Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
Via Phil at Finland for Thought: Johan Norberg discovers that the Sweden government measures unemployment differently than other countries. Sweden boasts of a 5.4% unemployment rate, but if they measured it the same way as the U.S., Australia, France, U.K. and others do, their true unemployment rate is 10.3% - Quite sneaky!! But not surprising.
What next? The announcement of the end another successful 5 year plan?
The Economist isn’t just factually correct here, but must have some kind of mind penetrating radar.Why Arab immigrants assimilate better in the United States
Mr Ahmed, the executive director of ACCESS, a social-services agency for Arab immigrants, reckons there are clear reasons why the sorts of immigrant-driven riots that have recently shocked and shamed France seem hard to imagine in Dearborn, or in other ethnic Arab communities across America. In contrast to the situation in France and in many other European countries, he points out, the children and grandchildren of Arab immigrants to America, both Muslim and Christian, climb the same ladder of education, income and advancement that other immigrant groups have scaled successfully, from Asians to the Irish.[ ... ]
Yet in the wake of those [ED.: the 9-11] attacks, Dearborn's Arab-American leaders were also able to fall back on countless ties - social, educational, commercial, political-with the wider community, to defuse tensions…
Arab-American workers and businessmen are woven into the wider economy: making car parts, running petrol stations, and trying, like the rest of the rustbelt, to branch out into new white-collar professions. In September 2001, both the chief executive of Ford, Jacques Nasser, and the president of the United Auto Workers, Stephen Yokich, were of Arab descent.[ ... ]
Immigrants from Lebanon or Iraq may head for Dearborn or the Arab section of Chicago because they have relatives there; or, when they arrive in a big city, they may gravitate towards an area with familiar foods and festivities. But that sort of clustering reflects immigrants' choices. Ahmed Rehab, a spokesman for the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, contrasts this with France, where North African immigrants gravitate to the grim high-rises of the banlieues because there is nowhere else for them to go.
Le Monde's Plantu is still smoking bananas. When he doesn’t get the results he wants, he concludes that law is wrong.
Judge (in French style court robe): “Oh, no – don't throw the phone book at him!?!” (A play on words about the size of a law book)
American soldier: “It’s not the phone book, it’s human rights!” (As if he's too stupid to understand that there is such a thing as law)
It's all about polygamy.
Super-seer Chiraq was the first to talk about the cancer of polygamy and its effect on Fwance's social health:
"Our problem is not foreigners, it's that there are too many of them. It's probably true that there are more foreigners in France now than before the war, but they are not the same kind and that makes a difference. It's sure that having Spanish, Polish, and Portugese working here poses fewer problems than having Muslims and Blacks working here."
"How can you expect a working class Frenchman, with his wife working as well, earning about 2,300 euros, and in the projects where they live they see next door a family with the husband, 3 or 4 wives, about 20 kids, earning 7,700 euros in welfare, without working of course ... if you add to that the noise and the odor, well the working class French next door just goes crazy. And it's not racist to say so."
-- Jacques Chiraq, 19 June 1991
Annual receipts: 57 billion F, annual budget: 118,5 billion F, annual state subsidy: 75 billion F. Financing retirements: 14 billion (with our taxes) Debt burden: 232 billion.Hilarious! Read the whole thing in the original Sanskrit.
The situation for a typical driver of TGV:
- Wages: starting at 14.000 F Net per month, 32.000 FF conducting Net TGV at the end of the career, Christmas bonus, educational benefit, TGV benefit, a coal discount (you read that right), holidays free (let us remain calm), paid vacation, overtime pay, a non-taxable relocation allowance, a 25 hours per week schedule
For a 40 year old TGV driver, the annual take-home pay and benefits comes to 490.000 FF. Retirement is at 50 years. Medical care: free at one of the 15.900 approved hospitals, doctor’s offices, and clinics covered at 100%. Other privileges: free train fare for their families
AND EMPLOYMENT FOR LIFE... AND THEY DARE GO ON STRIKE and take the USERS (the word customer doesn’t exist at the SNCF) HOSTAGE...
Faced with incomprehensible nature of social unrest, that man-about-town who writes SaleBete (dirty animal), a blog read fairly widely in France, takes to writing about his weekend travel adventures. Édouard (Ned Davies) is a New York City art dealer very much attached to France.
Like me, he seems to think dearly of her as well. (Each of us in our own way, of course.) However, for many on the left this permits both never criticizing what goes on there, and giving in to the temptation of appropriating a kind of French Cultural Exception for oneself. It gets to the point where in good conscience he can somehow call this simple question on the spanking-new BBC (Don’t)Have Your Say like forum “Francophobia”. «Mais qu’est-ce qui se passe en France ces derniers jours ? Les francophobes en sont ravis, bien sûr. Que faut-il leur répondre ?»
So rioting barely seems relevant to him, and only then when a response to criticism of it seems necessary, is it germane to address it.
You see, nothing is wrong, but coming to the wrong conclusions about it is.
His subject matter is often to telegraphing the material circulating the rumor-mill of the left in French to his readers, giving the impression that he’s suffering a kind of exile in the US. Otherwise there is the solipsistic display of his social life to keep things interesting to him. It has the well-timed appearance of emotional avoidance much like the fact that he writes to Francophones with the idea that there is a majority which accepts the same received wisdom that the American left has. In other words he is unlikely to come upon someone who disagrees with his tut-tuttery.
