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Posted on January 15th, 2006 by martijn.
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John R. Bowen: France's Revolt

Posted on January 15th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

John R. Bowen: France’s Revolt

Can the Republic live up to its ideals?

John R. Bowen

Originally published in the January/February 2006 issue of Boston Review

8 On October 27, 2005, in Clichy-sous-Blois, one of the poor outer cities that ring Paris, boys leaving a pick-up soccer game flee when police enter their neighborhood. Three of the boys climb a fence around a power station; two are electrocuted, and the third is badly injured. Young men and boys begin torching cars. Two days later, tear gas fills one of the town’s two mosques. (It is still the month of Ramadan.)

The “popular revolt,” as the French secret police call it, expands beyond the local département of Seine-Saint-Denis, eventually reaching cities throughout France. Groups of adolescents charge one mayor’s car as he drives through his city. Journalists take refuge in police vans. Schools and hospitals are burned, but few people die. Many who did not join in the vandalism complain of police harassment and social exclusion. On November 9 the government proclaims a state of emergency, which allows prefects to declare curfews. On November 17, the police say that the situation has returned to normal throughout the country because only 98 cars were burned overnight.

From the first day of the riots European and North American commentators offered the conventional explanations. They told us, correctly, that men and women living in these outer cities faced high unemployment rates and discrimination in jobs and housing, and that in any case jobs were hard to find in France. Prescriptions were comparably predictable. According to The Economist in Britain, creating more jobs would require liberalizing the economy; for France’s anti-globalization Left, it would demand fighting free-market liberalism. French politicians introduced (or reversed cutbacks in) job-creating measures.

But something more was happening. As the skeptical weekly Marianne noted, most unemployed people don’t burn cars; they look for work.

In France, some politicians and intellectuals claimed to have the answer: cultural deficits in the outer cities. One minister, albeit a lowly one, said that polygamy among West Africans led parents to neglect their children, who could then indulge their desire to burn cars. On November 23, 153 deputies in the National Assembly petitioned the Ministry of Justice to prosecute rap groups for inciting “anti-White racism” and “hatred of France.” The prominent intellectual Alain Finkielkraut decried the search for social causes of the riots and declared that the real problem was hatred of France by those who have a “Muslim identity.” American reporters seized upon a French study from September that documented an increase in religiosity in the workplace and suggested that there might be a connection to the riots. (The French secret police instantly dismissed the conjecture.) Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose harsh words for the “scum” in the housing projects helped to spark the riots, momentarily blamed “radical Muslims”—before cooler heads pointed out that the rioters had included non-Muslims, too, and that Muslim organizations had done their best to calm the situation.

But what was missing in these speculations was an adequate account of why so many of those who live in these neighborhoods but attacked no one were so bitterly angry at France. Few residents failed to mention Sarkozy’s insults; his ill-chosen words—or, perhaps, well chosen for the far-right voters he hopes to attract in his presidential campaign—were, along with the deaths of the two boys, the sparks that ignited long-simmering resentments.

What fueled the underlying anger? Feelings of betrayal, for one: many whose parents or grandparents came from overseas territories see France as deeply hypocritical, and some see continuity from colonial to neo-colonial ways of governing immigrants. France’s leaders preach republican theories of equal citizenship for all, regardless of origins. In practice, however, France has sharply stigmatized those who have the wrong origins. The anger at this hypocrisy resembles the attitudes toward the United States that the political scientists Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane call “liberal anti-Americanism”: a strong resentment of the United States for failing to live up to its own principles.

Something analogous is at work in France: “The state claims to be color-blind, [but] society still is not,” Newsweek proclaimed, referring to France’s unwillingness to take account of ethnicity when fighting discrimination. The policy of blindness to ethnic difference, made official in a 1978 law that forbade the state to collect data on ethnic or racial origins, does indeed hamper the state in creating substantive equality for all its citizens. But the problem goes beyond the state’s incapacities in fighting discrimination to the state’s role in creating the discrimination that violates republican principles.

