A FEW weeks ago, an esteemed civil rights organization asserted that anti-white racism has become a fact of French life
writes
John Vinocur in his
International Herald Tribune column.
The International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism said that this
did not involve specific discrimination of the kind confronted by Arabs
and blacks, but held that anti-white racism “exists, and there are no
taboos or hesitation about saying so.”
The organization has become a co-plaintiff in an apparently racially
motivated aggravated assault case involving an attack on a white male.
According to press reports, the suspect was shown on a video
surveillance tape wielding a broken bottle and shouting, “Dirty white,
dirty Frenchman,” in French and Arabic.
“Today,” wrote Pierre-André Taguieff, a sociologist and historian, “in
certain ‘difficult neighborhoods,’ so-called poor whites are the primary
victims of a majority of so-called poor non-whites. The rejection of
whites is, in turn, encouraged by Islamist propaganda that is hostile to Muslims’ integration.”
Obviously, the majority white population in France is not under siege.
And the Muslims here (an estimated five million people, including
citizens and the country’s largest immigrant group) continue to face
various forms of prejudice and exclusion.
But the anti-racism league’s stance gives substance to an intensifying
antagonism at the heart of French society from years of failed
integration — and to what is seen by large segments of French society as
Muslim unwillingness to accommodate the law, customs and lifestyle of
the majority.
A
survey published Oct. 25 by the Ifop polling organization
underscores the clash. It reported that 60 percent of the French
consider that “the influence and visibility of Islam in France” is too
great, 68 percent believe that Muslims’ nonintegration is their own
fault, and that refusal of Western values, fanaticism and submission are
the words that best correspond to the idea they have of Islam.
With the possibility of France entering recession next year, and
alongside recent cases of murder and alleged plots by Muslim extremists,
this amounts to real grief and tension.
Despairingly, both are compounded by the incapacity of successive
governments to deal with the Muslims’ role in France with anything like
decisive engagement.
First, no president here has ever made a priority of massive investment —
call it high dosage affirmative action — in the newcomers’ future
education and employment.
Second, no leader has ever sought to enforce specific standards for Muslim assimilation.
Those standards are not a vague, nonintuitive notion in France. They correspond to the secular character of the French republic,
which promises freedom of religion for all, but also demands a complete
absence of religion from the activities of the state — and bars the
insertion of religion by anyone into those activities.
… Coming on top of greater Muslim alienation and more complaints about
Islam
from the white majority,
the current government effort is the
rough equivalent of the denial that often has been the reflexive
response to issues involving everyday racism here since the end of
French colonialism in the 1960s.
Clearly, mumbling that the automatic equality attached to French
citizenship and the fairness of French society are sufficient guarantees
for Muslim integration is a dead incantation in 2012.
It’s hard to be optimistic about France buying or charming back an
estranged community that in some neighborhoods lives life as a partially
parallel society. Many Muslims might ask, Why should I accept the
values of the republic when I believe they function mostly in theory?
An extensive affirmative action program, with clear school and job entry
quotas might work, but it cannot come now without an accommodating and
assimilating new face offered as a quid pro quo from the Muslim side.
More
Vinocur on racism in France…