Although that what the social self-sorting mechanism often does, it’s unhealthy in large doses.
His critcisms seem to be reserved for the likes of George Boooosh, and are told within the prism of a sub-culture that agrees that those who disagree are barbarians (when they exist at all.) The familiar nod is passed around the dinner table, and the alternate culture goes on marching.
I have noticed that there is a highly anti-civic and separatist tendency among many on the left these days, which is to stop looking at people and events by what they do, and look merely at who they are. This habit forces even the very acknowledgement of events through an ideological filter, at the very least, not until it becomes an opinion.
An example appeared in The Washington Post: after 2 weeks of burying the magnitude of what has been happening in la France douce, they ran an editorial criticizing a lack of acceptance of diversity (“Accepting Diversity Is Hard (but Necessary”), as if not noticing many of the aspects of negative events, dwelling immediately on political abstraction instead, and seizing on a passing reaction to the thought crime of wanting to discuss it in the "wrong" terms.
Mark Steyn: «According to its Office du Tourisme, the big event in Evreux this past weekend was supposed to be the annual fête de la pomme, du cidre et du fromage at the Place de la Mairie. Instead, in this charmingly smouldering cathedral town in Normandy, a shopping mall, a post office, two schools, upwards of 50 vehicles and, oh yes, the police station were destroyed by - what's the word? - "youths".»
Kickass wit. Snak-a-delic Mark rides again.
The head of the CGT, Bermnard Thilbault stated quite imperially: “We’re confronted with a social crisis”. Well, no shit, Sherlock, what took you so long to figure THAT out. But that’s not what caught my eye. Lacking any sort of irony of challenge from Le Monde’s interviewer Thilbault said: Rémi Barroux (interviewing): «Jacques Chirac a annoncé qu'il allait rencontrer les partenaires sociaux à propos de la discrimination à l'embauche dont sont victimes les jeunes issus des quartiers sensibles. Êtes-vous d'accord avec les propositions du chef de l'Etat sur la crise des banlieues, qu'êtes-vous prêt à discuter avec lui ? »
And translated out fromm the original Klingon:
Thibault: « Je n'ai jamais refusé le dialogue avec le président de la République, mais les occasions sont rares. Nous sommes confrontés à une crise sociale et non à une crise des banlieues, de l'immigration ou de la jeunesse. Le chef de l'Etat n'a pas employé ce terme de crise sociale. Or, il s'agit bien de cela, et j'espère qu'il en sera question lors de la rencontre qu'il nous propose. Je demeure sceptique dans la mesure où j'ai été confronté la semaine dernière à un premier ministre qui considère que sa politique est la bonne et qui ne voit pas en quoi et sur quoi il faudrait l'infléchir, en écoutant les propositions des syndicats. Il s'agit d'un choix politique. Tout comme est un choix politique le fait que le ministre de l'intérieur reprenne à son compte des propositions de Philippe de Villiers ou d'autres responsables de l'extrême droite.»Rémi Barroux: Jacques Chirac announced that he would meet with labor and industry in connection with discrimination. Because young people from sensitive areas are victims of discrimination. Do you agree with the proposals of the Head of the State on the crisis of the suburbs which you are ready to discuss with him?
No follow up, no challenging on the idea of hijacking elected rule or crisis measures, no asking if he really means to call Sarkozy an extremist… Nothing. It’s laughable.
Thibault: I never refused to talk to the President of the Republic, but the occasions are rare. We are confronted with a social crisis and not with a crisis of the suburbs, immigration or youth. The head of the State did not use the term “social crisis”. However, it is indeed that. And I hope that it will come up in the meetings that it proposes to us. I remain skeptical insofar as I were confronted last week with a Prime Minister who considers that his policy is the best, and whoever doesn’t see it that way would have to accept it without listening to the proposals of the trade unions. It is about a political choice. Just like the fact is a political choice that the Interior Minister takes again on his account proposals of Philippe de Villiers or other people from the extreme right who are in charge.
In the US, we call that reminiscent of the bad old days of NPR interviews with anyone from the Clinton White House.
You can see this sort of thing in less economically free and democratically developed parts of the world. Same methods. Same results. When I hear about things like this I’m deeply saddened, and sympathetic to the ordinary French man and woman – especially those who love liberty and want to see it restored as one of their guiding principles, and not just let the words sit blithely on a plaque and the coins.
Below is an email from the fellow who tipped me off to the plight of the Gaulist in Part One. «Given the SAC history, it's revealing, and it's a real cloak and dagger one too. La Mite [Mitterand] had his own intelligence apparatus, so I wonder what Chirac has?
This is not the first account of this type on the state of affairs that we’ve gotten. In fact it’s quite typical. The same things offend people the most greatly: the unavoidable opacity in the air. The dishonesty, the loss of a great ideal. The weight it puts on people’s hearts, and the destruction of optimism.
What's really worrying is the big picture : the LEN law, the structural symbiosis of the manipulated and manipulators, between the power and the mainstream media, France siding with dictatorship to bring the internet under UN spell (thank God, that this has apparently failed), the emergency state and the chape de plomb over the news reports, Copé lecturing the foreign media with the approval of the press, Sarko preventing the publishing of a book about his wife (a pure act of censorship and strong-arming), Everyone around Chirac is corrupt anyway. Its’ basis are in the françafrique and the Arab policy, and all the money flowing back from them.
