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France's Intifada
Chiarc has an insurgency to call his very own...
[Ralph Peters] 11/9/05
France has cancer and insists it's just a rash. After two weeks of expanding immigrant violence, the government's inept response has turned a local riot into a nationwide insurrection.
French abuse of Arab and African minorities mostly Muslims made it only a matter of time before the country's prison-like ghettos exploded. If your skin is brown or black in la belle France, you haven't got a chance at a decent life. Now the wretched of the earth have exploded in rage.
Given the abysmal conditions in France's Muslim concentration-camps-without-walls, the government had only one chance of suppressing the uproar: An immediate, uncompromising crackdown on the Paris suburb where the trouble began. That would have bought the state a little time.
Instead, the Gallic cock behaved like a headless chicken, stunned by the ingratitude of 5 million brown and black residents who failed to appreciate discrimination, jobless rates of up to 50 percent, public humiliation, crime, bigotry and, of course, the glorious French culture that excluded them through an informal apartheid system.
Now the devil's been conjured. The government's vacillation revealed the power of the street. Teenage rioters control much of France by night a situation more akin to an insurgency than to the strikes and demonstrations so beloved of French workers and students.
France's oppressed minorities have discovered their power, dominating the streets and the media. The country will never be the same. With thousands of cars torched, schools and shops burned, government buildings attacked and French policemen shot by snipers, this is an uprising not some repeat of the white-kids' tantrum of 1968, when spoiled brats rebelled against their parents.
Media apologists for France's "more humane" system attempt to play down the importance of what's happening by comparing it to that romanticized tomfoolery in '68. But those theatrical disorders were white-on-white, a family argument, and a perfect fit for the French myth of themselves as born revolutionaries.
This time, it's different. And serious. Darker-skinned outsiders are pounding on the door of Monsieur Hulot's maison.
Paralyzed French officials complain of "unfair" media attention (welcome to the reality club, Pierre). Yet, hardly two months ago the French media celebrated the suffering in New Orleans ignoring the brave response of millions of Americans to Hurricane Katrina to concentrate exclusively on the Crescent City's lower 9th ward and one nutty, incompetent mayor.
Utterly devoid of self-awareness, the French cherish their image of America as racist. But minorities in the United States have opportunities for which their French counterparts would risk their lives. Our problem is that demagogues convince the poorest of our poor to give up on getting ahead. In France, the non-white poor never have a chance of any kind.
France has no Colin Powell or Condi Rice, no minority heading the equivalent of a Fortune 500 company, no vibrant minority political culture. When Americans who adore la vie en France go to Paris (the intelligentsia's Orlando), they don't visit the drug-and-crime-plagued slums. If tourists encounter a Moroccan or a Senegalese "Frenchman," he's cleaning up the sidewalks after the dogs of the bourgeoisie.
Willfully blind to reality, liberals continue to praise the racist culture of France by citing the Parisian welcome for Josephine Baker or the Harlem jazz musicians in the 1920s. But the French regarded those few as exotic pets. The test is how they treat the millions of immigrant families whose members don't play trumpets in bars or sell their flesh in strip clubs.
There is no Western country more profoundly racist than France. There's nothing resembling equal-opportunity programs or affirmative action. Even if the government attempts some half-hearted reforms in the wake of the current uproar, the average French employer will have none of it (they don't even want to hire more white citoyens). And French voters will turn hard right at the next election.
Does anyone really believe that the country that enthusiastically handed over more of its Jewish citizens to the Nazis than the Nazis asked for is going to treat brown or black Muslims as equals?
Meanwhile, the Chirac government is stunned. Its members truly believed that supporting Arab and African dictators and defying America's efforts to liberate tens of millions of Muslims would buy safety from the 5 million immigrants and their children who have not the slightest hope of a decent future.
As I wrote in my last book, this violence was inevitable. Continental Europe has no model for integrating immigrants into the social and economic mainstream. Instead of creating tomorrow's jobs, Europe protects yesterday's. Talented young Europeans struggle to come to the United States to work (but they'll settle for Britain). And "Old Europe's" prejudices go deeper than those in our Deep South of 50 years ago.
The current phase of France's immigrant insurgency with riots in 300 cities and towns will sputter out eventually. But any return to peace will be a false peace. France has been changed irrevocably. The internal enemy created by Gallic bigotry has been mobilized.
Desperate apologists for France's apartheid system claim that the present uproar is merely about youthful anger, that Muslim fundamentalism isn't in play. Just wait. Islamist extremists aren't stupid. Thrilled by this spontaneous uprising, they'll move to exploit the fervor of the young to serve their own ends.
Expect terror. Whether the current violence ebbs tonight or lasts for weeks to come, the uprising of the excluded and oppressed in the streets of France has only begun.
Meanwhile, every American who believes in racial equality and human dignity should sympathize with the rioters, not with the effete bigots on the Seine.-one-
