Posted on 12/25/2003 9:27:33 PM PST by nypokerface
ST.-FLORENTIN, France — From most angles, this village looks like the quaint medieval parish that tourists expect to find deep in the French countryside: half-timbered houses crowd around a stone church that overlooks rolling fields and ancient Burgundian forests.
But tucked between the old buildings and the bucolic landscape, there lies another world filled with spoken Arabic, steaming couscous and the simmering frustration of idle young men born to Muslim immigrants in a deeply conservative Christian land.
"Racists surround us," said Brahim Bouanani, a 26-year-old St.-Florentin native, when asked what lies down the tree-lined, two-lane highways that stretch out of town.
For Mr. Bouanani and his peers, born to North African laborers who arrived decades ago, St.-Florentin is less a centuries-old accumulation of France's cultural heritage than a series of cheap and charmless public housing projects on the west side of town. About a third of the town's 5,800 residents are "foreigners" like him, he said.
Their isolation is extreme, their alienation profound and their future uncertain. But their situation is not unique.
Beyond the Arab ghettos of Paris or Marseille or Lyon, the immigration of the 1960's and 70's seeded hundreds of smaller communities across France with Muslims whose numbers have since grown. France's Muslim population — Europe's largest — is now five million.
They are the avant-garde of a trend that is already redefining European societies from Sweden to Spain. With European populations aging and shrinking, reopening the borders to immigration is becoming an economic necessity.
Demographic pressures mean Muslims will probably be at the forefront of the next immigrant wave: by many estimates the majority of the 300 million Muslims already living along the Mediterranean's southern rim are under age 20, and the population there is expanding fast.
As a result, the growing estrangement of France's second- and third-generation Muslims and the increasing discrimination directed against them have become pressing concerns for the French government today. The political establishment remains rattled by the resurgence of virulent racist-tinged nationalism during the last national elections.
"I'm worried about a certain Islamophobia that is developing in our country," Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said during a recent visit to the capital's largest mosque.
In places like Burgundy, where the old France so starkly abuts the new, a glaring gap hangs between France's traditional Christian population and its Muslim youths. In Veziny, near Mr. Bouanani's home, conversation among a cluster of rubber-booted farm workers crowding the bar at the Union Café stops at the mention of St.-Florentin.
"They don't want to integrate," said the cafe's owner, a small, aproned woman with cloudy eyeglasses balanced on the end of her nose. She added the foreigners of St.-Florentin wanted to keep their language and religion and so keep to themselves. "They slaughter sheep in the bathtubs over there," she said.
In fact, some Muslims in St.-Florentin have butchered sheep in their bathtubs for the Id al-Fitr festival marking the end of Ramadan. But those habits belong to the older generation, young French Arabs say.
With their imperfectly spoken Arabic and their French ideals, they say they are as alienated from their parents as they are from the provincials in the surrounding countryside.
Mr. Bouanani took a visitor for a stroll along the hillsides below the housing projects and along the still waters of the Burgundy Canal. Makeshift fences of chicken wire and rough boards divide the land into small, overgrown gardens filled with mint and red peppers. Women in black chadors and abayas make the place feel more like Barbary than Burgundy.
Few of the younger generation work in the gardens, Mr. Bouanani says, and though many of the immigrants' children visit North Africa each summer, their ties are growing weaker as their parents age.
St.-Florentin, named for a ninth-century monastery built in honor of a fifth-century Christian martyr, changed little over the centuries until the 1960's, when an enterprising mayor built a small industrial zone.
During the brief labor-hungry economic boom that followed, workers were brought here from the Islamic crescent across the Mediterranean. The borders have since closed, but family members, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants have added to the immigrants' numbers.
The original immigrants expected little from their adopted homeland. But their children, born French and now coming of age, want to be treated like everyone else.
Crumbling Moroccan hashish into a cigarette paper in front of a mostly abandoned apartment block here, Gharib Roubiaux complained bitterly about living in the "rabbit cages" of public housing while the French children with whom he grew up are moving on to better lives.
"The future is a boat, but it is a boat that is sinking," he said. He had only worked for two months out of the past two years, he said.
No one will give you a job," he said. "How long can we stand here, leaning against the wall, before we blow a fuse."
That frustration is widespread as Europe's long-established societies try to absorb their mainly Muslim postwar immigrants.
Mr. Bouanani said he remembered feeling the racism rise as he grew up.
In 1992, a restaurant owner across from the housing projects opened fire on some young Muslims following a dispute, killing one and paralyzing another. When the restaurant owner was sentenced to just six years in prison, there was a riot and images of burning cars in St.-Florentin put the town on the national map.
Gérard Magne, the mayor of St.-Florentin, said the incident was a turning point and that the town had reached out to its young Arabs since then. The restaurant's space was given to the community for a mosque. The prefecture has also established a discrimination hot line and works actively to settle disputes, the young Arabs say.
"It's no longer explicit racism, but implicit racism," said Karim Sahmaoui, 20, a lean, sad-eyed man with white sneakers. He and others complain of job discrimination.
The factories typically employ the men for three-week stints of staggered shifts but rarely offer full-time contracts. They work for minimum wage without benefits. Full-time employment is reserved for ethnic Europeans, the men say.
Many people become so discouraged they rarely leave the square half-mile of buildings where most of the town's Arabs live. Depression and drug use are common.
"In the morning you ask yourself, `Why am I going to get up?' " said Mr. Bouanani. "You have to be strong in your head."
Mayor Magne conceded that it was hard for the town's young Arabs to find their place and that most eventually migrated to larger towns. Many who remain move out of the projects, which he said were slowly emptying. "It's my conviction that in 20 years this town will be completely integrated," the mayor said.
In Mr. Sahmaoui's sixth-floor apartment, one of the last inhabited in a building slated for demolition, his father chopped carrots and tomatoes for the couscous he was making for dinner. For all his frustration, Mr. Sahmaoui says that when he visits Morocco, he thanks his father for having moved to France.
"If I didn't have hope," he said when asked about he future, " I'd be in prison."
Don't like it, then move back to your parents' homeland (in Algeria). Amazing that neither the French nor the English envisioned what would happen when they automatically granted citizenship to the (Muslim) peoples of their former colonies.
This is true of other immigrants. There is a mexican population near where I live. They've all gravitated to a small,rural town. They socialize among themselves, live in groups and then are insulted that they don't belong to the rest of the population. They continue to speak their languange and hang out with their own kind. So they expect what?
Oh, OK. Well, there goes the need to prove, n'est pas?
Their choice....their solution or ours.
Stay Safe Ben !
If not legal.
I am sorry, but I live 30 kilometers from the French border. The country is not deeply conservative, nor is it deeply Christian. In fact, I think France is the most hostile western European nation to Christianity.
Immigration is an age old story, and the term "foreigner" can rile up the worst prejudices. However, not all immigrants are of the same stripe. Muslim immigrants have these problems:
- lack of assimilation
- deep hatred for their adopted land, including its culture
- a pathos mentality
- contempt for their nations laws, but an embrace of "Sharia" or Islamic lawlessness
- an incredible inferiority complex masked by swagger and bluster
This is the literacy level of these people.
The irony when the host hosting the stranger is treated as a stranger.
And he's jobless complaining no one's handing him a job. Why are the French bringing in jobless types and saying they're needed? Sounds a lot like what we're doing.
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