To appreciate this role, we need to set aside two misguided ideas. First, the riots do not, as some have alleged, prove the bankruptcy of the “French model,” whatever that might be. French leaders have no reason to apologize for the core ideas of French republicanism: that everyone ought to be fully accepted as a citizen of France and that the state is responsible for protecting the individual dignity of each citizen. France’s state-centeredness cannot be switched out for a British laissez-faire approach—it developed over the long term from a centralized royalty and from equally centralized efforts to create a set of educational, cultural, and political institutions that could give everyone equal entry into public life. French politicians are constantly tinkering with the system—recent steps to transfer powers from the state to local governments have overturned long-held ways of doing business. And certain features of French life that prevent positive social change—the rigidity of the school system, the lack of data about job discrimination—could be reformed without abandoning the core ideals of republicanism.

Second, the rioters were not all “Muslims,” and few were “immigrants.” The boys and young men who were arrested include what are called “French with roots” (Français de souche), blacks of West African ancestry, and northern Africans (maghrébins), with parents from Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia. (The difficulty of finding neutral terms for these categories is a symptom of the problem of confronting ethnic distinctions in a country that proclaims such distinctions to be inappropriate for policy discussions.) Some of these young men may consider themselves Muslims, and others assuredly do not, but in any case none of those interviewed mentioned God or the afterlife as having anything to do with their actions. This was neither Hamas nor suicide bombing, though some politicians tried to play the radical-Islam card. Furthermore, the overwhelming number of the boys and young men arrested were citizens of France; they were no more immigrants than Nicolas Sarkozy, whose father came from Hungary.

And yet, Islam and immigration are part of the broader story—of dilapidated housing projects, of insulting treatment by the police, and of a sense of not being heard. Islam and immigration also figure into how the French state has treated the marginal populations and why it has taken French policymakers so long to arrive at the realization—and not all have yet arrived—that their memories of a successful French “melting pot” (creuset) of immigration do not provide useful guides to current realities of exclusion and integration.

* * *

French colonialism contradicted the egalitarian ideals of the republic. Colonial policies treated one portion of the citizenry as subordinate to the other, creating social institutions and attitudes that continue to shape French culture and everyday life. Current divisions, or “fractures,” as they are called in France, reach back to the long history of French settlements overseas and the second-class citizenship held by Algerian Muslims, the brutal Algerian War and the state’s cover-up of its atrocities, the spatial isolation of workers brought from Africa to live in French slums, the longstanding police brutality and far-right hostility toward immigrants, and the state’s continuing tendency, left over from colonial days, to treat Muslims in France as a matter for arrangements with and subsidies from foreign powers. Some recent invocations of the colonial era are explicit, as when Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin activated a law designed to control Algerians in 1955 to control French rioters in 2005.

France has never fully come to terms with this colonial past or its lingering effects. Part of the difficulty comes from another, very different aspect of the French treatment of outsiders: France’s claim to a history of successful integration of immigrants rests on memories of how workers from nearby European countries came eventually to reside in France.

That history began in the mid-1800s, but it was hardly free of conflict. In the 1880s and 1890s, anti-Belgian riots in the northeast and anti-Italian riots in Lyon and the Midi were bloody and bitter. By the early 20th century, Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and Spaniards were arriving in France in large numbers—Portugal remains the largest single source of foreigners on French soil today. In the 1920s and 1930s French workers and growing far-right movements protested their presence—workers resented the competition and considered the Poles too Catholic. Many thought that the immigrants could never assimilate. The state housed the Poles separately from other workers, taught their children Polish so they could return home, and did indeed send many back to Poland.

It was the “30 glorious years” of rebuilding after World War II that encouraged some of the Poles, Italians, and Portuguese to stay in France and that made it possible for them to find jobs without displacing other workers and generating resentment. These new workers joined unions, fought for higher wages, and assimilated culturally. Their story is not entirely unlike that of the late-19th-century wave of immigration to the United States, in which Protestant anger against Catholics led to urban gangs and the anti-Catholic public schools movement; and in the 20th century the immigrants’ children and grandchildren reached the suburbs and ran for national office. In France the children of the Poles and Italians grew up speaking perfect French, went to the same schools as French children, and eventually found jobs alongside those of longer French ancestry, those “with roots.” One Hungarian immigrant’s son became interior minister.

