[Mb-civic] French Lessons - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

French Lessons

By Jim Hoagland
Wednesday, November 9, 2005; Page A31

"We are victims of our architecture," says Guillaume Parmentier, the 
head of a French institute, as he struggles to explain two weeks of 
rioting in the sterile high-rise ghettos populated by France's Muslim 
immigrants. True. But architecture is not the whole story.

The social explosions that have hit France are being watched nervously 
by the rest of Europe for signs that this could become something that so 
far it is not: a religiously motivated uprising by Muslim youths against 
their Christian and Jewish neighbors. But jihad -- or the assumed lack 
of it -- is not the whole story either.

The French -- and the angry, nihilistic Arab and African youths in their 
midst -- are also "victims" of that country's immigration and 
assimilation policies and, indirectly, its paternalistic social welfare 
system. Mark them as casualties of a particular brand of politically 
correct arrogance that French politicians have practiced for 30 years, 
and you begin to get something like a whole story.

France's upheaval is too important to be explained away by any single 
factor. And it is too important to be treated as a matter of 
satisfaction by Americans irritated by the French, on foreign policy or 
other grounds. France and its beautiful, troubled capital are proxies 
for all affluent nations that have elevated into an art form the habit 
of ignoring the world's poor, desperate and criminally inclined.

Our collective neglect lumps them all together, and it helps make the 
disadvantaged become prey or accomplice for criminals and Islamist 
fanatics. In that sense, we are all French right now. It is not just 
Paris that is burning. It is Africa, and the Middle East, and parts of 
Asia and Latin America, that are burning and showering flames on the 
Paris ghettos. And on London, Madrid, New York, Bali and Casablanca.

Hurricane Katrina helped Americans understand in sickening detail the 
failures of local and federal emergency-response bureaucracies. France's 
riots should illustrate to the French the dead-end nature of the 
physical and social architecture of building a tall fence around the 
country's 5 million to 10 million Muslim immigrants and their offspring, 
and then pretending they are essentially not there.

The French equivalents of New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward lie in 300 or 
more " zones de non-droit " (lawless areas), which sparked the national 
rioting. These are areas in the immigrant suburbs of Paris and other 
large cities where the police do not go as a matter of policy. They have 
instead for years established checkpoints on the perimeter of these 
islands of soulless high-rises and then let the inhabitants fend for 
themselves.

So now we know: Lawless areas can exist inside strong national 
boundaries as well as in the failed states of Africa and Asia. 
Governments can stumble into disaster by hoping for the best while 
letting serious problems fester in Clichy-sous-Bois as well as in New 
Orleans.

Television interviewers have descended on Clichy-sous-Bois and the other 
locales of arson and pillage to transmit the voice of the riot. Almost 
in unison and by rote, the perpetually unemployed children, and 
grandchildren, of North African immigrant workers who settled in France 
in economic boom times complain that they are marginalized and 
discriminated against -- even though they are as "French" as anyone in 
the country.

True. But the prejudice of others is not the whole story either.

The unemployment benefits that France's generous social welfare system 
provides to these youths may have bought the stylish clothes and 
grooming many of them display in the television interviews. But it has 
not bought their satisfaction or acquiescence in the system that feeds 
them and isolates them. Those payments may have enabled these youths to 
be as disdainful of the kind of work their parents eagerly came here to 
find as are the other "French."

The riots are in some ways a protest against what their parents have 
created (no surprise there) and against the enormous pressures that life 
in a Western society brings to bear on antiquated Muslim family 
structures. These youths lash out with molotov cocktails against the 
cultural crossfire that envelops them. And they become easy prey for the 
criminals and militants dumped into the failed townships of a proud and 
rich nation.

So there is no single explanation and no single answer. The United 
States has responded to the collapsing social and family structures of 
the Muslim Middle East and Central Asia with the fire and brimstone of 
war. The French respond to a related challenge within their borders with 
political insincerity and economic handouts. The failures of both 
countries have more in common than either is prepared to acknowledge today.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/08/AR2005110801257.html
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