French Riots 2: some wildly different takes from NY Times, Amy Goodman, and Wall Street Journal

One HUGE thing to realize: the Arab Muslim French do not have a single representative among Cabinet Ministers or elected representatives. There are 36,000 French mayors: not one of them is an Arab Muslim French person. Does that tell you something or what?

1. France Faces a Colonial Legacy: What Makes Someone French? -- by Craig S. Smith

Semou Diouf, holding a pipe in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood amid the noisy games of checkers and cards in the dingy ground-floor common room of a crowded tenement building and pondered the question of why he feels French.

"I was born in Senegal when it was part of France ," he said before putting the pipe in his mouth. "I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth again, "is the French don't think I'm French."

That, in a nutshell, is what lies at the heart of the unrest that has swept France in the past two weeks: millions of French citizens, whether immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, feel rejected by traditional French society, which has resisted adjusting a vision of itself forged in fires of the French Revolution. The concept of French identity remains rooted deep in the country's centuries-old culture, and a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.

Though many countries aspire to ensure equality among their citizens and fall short, the case is complicated in France by a secular ideal that refuses to recognize ethnic and religious differences in the public domain. All citizens are French, end of story, the government insists, a lofty position that, nonetheless, has allowed discrimination to thrive.

France's Constitution guarantees equality to all, but that has long been interpreted to mean that ethnic or religious differences are not the purview of the state. The result is that no one looks at such differences to track growing inequalities and so discrimination is easy to hide.

"People have it in their head that surveying by race or religion is bad, it's dirty, it's something reserved for Americans and that we shouldn't do it here," said Yazid Sabeg, the only prominent Frenchman of Arab descent at the head of a publicly listed French company. "But without statistics to look at, how can we measure the problem?"

Mr. Sabeg was born in Algeria when it was French territory and moved to France with his family as an infant. His father worked as a laborer and later a mechanic to put him through a Jesuit boarding school, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne.

He scoffs at the notion of a French identity based on what he believes is a fiction of equal rights and France's reluctance to engage in debate about the gap between ideals and reality. "France doesn't know how to manage diversity," he said. "It doesn't want to accept the consequences of a multiethnic society."

Like most French schoolchildren, he was taught that his ancestors were Gauls and that "in 732, Charles Martel, the Mayor of the Palace, repelled the Arabs in Poitiers."

French leaders admit failings but insist they are working to bring equality to all citizens and have embarked on an oblique public debate about what it means to be French. But that debate is still bounded by fidelity to ideals of the French Republic. President Jacques Chirac told reporters at Élysée Palace on Thursday that the government "hasn't been fast enough" in addressing the problems of discrimination. "No matter what our origins, we are all children of the Republic," he said.

Further to the political right, the debate has taken on another cast: the far-right National Front party released a computer-generated video on its Web site this week that showed Paris in flames. "Immigration, explosion in the suburbs ... Le Pen foretold it," the banner over the video reads, referring to the party's patriarch, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The idea behind France's republican ideal was that by officially ignoring ethnic differences in favor of a transcendent French identity, the country would avoid the stratification of society that existed before the French Revolution or the fragmentation that it now sees in multicultural models like the United States . But the French model, never updated, has failed, critics say. "France always talks about avoiding ghettoization, but it has already happened," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that people are separated in the housing projects, in their schools and in their heads.

The country's colonial legacy has only deepened that alienation. Rachid Arhab, one of the only well-known minority broadcast journalists in France, says that he lives with the resentments touched off by the bloody war of independence that Algeria won against France in 1962. "Unconsciously, for many French, I'm a reminder of the war," he said, adding, "now they see images of second-generation Algerian children in the streets burning cars and buildings, and that brings out the resentment even more."

Mr. Arhab himself is a study in the country's ambivalence toward what it means to be French. He was born in Algeria when the country was French territory and so was born French. He moved to France as an infant, but lost his French citizenship when he was 8 in the wake of the Algerian war - like many French-Arabs from Algeria, his parents didn't understand that they had to apply to retain their citizenship in France. Mr. Arhab didn't become a French citizen again until 1992. Yet he said, "I feel profoundly French."