The outer-cities immigration story, in contrast, is not about a melting pot but a bouillabaisse: the mussels and the fish were never supposed to contaminate each other with their tastes, much less blend together. By the 1870s, France had a plentiful supply of cheap, temporary labor in a second-class region of France—Algeria. Invaded in 1830, Algeria became part of France by the 1870s. French Algeria was bifurcated. The colonizers were fully French citizens, with French political and social institutions at their disposal. The Muslim colonized remained as a separate, “indigenous” population with a distinct personal status. They came to be governed by the indigénat, a distinct legal regime under which their family affairs were judged according to a version of Islamic law—unless they renounced that status and applied for citizenship, a step most considered to be a betrayal of their religion. (In contrast, France gave automatic citizenship to all Algerian Jews.)

From the late 19th century onward, then, three categories of residents coexisted in France: citizens, foreigners (who might be immigrants from other European countries), and indigénes, native peoples on French territory. These Africans or Asians had “ethnic characteristics that cannot be reduced to ours,” said a ministerial report from the time. This official system continued into the 1960s, such that in 1961 the Paris police were able to arrest “Algerian French Muslims” on the street—their identity cards, mandatory at all times, made it clear what they were. The legacy of this colonial system was the memory that, as the entrepreneur and advocate for “positive discrimination” Yazid Sabeg has put it, “France established in Algeria a social and interethnic organization based on communalism and discrimination, ignoring its own republican principles.”

Although all immigrants from Africa (northern or sub-Saharan) shared poor housing, police insults, and job discrimination, the early and psychosocially deep structure of immigration and separation in France was laid down in Algeria. In the 1920s, a new government office recruited men from Algeria (as well as from Italy and Poland) to work in metropolitan France and then return home. They remained outside the mainstream. It is not even, as economist Éric Maurin put it, that Paris’s outer cities are the “far-off and last echo of the failure of the republic of the universal.” The French model for building up metropolitan industrial capacity while not bleeding Algeria dry of its labor force depended on a “failure” of integration, in which workers from Algeria would remain apart so as not to integrate into French society. Individuals or families arriving in France generally found lodging either in shantytowns, the famous bidonvilles that sprang up in a ring around Paris and other large cities, or in low-cost “transit hotels,” where they shared rooms and even beds with other workers.

Ironically, the very length of the North African experience made integration more difficult. Many of the workers stayed in metropolitan France only a short time and therefore were less likely to develop the networks and habits that would have facilitated integration. They were segregated at work and in their housing by policies pursued by employers and by agents of the French state, who treated them as natives out of place and due to return home. In addition, most Algerians resisted assimilation. Because obtaining citizenship required Muslims to renounce their Muslim identity, few did so—only about 26 per year between 1865 and 1934. Even by 1990 only about 13 percent of Algerian immigrants to France had acquired French nationality, compared with 60 to 70 percent for European immigrants. Furthermore, the nationalist movements in Algeria and the post-independence Algerian governments discouraged Algerians from considering permanent settlement in France and tried to exercise control over Algerians in France.

The rapid growth in settlement by Algerian families in metropolitan France coincided with, and was thus colored by, the bloody war for Algerian independence from 1954 to 1962. The war killed thousands of people, featured the systematic use of torture by French soldiers against French citizens and assassinations in Algiers and Paris, and created bitter memories of betrayal on all sides. We might compare the Algerian War to the U.S. Civil War: both were battles for independence fought by a southern, poorer, agricultural region against an industrial, politically dominant North. Both tore apart the society.

* * *

The legacies of that long-term colonial experience are to be found in emotional memories and in social structures of separation and discrimination. At the moment of Algerian independence in 1962, about one million people were living in Algeria as settlers or civil servants, and these pied noirs returned to metropolitan France angry at the French state they felt had abandoned them. About five million French soldiers had fought against those siding with the Algerian Liberation Front. Hundreds of thousands of Algerian Muslims had been arriving in France each year, and they were bitterly divided. Some, the harkis, had fought on the French side, and their pro-colonial engagements became an embarrassment for a France seeking to forget the past. Most Algerians had supported the Liberation Front either actively or passively, but they found themselves now living in the country of the former enemy. Few sentiments were clear; fewer still were proud and positive.

