Chirac Urges calm as riots spread

PARIS, France -- French President Jacques Chirac has called for calm and warned of a "dangerous situation" following a sixth night of violence in poor Paris suburbs.

"The law must be applied firmly and in a spirit of dialogue and respect," Chirac told a Cabinet meeting Wednesday. "The absence of dialogue and an escalation of a lack of respect will lead to a dangerous situation."

"Zones without law cannot exist in the republic," Chirac said. His remarks were passed on to reporters by government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope.

The spokesman said Chirac acknowledged the "profound frustrations" of troubled neighborhoods but said violence was not the answer and that efforts must be stepped up to combat it, The Associated Press reported.

The unrest, triggered last week by the deaths of two teenagers, spread Tuesday night to at least nine towns in the suburbs north and northeast of Paris as police clashed with angry youths and dozens of vehicles were set on fire

Your analysis is quite astute, but I think you miss some of the key differences between the current situation in France and the American Civil Rights struggle in the 1960's.

First, the problems in France are happening against the backdrop of a global war on Islamic fascism. Call it what you will, a "war on terror" or on "al Qaeda." But the central fact is that we are fighting a global ideology that has the potential take over entire nations (some of them armed with nukes) and great swaths of the globe. The stakes are higher now, and the problem can only be seen in a global, geopolitical context. This was not the case in America in the 1960's. The youths in your cities can connect via the Internet or other media with angry youths throughout the Islamic world.

Second, the American Civil Rights movement was at its core a Christian movement that appealed to the very best in our history. Many whites--even those who were opposed to some of the legislation at the time--acknowledged that we had wronged black Americans. They had been a part of our nation for nearly 200 years--since our very founding. The African American culture was different, to be sure, but it was not entirely alien. White Americans and black Americans knew each other like family. And we were united at the core by our Christian faith. It is no accident that MLK, Jr. and so many of the other great Civil Rights leaders were preachers. In France today, there are no such "blood ties." What means of reconciliation do you have, beyond government jobs and increased welfare benefits? If you think that this was the key to success in our Civil Rights movement, you are missing the bigger picture.

Finally, you leave out some of the more sinister consequences of our response to the civil unrest of the 1960s. I am speaking about the decline of our schools and the ongoing disenfranchisement of black males, among other things. Today, a percentage of black men are either in prison or on parole. Will this also be a part of the French prescription?

Again, I'm not trying to pick on you. I enjoyed your analysis. But the comparison between modern day France and 1960s America strikes me as facile.

There is no "global war on Islamic fascism".
Many on the right wish there was, but there isn't.
There is a US-led war in Afghanistan and in Iraq right now. The biggest supporters of terrorism: Iran and Syria, are untouched, and won't be invaded. So, there is a very limited war going on. Americans are consumed with it because of 9/11 and two thousand dead US soldiers, but the rest of the world, and certainly Europe, don't believe that there is a global war going on.

The same was true in the 1960s. The Americans believed there was a global war on Communism. They were, after all, deeply engaged in a losing fight in Vietnam. Europeans acknowledged a potential threat from Russia, but did not consider the world to be at war but at peace.

Within the US black communities in the 1960s, the Southern Black movement was Christian, but the Northern black violence movements were often Islamist. Martin Luther King, Jr., won out (until he was assassinated, of course), but Malcolm X preached a very different message. Black Islam has spread across America since that time and has many, many members.

Also, America's problem with blacks was never viewed by Europeans as a purely internal American family affair. Segregation and racial tension were always viewed, and still are, as fundamental features of the American system. The American Constitution originally sanctioned slavery, and after the emancipation of slaves, American law still very strongly held blacks apart and down. America in this respect properly resembles South Africa, by European estimations, with identical motives in the national character. The primary difference between the two being that the whites vastly outnumbered the blacks in America and were therefore the ones to impose the solution. In South Africa the reverse was the case.

The black movements in the US were part of the general decolonization struggles of the native races of people that took place across the world in the 1960s. Britain and France surrendered political control over the blacks of Africa in their colonies. America's colonized peoples were internal, but the same drive for freedom and political power drove them.

The choice for America was whether it would be a relatively peaceful transition, or a permanent civil war. America opted for a cosmetically peaceful solution. However, the murder rates in America, of which black violence was a very large component, in the 1970s exceeded 40,000 per year, which is to say that America suffered a Vietnam every year in what amounted to a low-grade civil war without organized armies.

