A Horrifying Hypothesis (France)

France's adherence to its republican ideals has left it blind it to its most pressing problems, Jon Henley argues

Followed closely by a battery of mainly foreign TV cameras, a chartered El Al jet took off from Paris this week carrying some 200 French Jews emigrating to Israel. The event attracted zero attention in France because it was not news: each year for the past couple of years, some 2,000 French Jews have made the same journey (the number is rising, but remains pretty insignificant compared to the size of the community, estimated at 600,000).

It attracted substantially more attention abroad, mainly because of remarks by the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who said earlier this month that French Jews should flee their country for his as a matter of urgency, to escape "the wildest anti-semitism".

France, its politicians, its commentators, even its Jewish leaders, was outraged by Mr Sharon's comments (made, it should be said, to an audience of visiting American Jews who thoroughly approved, the American Jewish community being seemingly convinced that life in France is unbearable for anyone in a skull-cap).

There are probably many reasons why Mr Sharon chose to say what he said, few of which have anything much to do with anti-semitism in France and many more to do with Israel's failure to keep its stream of immigrants flowing.

But, when it responds to provocative comments by Israeli prime ministers and when it beats its collective breast so fiercely about anti-semitism (as President Chirac did this month in a magnificent speech on the racist attacks "soiling" the country, and as the whole nation did a few days later after what turned out to be an imaginary attack on a young woman by six Arab youths), France is missing the target.

That is not to say that France does not have a problem with anti-semitism; it does. There are three main kinds of anti-semitism here. There is the old, ingrained, Catholic kind, those unspoken and unchallenged assumptions that put Captain Dreyfus on Devil's Island and that still produce, in polite conversations at middle-class dining tables, the kind of remarks you would never hear in London or New York.

A new kind is also perceived by the Jewish community, that of the intellectual left, the Rive Gauche penseurs, whose anti-Israeli polemics are interpreted, by extension and by association, as in essence anti-semitic.

And thirdly, there is the nastiest, the most violent and the most visible kind: the anti-semitism of disaffected youths, mainly of north African origin. This is partly unthinking, knee-jerk violence, a half-baked spin-off of the intifada - the number of attacks on Jews in France follows almost exactly the same curve as the bloodshed in the Middle East. Mixed up in the motivation, too, is all the resentment, frustration and envy of an underprivileged group prompted by the perceived advantages of another.

The common consensus is that this last kind of anti-semitism is responsible for almost all of the recent anti-semitic physical and verbal assaults registered against Jews in France: 510 in the first six months of 2004, up from 593 in the whole of 2003.

But this consensus view cannot be backed up with statistical evidence, because in France there are no statistics to show exactly how many attacks on Jews are carried out by angry and disadvantaged Muslim youths. In fact, there are no statistics to show how many Jews there are, or how many Muslims. And that, in itself, is an indication of where the real problem lies.

For it seems to me that the real racial and religious problem in France, the real time-bomb quietly ticking away at the heart of 21st century French society, is not anti-semitism, but France's absolute failure, over the past 50-odd years, to properly integrate its Muslim community (estimated, and only estimated, at 5-6 million strong).

France has created a genuine racial underclass, disadvantaged and discriminated against daily in terms of housing, education and employment, living in those decaying, crime-ridden, immigrant-filled, out-of-town sink estates in which France has sadly come to specialise. And until France understands this, it will not able to address what lies behind its intensifying climate of anti-semitism.

The problem of failed Muslim integration in France is made 100 times worse by the nation's profound inability to recognise it. The very principles of the Republic - the watchwords of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity that have supposedly governed this country for more than 200 years - prevent it from doing so.

For the most sacred article in all France's grand republican and secular creed is the principle that everyone is equal and indistinguishable in the eyes of the state: no matter where they come from, all French citizens are identical in their Frenchness. In the much-vaunted "Republican model of integration", all immigrants go through the Gallic mill, shedding their ethnic and religious differences and emerging as shining new French citizens. In theory.

In practice, this explains why France cannot say, and does not know, how many citizens it has who are of north African origin, or who are Muslim, or who are Jewish. For the purposes of the Republic, it simply does not matter.

It explains too why France does not know how many children of its north African immigrants leave school without useful qualifications, or fail to get a job. (Only unofficial reports are available, for example, to show that unemployment among 20 to 29-year-olds of north African origin is currently up around 40%, against 10% for youths of French origin.)

It also explains why France cannot make any attempt to introduce programmes of positive discrimination; make extra resources - in education, for example - available for specific ethnic groups; encourage companies to hire north African staff; make sure there are Arab presenters on TV and Arab politicians in the national assembly; undertake what is really needed: a massive, society-wide effort to raise the status of an entire community.