Add to that the duel between de Villepin and Sarko in a context of quasi-insurrection and toothless power diseased with infighting.
[ . . . ]
It’s truly is the ultimate rotting state - a "controlled" democracy, a weak power on the defensive which can only hide the symptoms, there undemocratic forces at work (a revolutionary left allied with revolutionary Islam), powerful levers for theses forces (public sector unions blocking all reforms, leftist lobbies controlling intellectual life, suburban rabble successfully confronting the police), a catastrophic financial situation, an apathic majority paving the way for an active minority, and racial tensions since at least a decade culminating in a permanent low-intensity intifada.
Chirac is a terrible, terrible man. He’s the posterboy of the technocracy/oligarcy which has seized power and ruined France in just two generations.»
It might be the very thing that drives people to accept global utopian fantasies which are totalitarian at their core. There might come a point in the psychology of all of this, that people who otherwise accept things broadly secretly start to accept the idea of evil, authoritarian traits if it would only seem benevolent to them, or at the very least, leave them be and let people have a life inside a smaller frame – a protective boundary.
Accepting that paves the way to things that could only get worse.
It’s hard to understand there could exist desperation in a developed nation with a rich history of law and mature notions of its’ own society. «J'ai reçu un coup de téléphone ce soir, extrèmement clair qui m'a indiqué que moi ou ma famille ne serions pas protégés si nos identités venaient à être révélées. Les renseignements personnels fournis par mon "interlocuteur" étant suffisamment précis et inattendus pour guère ne me faire d'illusion sur l'origine de cet "avertissement", j'en ai tiré la conclusion que c'était bien un "dernier avertissement" On m'a d'ailleurs également indiqué, que tant que mes "activités" continueraient je ne pourrai pas compter retrouver un emploi. Or j'ai une femme et deux enfants, et je ne peux certainement pas prendre non plus ce risque économique et social pour la survie de ma famille. Nos ennemis sont suffisamment puissants pour dominer les media, empêcher la publication de livre, ou imposer au peuple leur censure par tous les moyens, y compris l'élimination sociale, dans un contexte désormais soumis à l'état d'urgence. J'ai deux filles, les choses sont claires. Le MEDEF, les syndicats, comme l'ensemble des élites étant toutes complices, je n'ai aucun illusion sur mon sort en France et j'ai besoin d'un emploi pour faire vivre ma famille... Je ne suis pas Moïse, je ne sauverai pas les français malgré eux, et j'insiste bien sur le "malgré eux", car il faut bien reconnaître aussi que si d'un côté règne l'entente pour organiser et imposer l'eurabia, de l'autre les résistances sont trop éparses, trop divisées, trop enfermées aussi dans des conceptions dépassées et des discours, voire des réalités, coupés du peuple, pour représenter une force crédible pouvant faire face à l'ennemi. Ce combat est non seulement harassant, mais aussi déprimant. J'ai fait ma part depuis 16 ans, et comme dit le proverbe : les écrits restent.. [le nom de l'organisation est retenu] est dissoute, toutes les données sur l'identité de ses membres ont été détruites pour assurer leur sécurité. Je remercie les quelques personnes qui ont tenté, en vain, de [le] soutenir. Mais cette fois, c'est bien fini.»
Below is a message that came to me by way of someone I hear from regularly and trust. Though I have no way of confirming the story below entirely, I have been able to confirm that the person telling it has no reason to lie, and that the website of the small Gaullist political party that he was a part of has been taken down.
Names and links have been deleted, given the nature of the threats.
The translation is my own. Please forgive its’ roughness. «I received a telephone call this evening telling me very clearly that me or my family would not be protected if our identities had been suddenly revealed. The personal information communicated to me in detail by an unexpected "interlocutor", which makes me believe the threat to be authentic. I drew the conclusion that it was a "final warning."
Originally:
I was also told that as long as I continue my "activities," I would not be able to find a job I have a wife and two children, and I can’t take that kind of financial or personal risk. I have to consider the well being of my family.
Our enemies are sufficiently powerful to dominate the media, to prevent the publication of book, or to censure people by other means, including social elimination, all within the powers of the State of Emergency. I have two girls. It’s clear that I can’t risk their well being. The MEDEF [association of businesses], the trade unions, and the elites all play into this. I don’t have any illusions about my fate in France and I need to work to sustain my family.
I’m not Moses. I will not save the French in spite of themselves, and I’m serious when I say "in spite of themselves", because it needs to be understood that on one side that if on a side there is an agreement to organize and impose a Eurabia on us, and resistance to it is scattered, divided, and locked up in strange plans and speeches. Realistically a divided people can’t oppose this enemy. This conflict isn’t just abusive, it’s depressing. I’ve done what I could for 16 years, and like the story goes: the writings will always be there.
The [organization name withheld] is dissolved, all the data on the identity of its members were destroyed to ensure their safety. I thank the few people who tried, in vain, to support it. At this point, it’s finished.»Yours’ truly,
[name withheld]
This party in question isn’t “ultra” anything, but has conservative views, are proponents of personal liberty, and oppose Israel bashers. As far as his travails go, one must understand just how easily and readily centers of power, (local or national), can brutally strong-arm people and their ideas simply because they don’t like them, or feel threatened. It’s all done without a pretense of abiding ones’ freedom of speech.
