France's Invisible Minority (5 million arabs, 0 in parliament)

I like to bash the French as much as any other typical Freeper, but from what I understand these Muslims are largely illiterate, uneducated, and totally hostile to French culture and unwilling to assimilate. Are any of them actually running for office? Are any of them active in political parties and organizations? Do any of them even bother to vote in elections?

The last time I checked France still purported to have a democratically elected government. Are they now supposed to toss that out the window and just appoint X number of Europeans, X number of Muslims, X number of women, etc. to all their offices?

The French social model might not be perfect but the Muslim one is far far worse.

When I tell people that such a huge minority has no political representatives they are dumbstruck.

You mean a Muslim in a Muslim dominated district cannot get elected? Or do you mean that the Muslims are so insistent on having their own enclaves that they do not want to participate in government?

Kristopher writes:
France needs to get rid of Chirac soon and elect a right wing party, not Jean Marie Le PEN he is too extreme but a more moderate right winger.

No "moderate" from whatever "wing" will do what is necessary to solve France's problems.

Only a Le Pen will do what needs to be done.

For an example of someone "doing what needs to be done" to cure his nation of "the Islamic problem", we might turn to Slobodan Milosevic (sp?) of Serbia.

Are those gasps and shrieks that I hear? When mention is made of "ethnic cleansing"?

Well, after reading one "anti-Islamic" post after another, in which folks state with various levels of vitriol what _they_ think should be done with the "mooselimbs" and "slammies", what right do the same folks have to express their indignation when mention is made of someone who really "attacked the Islamic problem" with all due force?

It is becoming more and more clear - not only to conservative Americans, but to many Europeans, as well [who probably consider themselves far from being "conservative"] - that the Islamics in their midst are a festering sore that not only won't go away, but gets worse with the passing of time.

The underlying problem is that Islamics are incapable of "assimilating" into Western societies with Christian/democratic underpinnings. This simply cannot occur with even modestly religious Islamics. I recall reading here on Free Republic a passage from the Quran that expressly forbids Muslims from congregating with nonbelievers and infidels.

So France (and other European countries) are confronted with the dilemma of a growing population within their borders and cities that refuses to assimilate, yet keeps growing. In a human body, wouldn't such an alien growth be called a "cancer"?

How does one "moderate" with cancer?

- John

An important fact of the European muslim minority that some of us seem not to understand is that these disaffected masses, such as the rioting beurs in the slums that ring Paris, are NOT in general very religious. Sure, a small percentage of them are radical islamists and these masses make good recruiting grounds for Al Qaeda and other radicals, but in general it's more the fact that they hate westerners, not so much that they are for muslim religious practices and beliefs.

Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a clinical psychiatrist who spent much of his career working in British prisons and analyzing the underclass, including the muslim underclass, had some very insightful observations in his recent article in The City Journal titled "The Suicide Bombers Among Us." Here are some of his comments from this long and very worthwhile read:

Young Muslim men in Britain—as in France and elsewhere in the West—have a problem of personal, cultural, and national identity. They are deeply secularized, with little religious faith, even if most will admit to a belief in God. Their interest in Islam is slight. They do not pray or keep Ramadan (except if it brings them some practical advantage, such as the postponement of a court appearance). Their tastes are for the most part those of non-Muslim lower-class young men. They dress indistinguishably from their white and black contemporaries, and affect the same hairstyles and mannerisms, including the vulpine lope of the slums. Gold chains, the heavier the better, and gold front teeth, without dental justification, are symbols of their success in the streets, which is to say of illicit enrichment.

Many young Muslims, unlike the sons of Hindus and Sikhs who immigrated into Britain at the same time as their parents, take drugs, including heroin. They drink, indulge in casual sex, and make nightclubs the focus of their lives. Work and careers are at best a painful necessity, a slow and inferior means of obtaining the money for their distractions.

But if in many respects their tastes and behavior are indistinguishable from those of underclass white males, there are nevertheless clear and important differences. Most obviously, whatever the similarity between them and their white counterparts in their taste for sex, drugs, and rock and roll, they nevertheless do not mix with young white men, even in the neighborhoods devoted to the satisfaction of their tastes. They are in parallel with the whites, rather than intersecting with them.

