PARIS BURNING:

Riots in France (Michael Balter, 11/08/05)

Last Saturday evening, my wife and I had dinner in a restaurant overlooking the St. Martin Canal, just a short walk from the Parisian neighborhood where we have lived for the past 15 years. As we left, we were greeted by the acrid smell of burning rubber from cars that had been set alight near the Place de la Republique nearby. We were not surprised. Everyone in Paris knew that the riots would not remain confined to the city’s impoverished suburbs for long. The center of Paris was too tempting a target for the gangs of youths now rampaging in dozens of French cities. Bringing the riots to the center of French government power was the next logical step.

As I write, early on Tuesday morning, the riots have continued for 12 straight nights, despite increasing law and order talk from the conservative French government and the mobilization of nearly 10,000 local and national police. The current situation is the logical and predictable result of neglecting the plight of the the ghettoized communities that ring Paris, especially to the north and east. Here, in bleak, often run down housing projects, immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa—some newcomers, many here for several generations—suffer from 30-40% employment rates, inferior schools, and minimal social services. They also suffer from the ingrained racism of a French society that has always regarded them as outsiders and perhaps always will.

To understand what is going on in France requires keeping two or more contradictory thoughts in one’s head at the same time. The rioters are not freedom fighters, revolutionaries, or community activists. The chief instigators are the hoodlum elements that have long plagued these poor suburbs, making the lives of their own neighbors insecure and miserable. On the weekends, they plague public transportation, sometimes attacking passengers and otherwise making a nuisance of themselves. On the other hand, there are no hoodlum gangs in the wealthy districts of western Paris. When a young man has no job and no money, being a hoodlum and/or a drug dealer is pretty much all that is left as a vocation. So while the torching of cars, schools, and businesses is unacceptable and inexcusable, it is easily understandable. And from an entirely symbolic point of view, these actions have a certain resonance: In France as in America, the automobile, the rioters’ chief target, is a symbol of freedom, mobility, and independence—something that these young people have never had and may never have. More than 5,000 autos have now been torched, a symbolic statement indeed.

They can surely be forgiven hating cars.

MORE:
Why Paris is burning (Ehsan Ahrari, 11/09/05, Asia Times)

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.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 8, 2005 5:22 PM