Amicalement
[nom retenu]
Both France and large parts of Europe appear to have the social exhaustion that has brought them to sheepishness and a resident element of loutishness to permit this kind of thing to go on. All the same, objections to it are tut-tutted for fear of the neighbors seeing. That kind of environment is no different that the type that are ripe to accept dictatorship.
First and foremost the right of free speech needs to be preserved in a realistic manner, not deconstructed into a stupor. You either have your freedoms or you don’t.
According to the EUtopians, we can’t imprison them, transport them, and can’t give them to the torturing locals. I guess they think that they can tell the rest of the world that they can’t catch them.
Let’s just give them to THIS guy.
While the likes of our occasional ulcerated commenter accuse us of enriching ourselves (what with all the advertising we have on our site, and a "tip jar",) what we remember is his hatred. Not unlike one man well liked by Europeans who has exploited death, war, and race for his own enrichment. Surely they have a great deal in common, like a habit for looking for racism and hate under any US flag and Star of David at every opportunity.
This article from MEMRI is quite telling when it comes to hate being little more than a habit and lifestyle. It makes sense when you look at the precise point of commonality that the left shares with a cancer on the culture of the near east: «Hatred is a General Phenomenon in the Arab and Muslim World, and Not Limited to Americans "...Hatred in the Arab and Muslim world is a general phenomenon that is not limited only to the Americans. It is possible that the Arabs and Muslims hate each other no less than they hate others...
Having my origins in Arab society, I can tell you first hand just how accurate it is, as well as the Dr. Stangelove-like penchant for blame, demonization, hate, and for singling out groups (and not individuals) based on genetics. The similarity the left has to modern fascist and the Nazis is also quite high, but after more than a decade's spinning and reeling after the collapse of the notion of totalitarian communist power, the bleats of anger coming from helplessness are no longer a surprise.
"In the 1990s, over 200,000 citizens were killed in Algeria –– most of them by extremist Islamic groups. What was the response of most of the Arabs and Muslims? A mixture of amusement and of presenting justifications for the murderers and terrorists. During those years, the Taliban movement also abused Shi'ites, Azeris, Tajikis, and other minorities, and no one did anything [to stop it].»
It's as though they need to find a new energetic ideological "superpower" to replace their old reliable standby, Soviet Communism, and looking for it by finding an improbable and unsupportable link between Jihad and western leftism.
For years they resembled the mythical mother who pretends to have a heart attack whenever the 40 year old son takes interest in a woman, but now they have a new revolutionary spirit without ideals. In that sense they look more like the FARC or one of the culturally appropriate seeming Burmese drug lords than a revolution.
Scott Burgess has more on how hatred of the US has allowed some to give themselves the permission to think that terror is “useful” if not downright nifty.
We'll be landing shortly. Please turn off all cattle prods and cellphones.
«"There had better not be a police blunder, or the town will go up / The city's a time-bomb / From the police chief to the guy on the street - they're all hated."»
Or this fine opus: «"The state is screwing us / Well you know, we are going to defend ourselves / Don't try to understand."»
The only thing that could be worse than white rap has got to be euro-rap, a remnant of the trash culture the efete in inner EUtopia think that they’re above.
Merci à Valerie
Thank heavens for socialists. They are a useful barometer for globalized stupidity, peevishness, and dread. No sooner had the public resolved that 100 +/- cases of vehicle arson where somehow livable, lefty starts pushing to reward the violent, and pay for it by further picking the victim’s pocket.
This will only end up making things worse in precisely the way it made them bad to begin with.
Transparently, they leave no doubt who their enemy is. It isn’t disorder, or unemployment, or inequity. It’s whoever is standing in the way between them and their power: «As French journalist Françoise Mouly noted, “Sarkozy openly admires American neoliberalism, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Rudolph Giuliani. He regularly counteracted the lofty pronouncements of the patrician Chirac with comments like ‘I do what works.’ As one French ghetto kid put it, ‘He acts and speaks like a gang leader.’”
Interesting, don’t you think, about how 95% of the range of political views is lumped in together and trashed.
Villepin, meanwhile, has pushed a conservative agenda that includes pension “reform”--in other words, cutbacks in retirement benefits. Chirac, already weakened after the EU referendum defeat, was increasingly seen as irrelevant during the crisis.
The same can be said of French Socialist Party (SP) leader Françoise Hollande, who also backed the EU referendum. Though critical of the government’s state of emergency law, the SP has done nothing to oppose it.»
Not a word about rioting being wrong, or even regrettable, and an occasional whisper about this being useful... In fact barely a word at all until they can point their hatred at one of their usual pet peeves. It seems like the world, as it is, just isn’t good enough for them, or perhaps not violent enough for them.Some people are never happy.
Note - the spelling error for M. Hollande, "Françoise", appeared in the original.
Everybody pursues their national interestsharrumphs John Bolton.
The only one who gets blamed for it is the United States.
They wouldn't just scoff at the clumsy, unsuave Americans, they would scream bloody murder. And with reason. As not only would the Bush administration's opponents in America join in the fracas, but a good number of its (strongest) allies would as well.
But that's basically what the French embassy in Washington was doing a few months back, Le Monde 2 informs us, until it decided that it was perhaps not a good idea, and backed out. And the way issue 63 of Le Monde's weekly keeps us informed of Michel Vinaver's 11 September 2001 is not through self-criticism, nor by pointing out the double standards (it is unimaginable that a French embassy in Moscow, Beijing, Harare, or Saddam's Baghdad would have done the same), but because the French in America chickened out and engaged in "censorship". What a pity, tut-tuts the top editor at France's newspaper of reference.