The combination of cessions of political power to the blacks in the major cities, enforcing their right to vote, allowing them to hold jobs with white people in half the country, and generating public employment to keep them busy turned a nascent black insurgency - which openly erupted in places like Detroit and Los Angeles in the 1960s - into a disorganized, low level criminality problem.

Some have complained about all of these things, but a good question is: what was the alternative? Were segregation to have been maintained, America would have suffered a Civil War, and the murder rates would not have been 40,000 a year, but in the hundreds of thousands a year. There was no conceivable end to such a war either, short of genocide or complete subjugation. America was engaged in a worldwide competition with the Soviets. Had the US degenerated into civil war at home, the USSR would have triumphed as the international leader. The Americans, I think wisely, chose to buy off the blacks rather than fight a war at home and thereby lose the rest of the world.

What was the alternative to affirmative action? The status quo was riots and very heavy level of violence, which only promised to intensify. America would yield and give substantial benefits to the blacks, or America would slide into further internal disorder and violence. American blacks were neither going to go away, nor be bludgeoned into submission (by any tactics that the rest of America was willing to countenance, at any rate. Charles de Gaulle made a similar call in Algeria when he decided that withdrawal was the only civilized option), nor were they going to give up and stop demanding what they considered their due.
They got it.
There have been many side effects and problems that have arisen from this, but America was not working either with a clean slate or from a position of strength. America had to bargain with the blacks from a position of weakness and division, and the overall results were probably the best that could be hoped for at the time.

In France, the situation is not nearly so dire as that which America faced in the 1960s.

For one thing, Blacks made up some 13% of the US population, and were majorities in many, many cities. American history for centuries had been one of unrelenting oppression of the black race. A century prior, Americans killed Americans, almost a million of them, over the issue of enslavement of the black race. In the USA in the 1960s, significant majorities of people in regions of the country wished to continue the oppression of the black race, and the political struggle was not just between blacks and whites, but also between white liberals and white bigots. This paralleled South Africa rather well, where Dutch South Africans were determined to maintain the blacks in subjugation, while English South Africans desired to see black equal rights.

By contrast, in France there is no history of slavery of Arabs, there was never a civil war over Arabs, and there is no legislation that formally reduces Arabs to second class humans, such as American segregation laws and restrictive covenanting did in America as a formal legal matter. French-born Arabs are French. This is the ideal. The French do not have the terrible baggage of historical national evil towards the Arabs which the Americans have had to contend with when dealing with the blacks.

Now, certainly there are white French bigots. However, this is generally not racial. African immigrants come in two varieties: the blacks and the arabs. French white bigots don't generally hate the blacks, and don't generally object to their presence. Blacks assimilate well into France. The problem with the beurs is that they have not assimilated. Many French people dislike and distrust this: it is an affront to the system and the beliefs of the nation.

But how do you force people to assimilate?

It's a different issue than America faced, and a less deadly one. Race riots and high-tension violence in the 1960s and 1970s cost tens of thousands of lives. In 7 days' riots in Paris, there are only two dead, and it was their accidental deaths that were the proximate cause of the riots in the first place. There is not the willingness to kill on the part of either French whites or French beurs that there was in America among white bigots and black radicals.

What you have, are excluded youth. They are educated well enough: they speak, read and write in French and can compute, but they have very little by way of job prospects.
Teenage boys hanging about in the streets, whether Irish, American, French or Arab is a prescription for trouble. They need employment more than any other single thing.

Also, the separation in France is not so total. In America, in the 1960s, you present it as a family affair. But it was not nearly so familial. Blacks and whites barely had sex with each other, let alone bred with each other. Beurs and blancs in France find each other physically attractive, and a substantial portion of the population has had their beur-blanc "fling". The "enemy" have slept with each other in France, a lot, and will continue to do so. There is also much intermarriage. Many, many French white people, at least in Paris, Lyon and Marseille have a beur in the family somewhere. This is not true of most American whites and blacks.

Perhaps a better comparison is the relationship between American whites and Hispanics. There is not the history of hatred and brutal laws, and each race views the other as being "marriageable" (voir President Bush's brother, the governor of Florida).

In France, beur et blanc are not permanent racial enemies the way American whites and blacks were historically. America had farther to come.

What we see in Clichy sous Bois is immense frustration boiling over into anger. We do not see the desire to kill, on either side. The police are not gunning down the beurs, and the beurs are not bursting into houses and slaughtering les blancs. Those things happened in American race riots, notably Detroit. Not even after seven days "riots" in Clichy.

Things are not as bad as they seem.