But even the language of identity has its barbs. Mr. Arhab said that when he hears people refer to him as French "of Algerian origin," it carries with it the subtext that he is not really French.

He said earlier generations like himself have had it easier than the frustrated youths in the housing projects today, because his generation had closer ties to their homelands. "When someone says to me, 'you're not French,' I can take refuge in my origins," he said, "but the young can't do that."

Most second-generation Muslim immigrants are generally no more observant than young French Catholics. But the legacy of discrimination creates the conditions for young people who feel neither French nor North African to seek an identity in Islam - often anti-Western, political Islam.

"I've known discrimination all of my life," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that the prejudices only grew stronger the more prominent he became. In 1991, he led a group of investors in taking over CS Communication and Systémes, a publicly listed company that he now runs. When he applied to the government to become a defense contractor, a ministry official told him, "You're called Sabeg, that's a problem for us," meaning that he was of Algerian descent.

Rumors soon began circulating that he was an Algerian spy. It took him three years to win his first contract from the Defense Ministry. He never found out who was behind the rumors. "It's like a snake, you see the tail as it disappears, but never the head," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that the rumors continue.

So far, the government's efforts to reach out to minority ethnic youth have been half-hearted, constrained by the republican ideals that have turned affirmative action into a taboo. But private efforts are beginning, skirting the rules.

Karim Zeribi, a former soccer player and political adviser, said a study he carried out earlier this year found that résumés sent out with traditionally French names got responses 50 times higher than those with North African or African names. In the wake of the study, Mr. Zeribi established an agency in April called Act for Citizenship, which canvasses minority neighborhoods for qualified job candidates and markets them to corporations.

"We want to create a network for these people where there is none," Mr. Zeribi said. Still, he said, his young candidates are regularly asked if they are practicing Muslims when they are interviewed for jobs.


2. From “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman:
As France Uses Colonial-Era Law To Impose Curfews, a Look at the Plight of Immigrant Youth in Europe

The French government has declared a state of emergency in response to the youth-led uprising that began nearly two weeks ago, and has spread to over 300 towns and cities across the country as well as Brussels and Berlin. We go to Paris to speak with French-born journalist Naima Bouteldja and French-American activist Julia Wright about how the current civil unrest is rooted in decades of social discrimination.

Under the emergency laws, the government can implement curfews, carry out house searches and ban public meetings. The French newspaper Le Monde criticized the government’s decision to invoke laws that were originally drawn up 50 years ago to quell the independence movement in the former French colony of Algeria. The paper’s editors wrote "exhuming a 1955 law sends to the youth of the suburbs a message of astonishing brutality: that after 50 years France intends to treat them exactly as it did their grandparents." One of the last blanket curfews in Paris was imposed solely on Algerians in 1961. This led to mass protests and a severe crackdown by the French police. On October 17. 1961 police killed as many 200 pro-independence Algerians in what is now known as the Paris Massacre. Police were accused of throwing Algerian demonstrators into the River Seine after they had been beaten unconscious.

Over the past two weeks the police have not resorted to such force but there have been mass arrests. Since the uprising began police have detained more than 1,500 people, many of them of Arab or African descent. In recent days over 300 towns and cities have been affected by the unrest including the Belgian city of Brussels and the German city of Berlin. On Tuesday night, youths threw firebombs at police and set cars ablaze in the French city of Toulouse just as Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was visiting the area. Over the past two weeks an estimated 6,000 cars have been set ablaze.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about the latest in France, we're joined by three guests. On the phone from Paris is Julia Wright. She's coordinator of the International Committee in Solidarity with Mumia Abu-Jamal and Political Prisoners in Paris. She's the daughter of the renowned writer Richard Wright, who authored the classic, Native Son , also about alienation and about racism. On the phone with us also is Naima Bouteldja. She is a French-born journalist of North African dissent, has written about the French uprising for The Guardian of London. We will go first to you, Nadja. Can you explain to us what you understand at this point? Nadja, are you with us?

NAIMA BOUTELDJA: Are you speaking about me, Naima?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Naima, sorry.