Head over to Le Monde Watch as we continue our in-depth coverage of Le Monde 2.
Here are a few excerpts:
In issue 54, a French writer-philosopher tells of how he got lambasted (including by his American wife) for being one of the lone voices that supported the war in Iraq: "I learned what it is to get insulted in the street, threats on the telephone. My North African friends told me, 'You have brain damage', those of the Esprit review dropped me. … I felt very alone." Could Pascal Bruckner stand the heat?…
The post-election issue (# 39) had Edwy Plenel explaining that Dubya's election victory was due, basically, to Americans being frightened and/or bamboozled by Karl Rove and his ilk, comparing the discourse on moral values with the speeches of Nazi-collaborator Philippe Pétain. (When Bush isn't being compared to Hitler, he is being compared to a Stalinist or a fascist sympathizer…) The issue also features an interview with Elton John, who calls his election "one of the greatest tragedies of all time" and an American reporter (the International Herald Tribune's William Pfaff) who compares the American way of life to communist totalitarianism.
Then there is the portrait of Paul Newman in issue 48, in which the journalist of the independent newspaper recounts the actor's militancy, and starts to dream of how much the world would be in better shape had Paul Newman been elected to the White House in the 1980s. (Imagine: no Ronald Reagan!…)
Head over to Le Monde Watch now.
Histoire de brosser les indigènes de la brousse. Saga Africa, attention les secousses. Villepin (who is a man) ventures out into the wilderness.
Smile and say fromage
Paris Le Syndicat de la Magistrature (SM, gauche) affirme que l'ONU et le Conseil de l'Europe doivent être informés de l'instauration et la prolongation de l'état d'urgence, demandant au président Jacques Chirac de rendre publiques les explications qu'il leur avait fournies.
C'est quoi ce petit pays de merde qui n'arrête pas de sermonner les autres au sujet du multilatéralisme et des droits de l'hommeeuh, et qui ne respect nullement ses devoirs en la matière ?
If there was a single subtext unifying the political establishment during the early days of flame and street battling here, it was the idea that the riots could become the black mark of death on Sarkozy's presidential ambitions in 2007writes John Vinocur, as he discusses the French as "all good people who want peace". Elsewhere, he wrote about
France's great political mano a mano, Nicolas Sarkozy vs. Dominique de Villepin for the presidency in spring 2007, has a core of fascination: the energy, ruthlessness, and ambition of two men who have to pretend, in an excruciating public charade, to be teammates for months to come.
M. le President fearless leader thinks that rioters or perhaps the state are suffering from an identity crisis. That there is a deep malaise is not a surprise.
Start by freeing your your inner nanny, and stick with your guiding principles. Customising policies to specific groups just creates factions.
Columbian TV actors and entertainment media types are marching in opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. They oppose it in order to preserve their
culture meal ticket because it would soften the law requiring 70% of all TV content to be domestically produced. I guess by culture, they must mean another ubiquitous version of “Big Brother”, goofy game shows, and those silly “battle of the sexes” variety shows with fat dudes and over-done and over-surgeried chicas jump up and down.
All knock-offs anyway, possibly better served by dubbed Brazilian Novelas, and Mexican “battle of the sexes” variety shows with fat dudes and over-done and over-surgeried chicas jump up and down.
Good luck, peeps. Chavez is still the weakest link. Goodbye.
From AFP via Expatica: French diplomats try to counter riot coverage French diplomats have been asked to step up their contacts with the foreign media to counter the harm done to France's image by weeks of front-page coverage of riots in its suburbs, foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said on Monday.
How about greasing some bloggers’ palms too? Or at least getting US greased? Maybe send around bottles of Armagnac, Calvados, or GM, or do we get the moonshine?
"It is true there is an image problem," Douste-Blazy told Europe 1 radio, saying that "all ambassadors have been asked to be present on the airwaves, in newspapers and on television in their countries."
Sensationalist coverage of the violence in some foreign media -- with headlines such as 'France on fire' -- has raised fears of a knock-on effect on tourism and foreign investment.
Government spokesman Jean-François Copé was to meet later on Monday with foreign reporters in Paris to brief them on the situation.
Since the start of the unrest 2,764 arrests have been made and 375 people have been sent to prison.
The rate of arrests seems, more or less, like a kind of secret weapon when you think about just what it is that could get you. It ain’t your Pappy’s crowbar hotel anymore, cha-cha. According to Susan Bell writing in the Scotsman, douce France has something pleasant in store for the suburban brick-chuckers:
Rat-infested French jails likened to 'dungeons in Middle Ages’ France’s prisons are the worst in Europe and their cells are akin to dungeons in the Middle Ages, according to a watchdog's report yesterday.
Shame? These are the same sorts of people who will exhibit dismay when crime goes down IN SPITE OF rising incarceration rates. Besides, with a suicide rate that high, who needs a death penalty?
It blamed the government's tougher sentencing polices for aggravating chronically bad prison conditions without solving the problem of delinquency.
The report said French jails suffered from overcrowding, bad hygiene, rising violence and suicide rates of more than six times the national average - France has Europe's highest suicide rate among prisoners.