To do so would be to reject part of the very bedrock of France, to admit that the Republic has, quite simply, failed 6 million of its citizens. For those 6 million, there may be a fair whack of fraternity, but it is true to say that there is precious little liberty and far, far less equality.

Few French people, of course, and even fewer French politicians, are prepared to acknowledge this horrifying hypothesis. (Typically, one of the very few who has is the hyper-realistic young presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy.) Unless and until they do, France's recent upsurge in anti-semitic violence looks like just the tip of a potentially disastrous iceberg.

It is, in secular France, a heretical notion indeed, that the grand founding ideals of the nation are now obstructing its progress, blinding it to its biggest problems, preventing it from addressing its most critical issues. But that is, I believe, the case. Anti-semitism is, to use a common French phrase, the tree that hides the forest.

Here's another view of the situation the French are still not facing, posted here June 23, 2004:

Douce France, by Hugh Fitzgerald

Imagine that you are a cosseted member of the French elite. One child is doing the khâgne, aiming for rue d’Ulm. Another is now a politechnicien. You are very comfortable, working for the state. You and your spouse are journalists, or writers, or one of that vast tribe of people conducting “recherches” and life is comfortable, good, the way it should be. Yes, you do notice more and more Muslims about you as you walk, no longer in the banlieues, but in the center of Paris, or Toulouse, or Lyon. And you remember how uneasy you felt, four years ago, when you happened to be walking on the Cannebière in Marseille. You decided, then and there, that you would not return.

And you have friends who live in the south. And they tell you that the beurs – some call them maghrébins -- make life hell for everyone. They attack French children on the way to school. They vandalize cars. They threaten, and do more than threaten, anyone who is still foolish enough to walk out wearing a kippah or a cross. Whole areas of cities in the south, as in the north, and east, and west, have become off-limits to non-Muslims. In the schools, the teachers have lost authority. They cannot even cover the subjects of World War II, the Resistance, and the murders of the Jews as the state prescribes; they fear, with reason, the violent reaction of the Muslim students.

And as the schools become more and more dangerous for non-Muslim students and teachers, with more time and resources devoted to discipline rather than to learning, French parents and would-be parents are now silently factoring into their childbearing plans the present value of the future cost of what, they see, will now have to be added: private school tuition. And that means, of course, that those French people will plan on smaller families. And they will also be factoring in the growing cost, paid by them, those French taxpayers, for the whole expanding edifice of security, the guards in the schools, the guards at the train stations and métro stations and airports and at government buildings everywhere, the costs of keeping the gravestones from being vandalized, the costs of protecting the synagogues and the churches, the costs for all those tapped phones and agents in mosques, and subsidies to lawyers and judges to hear charges and try cases against Muslims, and the costs of monitoring da'wa in the prisons (more than 50% Muslim).

But the Muslims are indifferent to expenses incurred by the French state. France is part of the world; the world belongs to Allah, and to his Believers. That doctrine has remained immutable for 1400 years. Imam Bouziane, the one they keep trying to deport, had 16 children by two wives, all living on the French state: a representative Muslim man. Over time, the difference between average family size of Muslims and non-Muslims steadily increases. And, over time, the education system continues to disintegrate. Right now, perhaps, you cannot see it. Your children go to the best schools, followed by the best lycées. You vacation in Normandy, or Brittany, or the Ile de Ré. And you do not take the metro often enough, or walk in the right districts, or work in the right factories or offices, to understand what tens of millions of your fellow Frenchmen now have to endure. You, for the moment, are still immune, still willfully unaware. You have spent the last few decades learning about the Muslim world from Eric Rouleau, and his epigones (after they silenced Peroncel-Hugoz, the one journalist who reported the truth) in Le Monde. You are deeply-versed in the constantly reported-upon, endlessly dilated-upon, perfidy of the mighty empire of Israel. You know what we have all had dinned into us: that the Arab Muslims are reasonable people, with clearly-justified grievances, grievances so reasonable and so limited in scope, that justice demands they be satisfied. Everyone agrees on the “solution.” It is called a “two-state solution” and of course it is a “solution” for otherwise, of course, it would not have been called a “solution.”

And everything looks the way it always has looked: the linden trees, the river, the bridges, the réverbères, the étalage in the neighborhood boulangerie. Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance. At the end of the school day, chic mothers still congregate in little towns, or small cities, outside the school – this or that Ecole Jules Ferry -- waiting to pick up their children. Here come the littlest ones, from Maternelle, running up now -- just look at how small they are. And here are the CE1 group, with those huge cartables on their tiny backs. Run, run, run, to Mommy. Oop-la. And then the years of study, study, study marked by ever-larger cahiers -- "cahier" and "cartable" are the words that identify French DNA better than Piaf or gauloises, isn't that true? And now we will read the books, and study the subjects, set down so completely and precisely by the Ministry of Education. And now we are up to the final year, preparing for the Bac, with copies of blue-backed BALISES, guides to Les Châtiments and La Peau de Chagrin. And just look at the results listed in the newspaper: Claire-Alix has a mention très bien. Fantastic. Everything is fine, everything will always stay the same, whole countries cannot change. It’s not possible.