Yes, it is true that there is an Internet. But French beurs go on the Internet and play video games (usually at corner internet cafes - there are relatively few home computers among the beurs - and to look at pornography and chat. Beur boys do not curl up their lips in disdain at the "Christian whores" in the way wahabbists and Middle Eastern Arabs do. They want to nail them. This is a different thing. You don't have very much in the way of puritanical morals among French beur youth, and since repressed sexuality and rampant closet homosexuality are a powerful driver behind Islamist violence all across the Muslim world, there is an important dampener on this in France. French beurs may come from Muslim homes, but they live in a society of openly and frankly practiced heterosexuality. Having a sexual outlet releases a great deal of the dammed up tensions that explode into suicidal violence of Arabs in Arab countries.

Now, of course, there are radical islamists, mostly immigrants, who come from North Africa and do their best to try and recruit beurs into the ranks of radicals. This is where the intelligence services come in. Those individuals and those messages are the ones that are particularly repressed. In truth, there is not a great danger that some ayatollah will be able to set himself up in Clichy sous Bois: beur boys are not going to give up sex with girls for the astringent Islamist purity codes.
Some may, of course, be violent hypocrites. But again I observe that there has not been any killing in 7 days of rioting in the banlieu.

In the final analysis, things are not nearly so bad in France as they seem. They could become very bad, but they do not have to. The beurs are frustrated and angry and lashing out, but it is restrained. What do THEY say they want? Jobs. Jobs and respect. (Of course, respect comes from jobs, so if you get them jobs, the "respect" problem will take care of itself.) Creating jobs is not a simple thing, but it can be done.

So, you are right, my comparison of the situation in France with the situation in America in the 1960s was indeed facile. America's problems were much deeper, and longer term, and the contesting parties were far more violent than those which face France today.

It does not pay to say which is "worse," the situation in America in the 1960's or the situation in France now. Only time will tell. If that this the thrust of your argument, then we will probably have little more to say to one another, since neither of us could be proven right or wrong until some 40 years hence.

I gather that you are not an American from some of your comments. Again, please do not take this the wrong way, but you appear to have a very clinical and narrow view of our recent history, including the Civil Rights movement.

For instance, your insistence that much of the Civil Rights movement was "Islamist." The Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammed and Malcolm X did receive a disproportionate amount of coverage in the national and international media. Malcolm was a truly charismatic figure--one of the great media icons of the 1960's. And the NoI was threatening to middle class white Americans in ways that MLK, Jr. and the SCLC were not. But to suggest that the NoI had anything approaching the significance in the broader Civil Rights struggle as the Southern Baptists and other black churches is simply ridiculous. Membership in the NoI began declining after Malcom left (shortly before being killed), and has been declining almost ever since. I attend dozens of Civil Rights functions every year, and I can tell you unequivocally that it was, is, and will remain a deeply Christian movement.

And it was a movement that was directly and explicitly tied to the promises made in our earliest founding documents, the Delcaration of Independence and the Constitution. Unlike France and other European nations, we are not and have never been a nation of blood, but a nation of ideas. Your own de Toqueville wrote most eloquently about this. The sins of our forefathers against American blacks were contrary to the very spirit and essence of our founding, and many in this country knew that from a very early date. As you said, 1 million American lives were lost in large part due to this, a redemption by blood that few nations in the history of the world have been willing to suffer.

And you are sorely mistaken if you think that black and white Americans "barely had sex with each other, let alone bred with each other." We have been having sex with each other since the very founding of the country, albeit on unequal and often downright exploitative terms! And today, a mere 40 years or so since the height of the Civil Rights movement, America has a higher rate of miscegenation than any other country in the world. This is a good thing.

As I said, any comparison between the two situations is going to be strained, at best. And only time will tell what will happen to both France and America. I believe that we are largely on the "right track" in terms of race relations and reconciliation.

I am afraid that France has a lot of pain in store for her. Your immigration problems continue to mount, and the rising resentment around the Muslim world will only make matters worse. Your political culture seems ill-equiped to handle this problem. And your post-revolutionary ideals of Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite appear to be insufficiently inspiring to these masses of newcomers. What common groud will you be able to find with them? What does it mean to be French? These are the important questions.

Ir you are not able to answer them, then the newcomers will answer them for you. Their answers you will not like, but they may be imposed upon you by sheer demographic force.

I am both French and American.

Wasn't the "Million Man March", which really only had maybe half a million marchers, organized by the Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan?

I will grant that the comparison between the two situations is very imperfect.

But with France, the country simply is not being "overrun by immigrants". The total immigrant numbers are high, but that includes a tremendous number of Eastern Europeans, who integrate well.