"Fifteen months to treat a toothache - one is less well treated when one is in prison than when one is an animal in the zoo," the main lawyers' union in France said.
The report placed the blame squarely on policies championed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister who has stated his intention to run for president in 2007, saying France's conservative government was wrong to fight delinquency with a drive for longer sentences.
"The place remains an inhuman nightmare," she said, "an eternal shame to France."
Prisoners certainly deserve decent medical care, but we’re still talking about prison. It still has to be worse than a welfare supported lifestyle to be unpleasant enough to make one think ‘Don’t do the crime if you won’t do the time.’ I believe that concept is completely lost on Baroness Kennedy, among others in the harem of the left. So if the dental care sucks if the state is running it in public, why should it be any better IN the hoosegow?
writes Dick Berry, while Barbara J Stock asks, How long before Europe fails?The nocturnal fires of France are a window on the screaming nothingness at the heart of Europe's soul
As for Kim Willsher, the Washington Times writer explains that
Nationalist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen … is one of the few political winners to emerge from the violence and vandalism, now well into its third week, that has prompted President Jacques Chirac to declare a state of emergency.The AFP adds that the
riots "result from massive, uncontrolled immigration from the Third World," [The far-right leader of France's National Front] said on the private radio station RTL1. "We knew it was a global time bomb."
Sociologist Marc Hatzfeld hearkens back to another famous article in Al-Jazeera sur Seine dating from a certain date in 2001, September 12th, to be precise. It was an article that will live in infamy. Either for anti-Americans if they dwell on the first 3 paragraphs, of anti-anti-Americans when they notice the cynicism that kicked in therafter. His article in Le Monde appeared on the Thursday 10 November:
“We are all riff-raff” «I belong to those who observed the events in Clichy-sous-bois with a mixture of concern and quiet impatience. It is of course the concern which prevails because one knows the effects of the riots on the inhabitants of the cities which started them and were hurt by them at the same time. Beyond considerable destruction to their own neighborhoods, it is for the inhabitants of that cities in flames, that I fear for. Fear that one of them own doesn’t get a grenade in their face, that he is also caught and finds himself made of an example of, and receiving collective punishment, that the city will be spied on in the years to come, and that you address becomes more defamatory than ever.»
Their addresses have already been subsidized - and still are. What does he want now? Room service?
This habit of declaring that one “has become” someone else in order to wear sympathy on their sleeves – in order to ride the coat-tails of the sympathy other people have for the victims, actually – is as unctuous as it is hard to watch. That strange desire to have the love of strangers will make people do bad things, like pander to sentiments just because they’re popular.
Beware of these sorts of emotional plays. Like the terminally sarcastic, before you know it, you’ll find yourself believing your own nonsense.
"End the strike!" «Users of the Control of transport of Marseilles (the transit monopoly) expressed their dissatisfaction Sunday at the Old Port. The discussions between management and the trade unions resumed.
Also who can forget this cool caper?
Updated on November 13, 2005 at 17h24
Sunday, was the third day of strikes against the Transportation Board of Marseilles. Trade unions and management once again found themselves face to face. The 90 minute Meeting was under the aegis of the Workplace Inspectorate, after three days of negotiations in middle of week ended in failure. If they showed no progress, the two parties agreed to re-examined it this Monday morning at 11. The employees of the RTM, which went back on strike Friday after a six day return to work will have met a little earlier in the morning in a general meeting to come to a conclusion about the continuing the strike.
"the spirit of dialogue" between unions [ED.: ALL part of the CGT racket]
Will Monday’s negotiations resolve conflict? Judging by Sunday’s exchange little change expected.»
On one hand, there is French hubris, and its gratuitously insulting embrace of France's immigrants as partners in the country's threadbare formulas of grandeur, equality and universalitywrites John Vinocur of the IHT (see some of its letters to the editor) in an admirable news analysis that deserves full quotation.
On the other, there is the eternal French dependency on the state, the allegiance to the French model that has failed to provide the jobs, education, housing or respect adequate to integrate Arab and African Muslims into a rich and resourceful country with real claims to special grace.
These two elements run together, and it is at the point where they cross that French reality has imploded: the intersection of the fakery producing a one-size-fits-all Frenchness, and the ceaseless defense of a rigidly statist social model, refusing to reform the economy, open up the labor market or consider affirmative action.
This unique French context makes the nearly two weeks of rioting at the edges of Paris and other big French cities, and now the declaration of a national state of emergency and curfew, something less than an absolute forewarning for the rest of Europe.
The local context is the constant denigration by the political class of everything that works elsewhere, especially if it is in the United States or Britain. It is the general immodesty, ingrained both left and right, concerning a supposed French model of civilization for the world that cannot find substantiation at home. And in the case of the current rioting, it is the boomerang effect of a particular kind of French romanticism that, over the years, legitimized intifadas, antiglobalist street fighters, and firebomb-tossing with the subtext, we are with you, brothers.
So the violence arises from specially French circumstances, including huge housing projects in enclaves for the poor and a dismal colonial history in Africa.
The violence also comes, prerationalized, from the homegrown French who provided the conceits fashioning the rationale, however jumbled, of the rioters.
An Arab-French kid in Clichy-sous-Bois may not articulate it, but what rage it must create to hear he lives in the greatest, smartest, most fair country in the world, revered as Islam's best friend in the West, from Algeria to Oman, and then have to deal with a French reality of racist scorn and rejection.