Another obvious difference is the absence of young Muslim women from the resorts of mass distraction. However similar young Muslim men might be in their tastes to young white men, they would be horrified, and indeed turn extremely violent, if their sisters comported themselves as young white women do. They satisfy their sexual needs with prostitutes and those whom they quite openly call “white sluts.” (Many a young white female patient of mine has described being taunted in this fashion as she walked through a street inhabited by Muslims.) And, of course, they do not have to suffer much sexual frustration in an environment where people decide on sexual liaisons within seconds of acquaintance.

However secular the tastes of the young Muslim men, they strongly wish to maintain the male dominance they have inherited from their parents. A sister who has the temerity to choose a boyfriend for herself, or who even expresses a desire for an independent social life, is likely to suffer a beating, followed by surveillance of Stasi-like thoroughness. The young men instinctively understand that their inherited system of male domination—which provides them, by means of forced marriage, with sexual gratification at home while simultaneously freeing them from domestic chores and allowing them to live completely Westernized lives outside the home, including further sexual adventures into which their wives cannot inquire—is strong but brittle, rather as communism was: it is an all or nothing phenomenon, and every breach must meet swift punishment.

Even if for no other reason, then (and there are in fact other reasons), young Muslim males have a strong motive for maintaining an identity apart. And since people rarely like to admit low motives for their behavior, such as the wish to maintain a self-gratifying dominance, these young Muslims need a more elevated justification for their conduct toward women. They find it, of course, in a residual Islam: not the Islam of onerous duties, rituals, and prohibitions, which interferes so insistently in day-to-day life, but in an Islam of residual feeling, which allows them a sense of moral superiority to everything around them, including women, without in any way cramping their style.

This Islam contains little that is theological, spiritual, or even religious, but it nevertheless exists in the mental economy as what anatomists call a “potential space.” A potential space occurs where two tissues or organs are separated by smooth membranes that are normally close together, but that can be separated by an accumulation of fluid such as pus if infection or inflammation occurs. And, of course, such inflammation readily occurs in the minds of young men who easily believe themselves to be ill-used, and who have been raised on the thin gruel of popular Western culture without an awareness that any other kind of Western culture exists.

The dissatisfactions of young Muslim men in Britain are manifold. Most will experience at some time slighting or downright insulting remarks about them or their group—the word “Paki” is a term of disdainful abuse—and these experiences tend to grow in severity and significance with constant rehearsal in the mind as it seeks an external explanation for its woes. Minor tribulations thus swell into major injustices, which in turn explain the evident failure of Muslims to rise in their adopted land. The French-Iranian researcher Farhad Khosrokhavar, who interviewed 15 French Muslim prisoners convicted of planning terrorist acts, relates in his book, Suicide Bombers: Allah’s New Martyrs, how some of his interviewees had been converted to the terrorist outlook by a single insulting remark—for example, when one of their sisters was called a “dirty Arab” when she explained how she couldn’t leave home on her own as other girls could. Such is the fragility of the modern ego—not of Muslims alone, but of countless people brought up in our modern culture of ineffable self-importance, in which an insult is understood not as an inevitable human annoyance, but as a wound that outweighs all the rest of one’s experience.

The evidence of Muslims’ own eyes and of their own lives, as well as that of statistics, is quite clear: Muslim immigrants and their descendants are more likely to be poor, to live in overcrowded conditions, to be unemployed, to have low levels of educational achievement, and above all to be imprisoned, than other South Asian immigrants and their descendants. The refusal to educate females to their full capacity is a terrible handicap in a society in which, perhaps regrettably, prosperity requires two household incomes. The idea that one is already in possession of the final revealed truth, leading to an inherently superior way of life, inhibits adaptation to a technically more advanced society. Even so, some British Muslims do succeed (the father of one of the London bombers owned two shops, two houses, and drove a new Mercedes)—a fact which their compatriots interpret exactly backward: not that Muslims can succeed, but that generally they can’t, because British society is inimical to Muslims.

In coming to this conclusion, young Muslims would only be adopting the logic that has driven Western social policy for so long: that any difference in economic and social outcome between groups is the result of social injustice and adverse discrimination. The premises of multiculturalism don’t even permit asking whether reasons internal to the groups themselves might account for differences in outcomes.

