France’s urban unrest spilled has spilled over into the Paris area — underscoring the country’s large Muslim population, economic disparities, the tendency for Muslims to live in specific areas, a culture of hopelessness and — some say — behind the scenes instigation of the violence by Islamic militants.
The news reports all paint a picture of a country marked by civil disorder and official dismay over how to defuse the violence and short-circuit the unrest’s origins. The AP reports:
AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France — Community leaders and residents marched past smoky ruins and charred vehicles in tense industrial suburbs of Paris on Saturday to protest a 10-day wave of violence, and authorities said the riots spreading across France seemed increasingly well-organized.
New fires and disturbances broke out after dusk fell Saturday. By 10 p.m., two schools and more than 100 vehicles had been burned. Several of the blazes were ignited by a Molotov cocktail near the Gare du Nord train station in Paris, within the limits of the capital.
Arsonists torched about 900 cars around the nation late Friday and early Saturday, the largest number since the disturbances began. They also set ablaze a city hall, schools, a car dealership, a textile warehouse, a day-care center and other buildings in immigrant neighborhoods on the edge of the capital.
Police made more than 253 arrests overnight Friday, more than any day so far.
The riots began Oct. 27 after the accidental deaths of two teenagers hiding from police. But that incident now seems little more than a trigger for an explosion of anger and alienation that has accumulated for years in France’s poor, predominantly Muslim neighborhoods.
Are these riots organized? According to the Los Angeles Times, there is no clear-cut answer to that among experts yet:
The persistent hit-and-run arson attacks show signs of strategy and coordination, said Yves Bot, the chief prosecutor in Paris.
“We see a form of action that is organized,” Bot told Europe 1 radio Saturday. “It responds to a strategy…. It’s done by mobile units of youths — or older guys because they are masked — who arrive on scooters, throw a burning bottle at a vehicle and leave.
“There are organized gangs, that’s irrefutable,” he added, “because it’s done in a way that gives every sign of coordination. In fact, one can read blogs on certain websites inciting other cities to join the movement of the Parisian region.”
But debate continued among authorities about the extent of organization. A regional police intelligence chief here said small-time gangsters who have long dominated the nation’s housing projects were instigating the troubles to assert control over drug-dealing turf.
Police also have seen indications in recent days that Islamic militants, another force in slums with big Muslim populations, have played a role in inciting vandals, he said, but to a lesser extent and “not on the front lines.” At the same time, other groups of Islamic fundamentalists have been active in trying to restore peace.
Overall, the intelligence chief expressed doubt that there was much coordination among the marauding gangs in different towns or regions.
“In this era of Internet, text-messages, cellphones and television, everybody knows what’s going on,” said the chief, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “The coordination comes mainly from the information revolution. The methods are similar because their social class is similar…. I don’t justify it at all, but there is an element of social demand here, of social distress. The message is: Our life is [expletive], so we are going to destroy everything.”
Craig Smith, writing in the New York Times, looks at the roots of the problem that has sparked the upheaval:
The corrosive gap between America’s whites and its racial minorities, especially African-Americans, is the product of centuries: slavery, followed by cycles of poverty and racial exclusion that denied generation after generation the best the United States could offer. France, on the other hand, is only beginning to struggle with a much newer variant of the same problem: the fury of Muslims of North African descent who have found themselves caught for three generations in a trap of ethnic and religious discrimination.
Even so, France is still low on the curve toward developing an entrenched, structural underclass – one that could breed extremism and lasting social problems.
So far, while hundreds of cars and buses have been burned and dozens of businesses destroyed in violence that has spread to a dozen towns, most rioters appear to be teenage boys bent more on making the news than making a coherent political statement.
“It’s a game of cowboys and Indians,” said Olivier Roy, a French scholar of European Islam. He is usually keen to warn Europeans of the potential danger posed by Islamists living among them. But in this case, he said, the danger is a long-range one. So far, he said, the attacks on the police and the torching of cars has less the character of a religious war than of “a local sport, a rite of passage.”
It isn’t as if this is a new issue for France. Writers and analysts of varying viewpoints have been writing for years about a simmering problem there with its Muslim population.
For instance, in 1995 Daniel Pipes wrote:
With eight bombings or attempting bombings in three months, France is convulsing over the problems of terrorism, fundamentalist Islam, and Algeria. During a recent trip to France, spent in Paris and at the Riviera, this writer had an opportunity to concentrate on the Middle Eastern dimension of life in that country. What’s happening there will probably come as a surprise to most Americans.
Among other things, in his piece which should be read in full, Pipes noted that:
- France has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe “both absolute and relative”
- Muslims in France tend to live in “suburbs of Islam” — which, he notes, contrasts with the United States where the more affluent go to the suburbs and lower income people tend to live in the inner cities.
- (in a most definitely controversial conclusion) Muslims “Muslims engage disproportionately in criminal activity, and mostly of a violent nature…”and “Terrorism committed by Muslims takes place more often than elsewhere.”
In this 1995 piece he writes:
Beyond these specific problems, some French believe the very nature of their country to be in play. One prominent journalist in Paris told me he thinks that France may change from what it is into an Arab and Muslim country in the course of the next century. How so? He pointed to two main trends, the demographic and the political. The French, like almost all modern peoples, are not sustaining their own population even as the nearby North Africans have one of the highest rates of reproduction in the world. Over time, he holds, the North Africans will ineluctably fill the vacuum in France.
Secondly, there’s the matter of will. As a post-Christian country, he sees the French lacking the will to maintain their own against the powerful wishes of the Muslim immigrants. As the latter population gains in numbers and sophistication, he sees a real possibility of French civilization drying up and the country fundamentally changing course.
In an article last July in Foreign Affiars, Robert S. Leiken, Director of the Immigration and National Security Program at the Nixon Center and a nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution., examined “Europe’s Angry Muslim.”
He noted that the wave of Muslim immigrants was the “unintended consequences” of post-World-War-II guest worker programs — culminating in Muslims being “the majority of immigrants in most western European countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and the largest single component of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom.”
And, he writes:
So unlike American Muslims, who are geographically diffuse, ethnically fragmented, and generally well off, Europe’s Muslims gather in bleak enclaves with their compatriots: Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom.
The footprint of Muslim immigrants in Europe is already more visible than that of the Hispanic population in the United States. Unlike the jumble of nationalities that make up the American Latino community, the Muslims of western Europe are likely to be distinct, cohesive, and bitter. In Europe, host countries that never learned to integrate newcomers collide with immigrants exceptionally retentive of their ways, producing a variant of what the French scholar Olivier Roy calls “globalized Islam”: militant Islamic resentment at Western dominance, anti-imperialism exalted by revivalism.
Additional information about Muslim immigration to France can be found here, here, here, and here.
What can stop the rioting? Riots usually have a beginning, middle and an end. In various countries the cycle is stopped either by a fierce government clampdown or an action on the part of the government (such as resignations) that defuses the anger in a way so community elites can try and cool passions. So far neither has happened in France.
And that’s just to deal with the rioting — not the root causes.
Video of the riots in Paris can be seen HERE via HRBY, Hambrug/Germany.
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