Not to mention the French state which, clothed as the ideal republic, runs the school, the bus and the Métro, owns the housing project, operates the job center, and fails, in relation to immigrants, on all those levels.
In the country of the 35-hour week, where the state is hardly the symbol of the work ethic or civic sense in the land of the continuous public service strike, administrative and school buildings have become the choice targets of the rioters' Molotov cocktails. The republic's social welfare payments are there, but accompanied by private-sector job creation so enfeebled and hiring discrimination so real that they turn any young person taking up the state's offer to wield a broom or toilet brush into his neighborhood's collaborateur.
Alain Touraine, a well-known sociologist, has pointed to the falseness and the lies in French society's portrayal of itself as the place where the most profound causes of the violence and disintegration are found. More self-defeating for France, the integration myth here, he said, was stronger than in places like Germany and Italy.
In other countries in Europe, this kind of French-type self-aggrandizement would be embarrassing or plain absurd. If places like the Netherlands or Denmark can have problems in defining the Dutch or Danish ethos they want their immigrants to comply with - although pressing foreigners to speak the language and work instead of living from welfare - they spare them anything as hollow as having to buy into a triumphant national myth.
A large majority of the French, those who still live well through the system, in the meantime seem to have presumed their country was rich enough to buy off, geographically isolate, and police the difficult immigrants.
Regardless of whether North Africans living in France jeered "La Marseillaise" at international soccer matches in Paris, this arrangement hardened into all the integration the country had to shell out for.
The fact was that France paid no attention to an average of 60 cars - the figure is from the Interior Ministry - burned every night around the country in the months leading up to the riots.
Or that in 2004, an internal security agency reported there were 300 communities nationwide "in retreat," basically ones with a marked presence of Islamic fundamentalism, hatred of France and the West, anti-Semitism, and violence.
Touraine avoids any mention of these realities in his analysis, published this week in Le Monde.
But he acknowledges that there will have to be some change in the notion of a single, French identity, the French "me" as he calls it, as the standard of universal value here.
Change, more nuance, a more specifically diverse French model, or bluntly, minority hiring quotas, preferential school admission, and school busing to create palpable integration: These are not easy matters in a place where the national myth of the republic and its incantation of perfect equality provide a baseline of comfort and self-justification to politicians of all parties.
Lionel Jospin, talking on the radio Wednesday morning, when asked about affirmative action as a solution, just dismissed it out of hand. The former Socialist prime minister, whose failure to provide the French a strong enough notion of personal security led to his defeat in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, said this kind of affirmative step "contradicts our republican tradition." If France is to go forward, he insisted, "it's got to be within our model."
Indeed, a day or two before the riots began, Dominique de Villepin, the French prime minister, described affirmative action as a "semantic debate" in a country known by one and all to be committed to equal opportunity.
Now, François Bayrou, leader of the centrist group that with the neo-Gaullists makes up Jacques Chirac's presidential majority, describes France as a "sick state, a state swollen into impotence" with "a democracy that doesn't work well." This means, he said, that "reality never enters political discussions."
But asked why the riots were happening here, since France's neighbors seemed to be escaping its misery, Bayrou offered a response that, like the answers of the other politicians he condemned, hid from the specifics of both responsibilities and solution:
"As long as French democracy doesn't change," Bayrou said, "these accidents are going to continue." He left it there.
Les sales pédés du XIIIème
The last Renault Twingo in France was KFC’ed last night in Toulouse while the terror of the stupid, blinged-out hoodlums seems to be tapering off. I’d say that it might have something to do with using arrests as a disincentive, but no leftist would believe me.
What will be of interest now is the way they reflect on it. I have more faith in the French who sincerely believe in the republican idea of people being equal, and that criminals are capable of being punished equally, no matter what they look like or what kind of sob story they can gin up. From the dpa press agency: «French insurers estimate that damage claims alone will reach €200 million.
The downside of European integration isn't just Europe, it would be to adopt the standard European approach:
According to Sarkozy, about 120 foreigners, many of them with legal status, have been arrested during the riots, but most of them may be protected by French law. For example, minors and persons with family on French territory will probably not be deported.
"It's not about numbers," Sarkozy said. "It's the principle."»«The violence is the worst in France since the 1968 student riots, has shaken the Government of President Jacques Chirac and caused ripples throughout Europe.
...just to start the ball rolling, of course. Let the feeding frenzy begin.
In a bid to help tackle problems in French suburbs, the European Union has offered France 50 million euros ($80 million), EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said yesterday.»
He pointed out that the rioting adults are overwhelmingly employed, that some immigrant areas have higher unemployment without disturbance, and PS run governments (past ones and local ones alike) refused to prosecute endemic car thefts AT ALL which clearly established just how fuzzy the line the law lays down can be, leaving no doubt that crimes preferred by some people (perhaps the first-time voters they're looking for) won’t be punished.
Some of the TP commenters get it, and get it perfectly well: «France's social and economic problems are too big, too old and too deep to be solved anytime soon. To believe otherwise would be a denial of reality. Possibly in another 50 years the country will have achieved real solutions but by that time it could be too late. »
Boveman, Neuilly-sur-Marne
It might well be a simple problem of a lack of moral fiber which is the most apparent clash of civilizations: between the nominally aware and those stupified by the nanny state: «What a mess, long lasting damage too a beautiful country especially the businesses/tourism trades. This sort of poverty should of been dealt with years ago, theres no equality at all.»
