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France: Tension in 'city that kills'
Electronic Telegraph ^ | /09/25/2001 | By Harry de Quetteville in Trappes

Posted on 09/25/2001 5:02:00 PM PDT by Map Kernow

THE bright sunshine of an crisp autumn morning lends Trappes a cheerily provincial air. Queues of people form at the bakers and newsagents and inspect the market stalls, as if to confirm the municipal slogan, "La Ville qui Bouge", the bustling town.

But Trappes has an altogether different reputation. Three decades after the first tower blocks of its housing estate went up, France knows it by the tagline "Trappes - La Ville qui Tue", the killer city.

Les Merisiers estate has become a byword for the no-go areas which surround most of France's major cities. Crime and unemployment are both off the scale. The four local colleges are all classed as in need of urgent improvement.

More than 80 per cent of people who live here are from the immigrant families that flocked across the Mediterranean from North and West Africa a generation ago. Then they worked at the giant Renault factories nearby. Now those jobs have gone. But the town's 15,000 young Arabs, known as beurs in French slang, remain.

Many of France's five million-plus Muslims live on estates in suburbs - banlieues - such as Trappes, tantalised by the wealth of the country's prestige cities they surround. Now, with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the ever-present racial tensions between city and suburb dwellers are ready to erupt.

"I can't go out into town without people looking suspiciously at me," said Rashid, whose bar is a focal point at the heart of the Merisiers estate. "If you are with a woman and she is wearing the veil you can see they think you are an extremist." Some say there is good reason to look anxiously beyond the ring roads towards the estates.

No one has forgotten Khaled Kelkal, a young man from the working-class Lyons suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin, recruited by Algerian GIA terrorists for their 1995 bombing campaign on mainland France. Learning that a local boy had tried to blow up the high-speed rail link between Paris and Lyons was almost as great a shock to the nation as the GIA's toll of 10 deaths and several hundred injured in other attacks.

Trappes has always been particularly tense. It was here that students spoke only Arabic in class to show their solidarity with Iraq at the outbreak of the Gulf war. It was here that the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada was celebrated by setting fire to the local synagogue.

It is also at the mosque here that the only imam from Afghanistan in the Paris region chooses to preach. Now, France is asking itself whether more young men like Kelkal are waiting to emerge from suburbs like Trappes.

"I won't pretend that young men can't fall into the same traps as Kelkal," said a suburban sociologist, Adil Jazouli, this week. "On the streets you hear some pretty hardcore things. But that's the fruit of social deprivation."

In Rashid's bar the washing up is put on hold as several customers join the conversation. None could envisage a radicalisation of the young Muslims on estates such as Les Merisiers.

Muslim leaders in France agree. "We are no longer in the 1990s, when agents from outside succeeded in exploiting the dissatisfaction of young people in the suburbs, with the intention of training them in camps in Afghanistan or elsewhere," the rector of the Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, said last week.

"But," he added, "there is certainly a hangover effect from then." That stigma could tip the balance of popular opinion, which has hesitated to label suburban Muslim youths as victims of exclusion, or even just delinquents.

Some seem to have made up their minds already, like those who set upon 20 North Africans last Wednesday in the Corsican town of Calvi. Rashid and his patrons in the Merisier feel that this kind of beating can lead nowhere but to ethnic confrontation. "We will not be attacked," he said. "Maybe in London but not in France. The Muslim community here is too strong, too powerful for that."


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS:
Muslim communities in the West, and "cities that kill."
1 posted on 09/25/2001 5:02:00 PM PDT by Map Kernow
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To: Map Kernow
"We will not be attacked," he said. "Maybe in London but not in France. The Muslim community here is too strong, too powerful for that."

The French must be gratified by this affirmation of civic solidarity. The joys of diversity are global, it seems.

2 posted on 09/25/2001 5:21:48 PM PDT by Dan De Quille
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To: Dan De Quille
A real life "Camp of the Saints"
3 posted on 09/25/2001 5:36:16 PM PDT by StormEye
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To: Map Kernow
I saw a demographic projection for France a while back and it was pretty staggering. France will be nearly as Muslim as any country in the Mideast in short order. Your not even allowed questioning the implications of this in France without not only being stigmatized but criminally prosecuted.

Bridgett Bardot was criminally sanctioned just a few months back for simply stating the truth. "My country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims", she said and was fined for "inciting racial hatred".

4 posted on 09/25/2001 5:38:18 PM PDT by Catphish
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To: Catphish
The minority population in Britain is exploding too, especially Muslims. "Exploding" is also the way to describe what happened earlier this year in several northern English cities, where Muslim gangs rioted, attacked whites and looted and destroyed property, and established "no go" zones in those cities. Just the other day, a white teenager was set on and stabbed to death on his way home by a Muslim gang near London.

I also understand that Amsterdam is now roughly 1/3 minority.

Maybe the Muslims won't have to defeat the West. Maybe all they have to do is sit back and watch while the West commits suicide.

5 posted on 09/25/2001 5:49:29 PM PDT by Map Kernow
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To: Map Kernow
Maybe all they have to do is sit back and watch while the West commits suicide.

It's the commitment to egalitarianism combined with a pervasive skepticism that paralyzes the West. If there is no 'objective' 'truth', and everybody's subjective, relative 'truth' is as good as anybody else's subjective, relative 'truth', how do you defend one 'culture' against another?

Multiculturalism follows logically from egalitarian and skeptical assumptions.

6 posted on 09/26/2001 3:40:58 AM PDT by Dan De Quille
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