NAIMA BOUTELDJA: Yeah, I think the whole unrest is really a reflection of years and decades, even, of very heavy social discrimination and exclusion and a very heavy, as well, impunity as regard to racism and impunity as regard to a very scornful statement and even racist statement from the French intelligence -- the French establishment, sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the communities and where the immigrants or the immigrants' children are from that are now in this uprising?

NAIMA BOUTELDJA: Yes. I think it's mainly led by -- I don't know how much you know about the ethnic minorities in France, but in these suburbs, you have mainly – I mean, you have to first visualize them: It's a huge concentration of tower blocks. I mean, I live now in the U.K., and we haven't got anything like that, even if you have ethnic conclaves, as well, here. But it's nothing comparable to over there. So you have this huge concentration of tower blocks, very often in the margin of big cities such as Paris, Toulouse, Marseille, and with a very heavy concentration of French from North African background and from also the Sub-Sahara. And you have also, of course, the minority of French, from working class, white French. And the riots have been led mainly or have been involving French from the second and third or even fourth generations. So people who were born in France, who very often haven't got much link with the countries of their parents, and who are treated and ghettoized as second-class citizens.

AMY GOODMAN: Julia Wright, from your perspective in Paris, can you talk about what is happening right now?

JULIA WRIGHT: Well, I had a very eerie feeling of déjà vu. And you'll forgive me, Amy, for being haunted by the first page of Black Boy, my father wrote, when at four years old he felt left out, and they were poor, and he was hungry, and nobody was paying attention to his brother and him. And he wandered listlessly about the room. And he stood before the shimmering embers, fascinated by the quivering coals. And a new idea of a game grew and took root in his mind. Why not throw something into the fire and watch it burn? And then, why not burn the curtains? And then, when the adults realize the house is on fire, he hides under the house. And what really struck me when I reread these pages a few moments ago was, yes, the house was on fire, but I was determined not to leave my place of safety.

And I've been working, Amy, with the youth of the suburbs who are now in this state of unrest. And there was an incident on the 27th of October that sparked this accumulation of so-called riots. I don't like the word “riots.” Anger, anyway. I just have to tell you about this anecdote. Two kids were walking a little late, okay. Maybe they had some weed in their pocket. Maybe they didn't. But they were the wrong color, and they were the wrong age. And they were seen by two policemen in helmets, what we call gardes mobiles, with their Plexiglas shield and their whatever you call it, the electric whatever, like prodding cattle, you know?

And these kids, it was like in a video game. They just ran. That was their reflex. And they climbed the fence, and they didn't look at the notice on the fence. And there they were in the middle of a high-power voltage electric generator, and they were electrocuted to death. Nothing was left of them. And this was the spark. And it's so telling to us who still have the death penalty in the United States and, in fact, the electric chair, where these two kids had no chairs to burn on. And I still feel eerie, because as I work with youth, 20 years -- 20 days before that happened, I asked one of the youths who's very gifted to write a statement on how he felt. Could I read the first five lines of that statement?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Go ahead.

JULIA WRIGHT: "I am 20 years old, and I don't want to survive here. From death row to the prison of Abu Ghraib, from Baghdad to New Orleans, from Chicago's Southside to the French hoods, here, over there where you are, chaos. We're no political spinners. We're just voices, live from the street where we live, where we become wise, where we are duty-bound to take control out of respect for those who are prevented from setting foot in it. That very street I visualize without peace stones."

This is a 20-year-old. He wrote this on the first of October. The two kids burned to death on the 28th of October. And the suburbs have been burning since.

AMY GOODMAN: Julia Wright, American activist who lives in Paris, also daughter of Richard Wright, author of Black Boy, Native Son, and other books. Naima Bouteldja, a French-born journalist of North African descent, also with us, a researcher with the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. Naima, you make a comparison in the piece that you wrote, "Explosion in the Suburbs," of the curfew that has been imposed now and the one that was imposed in 1961.

NAIMA BOUTELDJA: Yes. I think – just would like to come back a bit on what my friend was saying earlier. I think there is indeed a very, very deep anger amongst my fellow citizens in France who live in the suburbs. And there is one thing which all the time happen, on the night of the death of these two kids, Nicolas Sarkozy said – tell to everyone, to their family, that they were involved in a burglary, which was -- after that, we know -- just a lie. And that's also three days after the death of these people.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Interior Minister.