FRED, blackpool
It's not so much a question of knowing which fork to use at this point, it the habit of using a fork at all.
After 2 weeks of factional warfare in France, the WaPo's Outlook Sunday guide to the opinions you should have, has finally addressed the issue. Two pieces appear, one is a somewhat misguided piece which itself mostly seems to notice little more than skin color [by Keith Richburg], but astutely notes: "Europe still has not come to grips with the fact that its’ societies are changing."
Never mind that people need above all else to share in of a social contract to live together, Richburg doesn't think France is genetically diverse enough. Titled in the forgoing page “Torching France’s Assimilation Model”, I have to wonder if Richburg want to give ammunition to the anti-republican “separate but equal” model of celebrating diversity, one ethnic borough at a time, which people do on their own anyway without the enobling name.
Taking the temperature of the urban and more urbane indicators which are traditionally thought to model a society by example, Frances Stead Sellers on the other hand sees something more than what is skin-deep. She describes two different cultures which are caught in one-another's throats and presents the example of the "aboriginal" French who when traveling will "do as the Romans do when in Rome," while may from the other communities couldn't care less.
She goes on to say:"Everyone looks across the Atlantic at the world's most ambitious yet culturally imperfect multicultural experiment. Can countries that don't have America's founding philosophy of equality and have not yet suffered the liberating agonies of a civil rights movement find a philosophy that will put their citizens - new and old - on equal footing?"
None of it is as telling as a small item in Friday's Le Figaro in their centerfold page tableau covering the riots. Cécilia Gabizon point out that at the dilapidated street level, French-Sub-Saharan-Africans and French-North-Africans are blaming one another for the violence.
As a point of comparison it took a decade for any enmity to develop between Jews and Blacks in the US. It didn't start with any violence, and it ended in a matter of 2-3 years after there wasn't as much of a need for them to lobby the rest of society together. The myth continued only on the widely ignored lecture circuit of people who needed something to write about. 
Another correspondent still unwittingly undermines the delusion that the riots are by "youths" or have a great deal to do with unemployment by begging for a cure to both. Wouldn't les émeutiers have to be at least 16 to worry about unemployment enough to start brick-chucking?
« La raison d'abord. Interrogés sur les causes du drame, ceux qui en sont témoins aux premières loges n'ont qu'un mot, d'emblée : la famille. Quand parents et enfants ne parlent plus la même langue, n'utilisent pas les mêmes références, ne sont debout ni ne dorment aux mêmes heures, la parole ne circule plus. Venus souvent de cultures où l'autorité paternelle était affirmée, des jeunes de chez nous se trouvent soudain plongés dans un environnement qui se veut libéré de tout engagement au long cours. Ce n'est pas alors la carence scolaire, ni même celle de l'emploi qui sont en cause. Toutes deux interviendront après. Mais le pacte familial, le premier de tous, est souvent menacé ou rompu.»
«The cause? When those who are most deeply involved in these areas are asked, they say that it is the dissolution of the family. When parents and children do not speak the same language any more [ED.: I think he means that literally], do not use the same references, don’t wake and sleep the same hours, communication ends. Often coming from cultures where paternal authority is respected, these young people are suddenly plunged into an environment which discourages close bonds and meaningful relationships. It isn’t then bad school, nor even employment which is at the center of this issue. Both will intervene soon enough, but that the family bond, the primary element, is often threatened or non-existent.»
This distinction is important in the Republique ultra-yackity-yackaine, since a complex social miasma would evoke one solution: keep paying off people who do stupid things with their lives, and make them no better for it.
Un article du Monde daté 8 mai 2002 où Azouz Begag traite les jeunes voyous de racaille et de caillera. De nos jours, Begag est Ministre pour la Promotion de l'Egalité des chances basané de service et a pleinement réussi son intégration dans cette caste des politicards franchouilles qui pratiquent la langue de bois. Langue de pute.
"Depuis plusieurs années déjà, on pouvait en entendre dans les quartiers clamer qu'ils allaient exprimer leur désespoir aux prochaines élections. Pour qui connaît un peu la sociologie des quartiers de banlieue, cette menace électorale n'est pas déconnectée d'une demande de sanction contre ceux qu'on nomme les racailles ou « cailleras » (en verlan), groupes de jeunes dont tout le monde a peur, qui conduisent des scooters, sans casque, roulent sur les trottoirs au mépris des piétons, ignorent royalement les feux de signalisation, comme ils récusent tout autre code de conduite sociale."
C'est vrai que Begag connaît bien son sujet.
for the Promotion of Equal Opportunity of “Political Whitewashing Services” and quite successfully integrated the elite class of political weasels to knowing how to talk the talk. But in 2002 he said: "For several years now, one had been able to expolit people's despair at the ballot box. For those who understand the sociology of the suburban districts, this electoral threat is connected with a desire to keep a lid on the people they call “riff-raff” or "scum" (in slang.) [In other words, the] groups of young people that everyone is afraid of. They ride around on scooters without helmets on, riding on the sidewalks to the contempt of pedestrians, and don’t obey traffic signals, just as they ignore any other code of social conduct."
It sounds like Begag has a good grip on his portfolio.
…it is a deserter from the United States army. 