What is going on right now in Clichy and Aulnay is not an immigrant problem, but a French problem. Practically everybody on both sides of the barricades is French. The young men throwing stones and burning things are French, and the police firing tear gas are French. Nor are the Beurs shouting about the coming of Sharia. What they are screaming about is exclusion, the lack of jobs, discrimination and hopelessness.

In other words, at least at the present stage, what is happening on the outskirts of Paris is not a new front of the War on Terror, and is not a Muslim issue, but is sectoral unrest in the hardest-hit ethnic community in France over the perennial jobless problem. That many, but by no means all, of these young men happen to be Muslims, or at any rate be Arabs, makes for an appearance of something larger that is, in fact, a peculiarly French social problem.

There is a comparison to be made with what you said about the American situation. When the Black Muslims got started in Michigan, they did indeed gain a lot of momentum because of all of the anger and rage at racial oppression. Islamists in France are banking on that. But the riots that happened in Detroit were not Black Muslim inspired. They were furious blacks. Had nothing at all been done, the Black Muslims (or the Black Panthers) may well have been able to become an American black version of the IRA, wracking America in a perpetual guerilla. But that didn't happen because the Americans came to their senses, and decided that it was better for national security and the future to stuff it down the throat of a bunch of white bigots, who probably wouldn't riot, than to try to hold the line against blacks, who already had boiled over and could not be controlled without concessions.

That is what is going on in Clichy and Bondy and Aulnay. This is not an Islamist insurrection, not yet anyway. It is young, excluded French men demanding that the country change, open up, give them a place and a chance. They are complaining about prejudice and the lack of jobs - NOT that the morals of French society are a stinking cesspool of vice, etc. There are Islamist operatives among them, just as there were the Islamists of the American Black Muslim movement, who desperately want to turn the issue into a Muslim revolt. But they do not currently control the mob, just as they did not control the angry mobs in America.

Whether they will get control of the mob in France or not is dependent on what the government does to react. Going in there and gunning down everybody on the street would be the best way to have an Islamist civil war in France. The rioters are not killing police or civilians. If the state is the one to precipitate massacres, the unrest will radicalize.

Islam is in France to stay. It is not close to being the dominant religion, and isn't going to supplant la France laic anytime in the near or distant future. So any notion of mass expulsions of French citizens is, too, a bad fantasy.

What needs to happen is that order needs to be restored, by sending in more police, and then the government needs to get these Arab young men into jobs. Now, of course, if Christians want to go and conduct missionary efforts among the Arabs in the banlieu - this is their right, and it would probably be more productive than going to Latin America, which is already Christian.

Certainly any sort of Christianization effort will not be coming from FRANCE. France will, instead, focus on the social aspects, and will probably simply create a cadre of government jobs to keep young people employed in these areas.

I'm sorry to say I find your post a mistatement of the racial situation in the US. It follows the party line of many European countries, and our own Cindy Sheehan types including in our media, in seeking to smear the US and paint us as having a huge racial divide and oppressive poverty. The most recent example of this desire to tar us is the way the hurricane and its aftermath was depicted in the European press.

The estimated death toll was grossly exagerated (it stands at 1067 so far), and that from a Europe who saw close to 50,000 die in a heat wave. The looting while distressing was very limited and fast finished. The failures to evacuate etc turned out to be attributable in large part to the negligence and indifference of a Black mayor.

The US has a large Black middle class even though this group rarely makes the paper. Our standard of living is much higher than Europe's and thus our poverty is less than Europeans imagine. Black home ownership has reached record highs under President Bush whose indifference to Blacks is regularly touted by groups such as the NAACP interested in perpetuating the racial divide.

I strongly agree with the post of cicero's_son and this comment -- "Unlike France and other European nations, we are not and have never been a nation of blood, but a nation of ideas."

You draw parallels between riots and crime. The same parallels exist in France. Here however the crime is addressed by some excellent local politicians such as Giuliani when he was mayor of NYC and lowered the crime rate dramatically. In fact crime around the country has been lowered 32% since 1995 per recent statistics.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/10/17/crime.rate/

In contrast in France crime by Muslims has been allowed to continue and even when addressed receives only minor sentences by leftist judges. Whole Muslim neighborhoods are considered 'no go' zones by French police. Such a situation does not exist in US. Also in France Muslim hooligans in school are allowed to take over and intimidate students and teachers. That was the reason for the ban on the Hijab in schools instead of cracking down directly on the violence. (as an aside Mr Sarkozy opposed this ban as did the US)

By example the area you mention, Clichy sous Bois, was the scene of many anti-Semitic crimes, arson of a synagogue in 2002 being just one. Crimes in these Muslim dominated areas has been allowed to continue without correction. There was never a crackdown but tolerance. Voila, riots now. You yourself allude to this tolerance when you say that there has been no killing since they understand that line can not be crossed. Also Clichy is the home of a large number of NEW immigrants.