NAIMA BOUTELDJA: Sorry? Yes, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is the French Minister of Interior. And three days after this horrible tragedy, there was a police who exploded a tear gas inside a mosque. And again, they first denied that it happened, and then lied bluntly about -- didn't accept to apologize to the Muslim community, which is just a common sense. So, all the time, this kind of things happen, this kind of incident happen, this kind of death in the hands of the police, you have like kind of – the answer of the government is scornful and completely provocative.

So, as we got to the imposition of the curfew, which is now in the power of the local authorities -- they can impose it in certain areas in the town -- yeah, I mean, it has a very, very colonial legacy, because the last time it happened in France, it was in 1961. And it just end up to another tragedy. You had the FLN, which was the main resistance, political force during the War of Independence in Algeria, who called for a peaceful demonstration. And this peaceful demonstration was bluntly and very violently repressed by the police, and hundreds of people died in France in Paris, on that night on the 17th October, 1961. And until very, very recently, there was no acknowledgment.

There’s still no acknowledgment at all by the French establishment about this, what happened on that day. But there was even not knowledge, even in the anti-racist movement, no knowledge about that day, that event. And again, I mean, that's not going bring peace in the suburbs. That is clearly saying to these people that the way the indigenous in the republic were treated by the French government is very much still alive, and it's very much a way that the government is seeing these French citizens from second and third generation.

But the government hasn't only done that -- I mean, this law – I mean, imposing curfew; there's also power from the local authorities again to ban any public meetings if they think that it's a threat to law and order, to close any public spaces if they think that they're going to stop the police to make their work. And it's also – it’s clearly saying that there would be censorship on certain articles on the press if they think that that's also -- can inflame the situation. So again, this kind of exceptional laws have been imposed during the colonial period and were not imposed, for example, in 1968, when there was a big uprising and unrest, as well -- social unrest from the left. So that's just a pretty appalling situation, really.

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3. From the Wall Street Journal, who of course have their own idiosyncratic explanation. It amazes me that a newspaper whose business coverage is super-smart, sports an editorial page of such dire predictably pro-biz prejudice. Are business people really as politically dumbfucked as the Wall Street Journal itself is? Hardly. Take the Economist – they manage to be as astute about business as the WSJ is, but also show some political sophistication. Maybe the WSJ makes a difference between their actual journalists, who are the finest, and their editorial people, who are as off-puttingly crude as the ass end of a diarrhea-ridden porcupine. Anyway, here’s your typical shallow American response from a business perspective (and I’ve deliberately picked one that’s not totally crazy, but sort of makes a semi-valid point):

Why Immigrants Don't Riot Here: France's rigid economic system sustains privilege and inspires resentment -- by Joel Kotkin

The French political response to the continuing riots has focused most on the need for more multicultural "understanding" of, and public spending on, the disenchanted mass in the country's grim banlieues (suburbs). What has been largely ignored has been the role of France's economic system in contributing to the current crisis. State-directed capitalism may seem ideal for American admirers such as Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The European Dream," and others on the left. Yet it is precisely this highly structured and increasingly infracted economic system that has so limited opportunities for immigrants and their children. In a country where short workweeks and early retirement are sacred, there is little emphasis on creating new jobs and even less on grass-roots entrepreneurial activity.

Since the '70s, America has created 57 million new jobs, compared with just four million in Europe (with most of those jobs in government). In France and much of Western Europe, the economic system is weighted toward the already employed (the overwhelming majority native-born whites) and the growing mass of retirees. Those ensconced in state and corporate employment enjoy short weeks, early and well-funded retirement and first dibs on the public purse. So although the retirement of large numbers of workers should be opening up new job opportunities, unemployment among the young has been rising: In France, joblessness among workers in their 20s exceeds 20%, twice the overall national rate. In immigrant banlieues, where the population is much younger, average unemployment reaches 40%, and higher among the young.