But it is changing, coming apart, quietly, slowly --let’s not look too closely, we mustn't pay too much attention -- the streets, the schools, the hospitals, the ability to speak the truth about things, about life as it is lived, la vita vissuta as they like to say in a neighboring country. Dominique de Villepin always knew there was nothing to worry about; he was born, after all, in Salé, next to Rabat, even spent a few years of his infancy there; of course he knows his Arabs, his Muslims. And surely Eric Rouleau, who for decades in Le Monde was the resident expert on the Middle East (he was so knowledgeable that he never had to so much as mention the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunna), surely he knew everything, didn't he? And those French translations of Edward Said that denounced with such passion the Islamophobia, and those vicious cliches with which the blind and rotting West has always caricatured the Arab Muslim world. Oh, we have been so terrible to the Arabs, we colonialists, we French, we Westerners. And then there is the never-ending outrage of Israel, that running colonial sore. Of course, they have every right, those Muslims, to come here to France. We went to their countries once, now they come to ours. And they have every right to hate us, don’t they?

So now we have decided not to understand, and to cut all ties of sympathy to, Israel -- and how did we ever have any sympathy for it in the first place, the way some of our parents did back in 1948 or 1956 or 1967? How could they not have seen what the "Palestinian people" had to endure? Hanan, Yasser, Said, Saeb, Aziz, Walid, Rashid, Mohammed -- you have won our hearts and minds. Take us, do with us what you will.

No one will mention what is happening or what kinds of things we must begin to think about doing to save ourselves. No one of any decency. And whatever Le Pen and Megret say, we must say the opposite (except, of course, when they show their hostility to "the Jews"). Do not say those things, do not think them. Free thought is all very well in theory, but really -- consider the consequences. Don't dare to think outside that box brimming with idées reçues. Défense de penser au dehors du box.

No, everything will be all right as you stroll down the Avenue Paule-Anne. Those Muslims will never be a match for us. Why, just look at those legionnaires marching à pas lent down the Champs-Elysées, think of that string of desert victories. Inside our heads, it is 1930 and over here is the Exposition coloniale. You remember, tu t’en souviens, that painting by le Douanier Rousseau, don't you, with the burnoosed Arab standing next to the black Senegalese? I have it right, don’t I? France will always be France. Nothing will ever change.

At a certain point, and despite everything that causes you not to see what is staring you in the face, you realize that something has gone irreparably wrong with your country, and you, and your children, are in danger of losing that country, down to every village and house, qui m’est une province et beaucoup davantage. And you do not know what to do, or how to explain this feeling to others, or in whom to confide your secret fears, or what can be done. It is so confusing, and so upsetting. You cannot vote for Le Pen. You cannot endorse "cowboy" Bush or those ridiculous Americans. You have no place to go.

And then you learn what Jacques Chirac -- who now has a Muslim grandchild himself -- and Dominique de Villepin, do not wish you to learn. For if you did, you might be very angry. You discover that 1 out of every 3 babies born in France today is a Muslim baby. And that means, in 20 years, one of every three 20-year-olds in France will be a Muslim twenty-year-old. And that means, twenty years after that, at present rates of reproduction, France will have a majority Muslim population. Where shall we hide the statues from Marly-le-roi? And the Venus de Milo? And what about all those paintings of animated life -- all those portraits in the Louvre, and the Grand Palais, and the Musée Guimet down there in linden-lined Aix, and everywhere else in art-filled artful France, mère des arts, des armes, et des loix -- that are absolutely forbidden according to the immutable strictures of the Qur'an. Should they be sent for safekeeping to those Americans across the seas? By then most of the Jews in France will have left, gone across the oceans for their own safekeeping, to Israel or to English-speaking Canada (they were worried about the Muslim population of Quebec, you see, which had been allowed to grow under the Province of Quebec's policy of encouraging francophone immigrants, preferring North Africans to potential immigrants from Italy, Greece, Spain), and above all, to America. What luck those Americans have had. No more bequests to France by the likes of the Rothschilds, or Nissim Camondo. No more Donations from another Pierre Lévy. Enjoy the Kufic calligraphy; some find it endlessly fascinating.

For the moment, you allow yourself to believe that something will come up. Most likely, all those Muslims will simply convert. I mean, they do that, don't they, quite easily I'm told. Of course, why didn't I think of it, that is exactly what will happen. The situation is always saved in time. Just like during the war. Nothing to worry about. Nothing.

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