The conflicts and the anger were imported to the mainland. The state sought to cover up the more delicate moments of the “operations to maintain order” in Algeria and the 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris. It was only in 1999 and 2000 that the lid began to come off: in June 1999, for the first time, the French parliament acknowledged that there had indeed been a “war” in Algeria. The first use of the term “massacre” for the October 1961 killings came in March 1999, during the trial of the man who in 1961 was the Paris police chief: Maurice Papon, on trial for sending Jews to gas chambers during World War II, not for his massacre 19 years later. In 2000 and 2001 revelations of torture in Algeria emerged, as did the fact that high officials, including François Mitterrand, had known about it. In 2001, Paris’s mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, placed a plaque on the spot where 40 years earlier police had thrown Algerians into the Seine, and a similar ceremony with the same mayor was held in 2005, but no representative of the state has yet to acknowledge the massacre, and, indeed, two archivists who leaked incriminating documents from 1961 received reprisals.

Under these conditions—a century of second-class legal status, a bloody civil war and bitter aftermath, continued isolation and discrimination—what sense of French citizenship and memory could be available to African immigrants and their children and grandchildren? Part of the question is what sort of memory does France wish to promote and enshrine? The authors of the recent book The Colonial Fracture argue that France is the only European country to have dissociated national history from colonial history. France’s history of itself is internal, structured around battle sites or wines or monuments. The seven volumes of France’s quasi-official “Sites of Memory” do not include sites overseas. Colonial histories, on the other hand, are nostalgic, exotic, and increasingly rosy. The several museums of colonial history now being planned will celebrate what Jacques Toubon, the head of the museum commission, has called the “work” (l’oeuvre) of colonialism. On February 23, 2005, the National Assembly passed a law (with few deputies present) stipulating that schoolteachers teach “the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa.” The resolution led to an outcry by many historians, but touched a chord among many who wish that the “civilizing mission” carried out by France not be forgotten, particularly the harkis who had fought on the French side in the Algerian War. In several cities in the southeast, these constituencies succeeded in erecting monuments to members of the paramilitary OAS, an organization engaged in assassinations in Algeria. In November, after the riots, the majority UMP party, anxious to preserve support by the harkis, defeated an effort to repeal the article in question.

Colonial-era memory may prove increasingly divisive in the years to come. Even as a loose alliance of anti-racism organizations declared the existence in France of “The Indigenous People of the Republic” in an effort to underscore the perduring effects of colonial rule, other groups emphasized the legacy of slavery and of anti-Semitism. Shortly after the riots ended, 56 associations representing people of African and Antilles ancestry formed the French Federation of Blacks to give blacks more visibility in relation to North Africans and to demand that France face more openly its history of slavery.

* * *

This colonial history is crystallized not only in memories but in immediate, lived experiences. People in the poor outer cities seek to make sense of why their lives are as they are, even as they clamor for jobs and better housing and respect.

France’s labor and housing policies left poorer populations living on the geographical and thus social margins of French cities—in marked contrast to the inner-city segregation of American blacks. Their neighborhoods are not museums to the past; they are populated by recent immigrants as well as the descendants of older ones because immigration continued, even after the 1974 halting of most labor migration. About three quarters of legal immigrants arrive in France today through claims of marriage or family ties.

For a sense of this mixing of old and new consider the Créteil académie, the governing unit of school districts, which includes three of the major catchment areas for immigrants near Paris, the prefectures of Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne, and Seine-et-Marne. Between 3,000 and 4,000 new immigrant schoolchildren arrive in the district each year who do not speak any French. They are of 70 different nationalities, but most come from the same countries that have provided the majority of immigrants. In Seine-Saint-Denis, for example, 28 percent of these immigrant children are Algerian, 12 percent Moroccan—and 11 percent Chinese. Thus the second generation sits, school desk by school desk, with a new first generation from the same countries.