To make matters worse, the elaborate French welfare state--government spending accounts for roughly half of GDP compared with 36% in the U.S.--also forces high tax burdens on younger workers lucky enough to have a job, largely to pay for an escalating number of pensioners and benefit recipients. In this system, the incentives are to take it easy, live well and then retire. The bloat of privileged aging blocks out opportunity for the young.

Luckily, better-educated young Frenchmen and other Continental Europeans can opt out of the system by emigrating to more open economies in Ireland, the U.K. and, particularly, the U.S. This is clearly true in technological fields, where Europe's best brains leave in droves. Some 400,000 European Union science graduates currently reside in the U.S. Barely one in seven, according to a recent poll, intends to return. Driven by the ambitious young, European immigration to the U.S. jumped by 16% during the '90s. Visa applications dropped after 9/11, but then increased last year by 10%. The total number of Europe-born immigrants increased by roughly 700,000 during the last three years, with a heavy inflow from the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and Romania--as well as France. These new immigrants have been particularly drawn to the metropolitan centers of California, Florida and New York.

The Big Apple offers a lesson for France. An analysis of recent census numbers indicates that immigrants to New York are the biggest contributors to the net growth of educated young people in the city. Without the disproportionate contributions of young European immigrants, New York would have suffered a net outflow of educated people under 35 in the late '90s. Overall, there are now 500,000 New York residents who were born in Europe (not to mention the numerous non-European immigrants who live, and prosper, in the city).

Contrast this with Paris, where the central city is largely off-limits to immigrants, in some ways due to the dirigiste planning that so many professional American urbanists find appealing. Since Napoleon III rebuilt Paris, uprooting many existing working-class communities, the intention of the French elites has been to preserve the central parts of the city--often with massive public investment--for the affluent. This has consigned the proletariat, first white and now increasingly Muslim, to the proximate suburbs--into what some French sociologists call "territorial stigma." In these communities, immigrants are effectively isolated from the overpriced, elegant central core and the ever-expanding outer suburban grand couronne. The outer suburbs, usually not on the maps of tourists and new urbanist sojourners, now are home to a growing percentage of French middle-class families, and are the locale for many high-tech companies and business service firms.

The contrast with America's immigrants, including those from developing countries, could not be more dramatic, both in geographic and economic terms. The U.S. still faces great problems with a portion of blacks and American Indians. But for the most part immigrants, white and nonwhite, have been making considerable progress. Particularly telling, immigrant business ownership has been surging far faster than among native-born Americans. Ironically, some of the highest rates for ethnic entrepreneurship in the U.S. belong to Muslim immigrants, along with Russians, Indians, Israelis and Koreans.

Perhaps nothing confirms immigrant upward mobility more than the fact that the majority have joined the white middle class in the suburbs--a geography properly associated here mostly with upward mobility. These newcomers and their businesses have carved out a powerful presence in suburban areas that now count among the nation's most diverse regions. Prime examples include what demographer Bill Frey calls "melting pot suburbs": the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles; Arlington County, Va.; Essex County, N.J.; and Fort Bend County in suburban Houston. The connection between this spreading geography and immigrant opportunity is not coincidental. Like other Americans, immigrants often dramatically improve their quality of life and economic prospects by moving out to less dense, faster growing areas. They can also take advantage of more business-friendly government. Perhaps the most extreme case is Houston, a low-cost, low-tax haven where immigrant entrepreneurship has exploded in recent decades. Much of this has taken place in the city itself. Looser regulations and a lack of zoning lower land and rental costs, providing opportunities to build businesses and acquire property.

It is almost inconceivable to see such flowerings of ethnic entrepreneurship in Continental Europe. Economic and regulatory policy plays a central role in stifling enterprise. Heavy-handed central planning tends to make property markets expensive and difficult to penetrate. Add to this an overall regulatory regime that makes it hard for small business to start or expand, and you have a recipe for economic stagnation and social turmoil. What would help France most now would be to stimulate economic growth and lessen onerous regulation. Most critically, this would also open up entrepreneurial and employment opportunity for those now suffering more of a nightmare of closed options than anything resembling a European dream.

(Mr. Kotkin, Irvine Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "The City: A Global History”).