The other fallacy in your analysis is that the Beur boys who have been born and raised in France are not much of an Islamist risk ("beur boys are not going to give up sex with girls for the astringent Islamist purity codes"). I think the young men in London on 7/11 gave proof of the danger of that thinking.

While I agree with the excellence and toughness of the French security forces, in marked contrast to those in the UK, their very existence and toughness belies the idea that the risk is minimal.

We disagree on some things.

But on others you have manufactured a disagreement.
I did not refer to black relations in the United States in the present tense. I referred to the explosions in the 1960s and 1970s, when segregation was very real, and so were very violent riots, and the murder rates in America were producing casualties at higher rates than open warfare.

That is not the America of today.
Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion has been particularly effective at reducing the ranks of the criminal underclass. Crime rates all across America, and not merely in Mr. Giuliani's New York, began to plummet 16 years after Roe v. Wade. This was not the result of sweeping changes that brought in good politicians everywhere, for many politicians remained bad. It was, rather, the direct and natural sociological impact of very heavy abortion rates in the underclass, eliminating a substantial portion of the criminal unborn.

Now, I personally consider abortion to be willful homicide, and therefore do not support the practice despite the prophylactic eugenic effect it has had on crime.

All of that said, I did not mention it before, and I never brought up the hurricane or the current state of black-white relations in America, other to say that they are reasonably calm, that there are substantial zones under primarily black rule, which allows for political patronage among blacks that thereby keeps the natural leaders occupied and engaged in the system. I also stated the truth: that there remains a substantial gap between the status of blacks and whites in America. However, it is not explosive.

I believe that France's situation is akin to America's in the 1960s, and that we are not seeing the birth of Eurabia from that sliver of the population. We are seeing young French Arabs acting out their anger that they are not fairly integrated into the rest of French society, and suffer therefore. I cannot disagree with them that this is true.

As to standards of living being much higher than in France.
I disagree. I live and work in both places, and have family in both places. France and America are not much discernible in terms of wealth. One can see certain cultural features that are better in one place or the other, and certain economic features that are preferable in each nation. Which place has a higher "standard of living" is a very subjective factor anyway, decided by what one choses to use as a benchmark, and how one weights it.

Where would I personally prefer to live?
I would like to live in a chateau in the Touraine and enjoy the food, wine and atmosphere, but to earn an American CEO's salary to be able to pay for it all.

America is not hands down better than France, certainly.
Or the reverse.
Both places have wonderful parts, and both places have bad parts.

"Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, abortion has been particularly effective at reducing the ranks of the criminal underclass. "

huh??

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"As to standards of living being much higher than in France.
I disagree. I live and work in both places, and have family in both places. France and America are not much discernible in terms of wealth. One can see certain cultural features that are better in one place or the other, and certain economic features that are preferable in each nation. Which place has a higher "standard of living" is a very subjective factor anyway, decided by what one choses to use as a benchmark, and how one weights it."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Just not so. I could post numerous studies and stats that unequivocally state the reverse.

Anecdotally I can show you the reverse as well. The idea that 10-15,000 died in France from lack of a/c is mindboggling to a society that sprays to prevent West Nile after 2 deaths, that is outraged that 1,000 died from the one of the worst hurricanes of the century, that has the best medical care in the world even for the poor.

Here is one anecdote:

"The differences between American and European material wealth are now marked and growing — Americans increasingly enjoy larger homes, more cars, more appliances, cheaper food and energy, more advanced health care, and more disposable income. A recent European visitor to my farm, a member of the professional and affluent class, was stunned when I showed him the new suburban houses and multiple cars of first generation immigrants from Mexico living nearby — in the poorest section of one of the poorest inland counties of rural California. “They seem wealthier than I am!” he exclaimed. In a global sense they really are, even without the subsidized train tickets, day care payments, and a government-guaranteed six-week vacation."

http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson092705.html

We have a larger middle class, higher home ownership, car ownership.

All but 4 of our poorest states are richer than France, Italy, Germany and UK.

http://www.timbro.com/euvsusa/

Check out this comparison http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_gdp_cap

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