This story is not of unbroken gloom, but it is full of unintended consequences. Physical conditions in the outer cities improved markedly during the 1960s and 1970s, when the state built huge complexes of apartments as low-rent housing, or HLM (habitations à loyers modérés), which each housed thousands of families. These new complexes were heartily welcomed at the time. They were clean, had toilets, and at first they housed together native French and immigrants from all parts. But better-off families (especially native French and Asians) were able to move out and buy small homes, and as the nearby factories closed their doors in the 1970s and 1980s, those who stayed found themselves increasingly without work. The projects became traps rather than springboards, and it is the children who grew up in them who burst onto the front pages this fall.

Perpetuation of inequality works in myriad and sometimes subtle ways, starting with interactions between housing and schooling. In France, as in the United States, residential concentrations of poor minorities make income disparities worse. The concentrations of immigrants in certain neighborhoods—about twice as high as in the United States generally—had their beginnings in state policies toward immigrant labor and have persistent effects on schooling and employment. Who sits in the school desk next to you has significant effects on how likely you are to complete school. These effects help explain why 20 years of special state investments in poorly performing school districts (the ZEP, zones d’éducation prioritaires) have had no measurable effect on school success. The concentration effects continue after school: immigrants earn much less than native-born French with the same level of education.

Ironically, the low-cost housing projects, though often blamed for social problems, serve to counteract ethnic self-segregation even as they reinforce economic segregation. It is very difficult to find a place in an HLM—people compete to get out of unsafe and filthy privately run apartments—so you end up wherever the housing office sees fit to put you. As a result, blacks, North Africans, and “native” French live side by side in the projects. But they observe boundaries. You date across those lines at your own risk; when one black-brown couple tried it last year a shoot-out followed and prompted Sarkozy to make the first of his incendiary remarks.

There are bright spots where institutions and associations thrive and gloomy spots where they do not. Within the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, where the riots were concentrated, the cities of Saint-Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois at first glance seem similar: high unemployment rates, subsidized housing, foreign residents, and poor schools. Saint-Denis, however, is a bustling market center with easy access by subway or train to the center of Paris, a campus of the University of Paris, private Islamic schools and associations, and the Basilica, a major tourist attraction. Clichy-sous-Bois (where the riots began) has isolated housing projects, no cafes or bistros, no educational institutions beyond the mediocre public schools, and very difficult access by public transport.

Public schools are supposed to be the major French mechanism for integration. But, as in the United States, schools in principle take their pupils from the surrounding neighborhoods, thus reinforcing residential segregation. Parental strategies exacerbate these effects because many of the better-off parents manage to place their children in schools in a better district—40 percent of Paris-area parents are estimated to have done so through legal methods and an unknown number through illegal ones. These strategies for getting around the rules make the concentration of immigrants in any one school two to two and a half times what it otherwise would be.

Within schools, teachers channel pupils very early on toward those professions that seem to best fit their social and cultural profile. High schools were created by Napoleon in 1802 in order to form an elite, and they have never lost their essential gate-keeping quality. Social-class differences show up massively in the schools children attend, which tracks they pursue (math, arts, technology), whether they take the baccalaureate or a less demanding exam, and what they do afterward. Ghislaine Hudson, the principal of a school south of Paris, points to the way in which pupils are evaluated: if they are weak in any subject, they fail and have to repeat a year, so weaker students experience failure after failure, year after year.

Pupils who fail together also live in the same neighborhoods, adding to their sense of class determinism. As two sociologists recently wrote, young people in the poor outer cities experience schools not as a way to advance but as “a site of selection that turns their social fate into so many personal humiliations.” Better-off parents have the option of private school, and 40 percent of all French parents place a child at one time or another in a private school.

People in the outer cities have higher unemployment rates, but the official numbers understate the realities youth face. A town may have 20 percent unemployment, twice the national average, but for younger residents the rate may be 30 percent, and for those who left school and populate the projects, the rate may be 50 or 60 percent. Discrimination makes already poor chances worse. A 2005 report on employment is one of the few to have examined the difference ethnicity makes in France. The authors conclude that having a North African background makes you two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than if you are (or more importantly, if you look and sound) “native French,” controlling for level of education, and that this difference has changed little in 15 years. Ominously, in a December 2005 poll, one third of all French residents said they considered themselves to be “raciste,” a sharp rise from the previous year.

