Tariq Ramadan is being promoted by the Blair government “in order to appease radical Islam”. Members of Respect distribute leaflets outside mosques calling – shock, horror – for the defence of Muslim communities. The “one-time champion of the IRA”, the Mayor of London, is “today the defender of Muslim radicals”.

Still, Askolovitch does find one co-thinker. It’s our friend Kenan Malik, who declares that when he was young “racism was terrible”. Today that is no longer the case, apparently. Instead, “people fantasise about an imaginary Islamophobia”. The result is to “clear the ground for the Islamists”.

Nouvel Observateur, 27 October 2005

More offensive right-wing drivel about the Paris riots

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Paris“Lax immigration policies, prostration to the god of multiculturalism, and the refusal to fight fire with fire are three reasons why Muslim ‘youths’ in Paris are rioting in the streets. As I see it, the religion of Islam is inherently incompatible with the concept of individual liberty, a crucial component of western countries. It’s no accident that a culture like the West and a nation like the United States were envisioned and created by people who were either Christians and/or biblically literate and/or respected the Christian tradition. In countries under Islamic law, there’s no such idea as ‘individual liberty’. You’re either a Muslim or in danger of having your throat sliced open.”

La Shawn Barber’s Corner, 3 November 2005

This analysis is wholeheartedy endorsed by Robert Spencer, who heads his post “French rioters continue to prove multiculturalist relativism a dismal failure”. It appears to have escaped Barber’s and Spencer’s attention that official state policy in France is resolutely anti-multiculturalist, requiring as it does the subordination of minority cultures to the dominant French “national” culture. But never let facts get in the way of a right-wing cliché, eh?

Jihad Watch, 3 November 2005

Right-wing deputy Philippe de Villiers, leader of the Mouvement pour la France, who has said he wants to “stop the Islamization of France”, told RTL radio that the problem stemmed from the “failure of a policy of massive and uncontrolled immigration”.

Associated Press, 3 November 2005