The BBC peddles this sociological view consistently. In 1997, for example, it stated that Muslims “continue to face discrimination,” as witness the fact that they were three times as likely to be unemployed long-term as West Indians; and this has been its line ever since. If more Muslims than any other group possess no educational qualifications whatsoever, even though the hurdles for winning such qualifications have constantly fallen, it can only be because of discrimination—though a quarter of all medical students in Britain are now of Indian subcontinental descent. It can have nothing whatever to do with the widespread—and illegal—practice of refusing to allow girls to continue at school, which the press scarcely ever mentions, and which the educational authorities rarely if ever investigate. If youth unemployment among Muslims is two and a half times the rate among whites, it can be only because of discrimination—though youth unemployment among Hindus is actually lower than among whites (and this even though many young Hindus complain of being mistaken for Muslims). And so on and so on.

A constant and almost unchallenged emphasis on “social justice,” the negation of which is, of course, “discrimination,” can breed only festering embitterment. Where the definition of justice is entitlement by virtue of group existence rather than reward for individual effort, a radical overhaul of society will appear necessary to achieve such justice. Islamism in Britain is thus not the product of Islam alone: it is the product of the meeting of Islam with a now deeply entrenched native mode of thinking about social problems.

Of course, hatred is the underlying emotion. A man in prison who told me that he wanted to be a suicide bomber was more hate-filled than any man I have ever met. The offspring of a broken marriage between a Muslim man and a female convert, he had followed the trajectory of many young men in his area: sex and drugs and rock and roll, untainted by anything resembling higher culture. Violent and aggressive by nature, intolerant of the slightest frustration to his will and frequently suicidal, he had experienced taunting during his childhood because of his mixed parentage. After a vicious rape for which he went to prison, he converted to a Salafist form of Islam and became convinced that any system of justice that could take the word of a mere woman over his own was irredeemably corrupt.

I noticed one day that his mood had greatly improved; he was communicative and almost jovial, which he had never been before. I asked him what had changed in his life for the better. He had made his decision, he said. Everything was resolved. He was not going to kill himself in an isolated way, as he had previously intended. Suicide was a mortal sin, according to the tenets of the Islamic faith. No, when he got out of prison he would not kill himself; he would make himself a martyr, and be rewarded eternally, by making himself into a bomb and taking as many enemies with him as he could.

Enemies, I asked; what enemies? How could he know that the people he killed at random would be enemies? They were enemies, he said, because they lived happily in our rotten and unjust society. Therefore, by definition, they were enemies—enemies in the objective sense, as Stalin might have put it—and hence were legitimate targets.

I asked him whether he thought that, in order to deter him from his course of action, it would be right for the state to threaten to kill his mother and his brothers and sisters—and to carry out this threat if he carried out his, in order to deter others like him.

The idea appalled him, not because it was yet another example of the wickedness of a Western democratic state, but because he could not conceive of such a state acting in this unprincipled way. In other words, he assumed a high degree of moral restraint on the part of the very organism that he wanted to attack and destroy.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_suicide_bombers.html

Here's what I think is going to happen in France. In the short run, there will be a crackdown on the rioters. In the long run, the Chirac government is finished. It will be replaced by a more conservative government. There will be a much more restrictive immigration policy instituted in France. Less money will be spent on low cost housing. Some of these low cost projects will be torn down. There will be a new housing policy of dispersing this type of housing - smaller units over a wider area. Some of the disaffected Muslims will leave.

I think that is a quite probable scenario you outline. I wonder if this is not a deliberate strategy by Sarkozy, i.e. by cracking down in the "no-go" zones, he knew there would be an ugly reaction, which would bring to the surface and to the attention of the average French voter the festering sores that these muslim ghettoes are. This pushes the voters to the right, although probably not all the way to Le Pen, given the very high percentage of marxist and socialist voters in France. It may even split the French socialists between those who want to limit immigration and clean out these no-go zones and those that adhere to the more traditional socialist policy.

A rough tally shows there are about 150 beur candidates among the 8,400 who are contesting the election, but the vast majority are for minor parties and practically none has a chance of being elected.

That says a lot.

Perhaps they haven't considered becoming FRENCH CITIZENS abd running for office. Or should those positions be handed out as well?

care to tell us how many Muslims RAN FOR OFFICE???

The article says 150 out of 8400 candidates, and of those 150 almost all are from marginal fringe parties that have practically no chance of receiving a significant number of votes.