Compounding these structural features is constant harassment by the police. Officers use the informal tu, received (and intended) as an insult—after the riots began Sarkozy ordered the police to stop this particular practice. Citizens with darker skin report being stopped frequently, some four or five times a day. At each stop, the police demand to see identity papers, sometimes tossing them to the ground. It was fear of being hauled down to the police station and held for hours (a fear based on their own experience) that probably led the boys in Clichy-sous-Bois to flee to their deaths in October. (The introduction of neighborhood police, who would get to know residents, was curtailed by the governing center-right party in 2002 as part of budget cuts.)

* * *

French official responses to the crisis have been halting and often contradictory—Sarkozy tells police to use the formal vous but repeats his use of “scum”; the government promises to restore some neighborhood subsidies but has little new to offer regarding discrimination in jobs and housing; de Villepin avoids celebrating Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz because the Corsican reinstated slavery but he tightens up immigration and his party insists on colonialism’s positive impact.

France’s leaders must acknowledge the contradictions of the past and the continuing psychological and social reality of that past. France’s taboo on discussing ethnic and national origins has served to hide their impact on present inequalities and discrimination. This taboo can be lifted without abandoning the republican model. Some post-secondary schools and corporations give preferential access to young people in outer cities, and the use of anonymous resumes is growing. Patrick Weil has proposed that France can learn from U.S. policies to admit a certain percentage of high-school students to state universities. Gathering statistics on the origins of employees would help detect systematic discrimination. None of these steps violates the idea of individual equality; they seek to counteract the effects of past and present discrimination. And in this way they resemble American affirmative action programs, wrongly confused with quota systems by many in France.

French leaders must also acknowledge the positive role that Islamic associations can play in developing the sense of citizenship and membership in the outer cities. During the riots, the groups most actively trying to calm matters were Islamic associations. Some politicians evinced their distaste that any Islamic group would play a public role, and objected when the largest federation of such associations, the UOIF, told Muslims that destroying property was un-Islamic. France’s allergies toward public manifestations of Islam (see John R. Bowen, “Muslims and Citizens,” February/March 2004 Boston Review) are reinforced by the suspicion of neighborhood associations that have an ethnic or religious character. As Riva Kastoryano notes, the long-standing opposition to intermediary groups in France—opposition that traces to the anti-guild Le Chapelier Act of 1791—has meant that associations have had to represent themselves as facilitators of integration rather than representatives of communal interests. A deep suspicion of “communalism” (communautarisme) drives political leaders to condemn activities that stem from a specific ethnic or religious group.

Islam is now part of French public life; it will become ever more so, and France needs to recognize the critical role that local ethnic and religious associations play in creating social ties in neighborhoods where such ties are stretched dangerously thin by the pressures of poverty and exclusion. Despite politicians’ reference to angry residents of the outer cities as “immigrants,” those who showed or expressed their anger in the autumn of 2005 are by and large citizens of France, in need of recognition of their origins and respect for their beliefs. Facing the contradictions of the past and the diversity of the present must be part of a new French model of citizenship. Rooted in the egalitarianism of the republican tradition, it must give equal public recognition to all its citizens by acknowledging their human differences, not by denying them. <

John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a 2006 Carnegie Scholar. He is the author of Why the French Don't Like Headscarves.

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John R. Bowen: France’s Revolt

Posted on January 15th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

John R. Bowen: France’s Revolt

Can the Republic live up to its ideals?

John R. Bowen

Originally published in the January/February 2006 issue of Boston Review

8 On October 27, 2005, in Clichy-sous-Blois, one of the poor outer cities that ring Paris, boys leaving a pick-up soccer game flee when police enter their neighborhood. Three of the boys climb a fence around a power station; two are electrocuted, and the third is badly injured. Young men and boys begin torching cars. Two days later, tear gas fills one of the town’s two mosques. (It is still the month of Ramadan.)

The “popular revolt,” as the French secret police call it, expands beyond the local département of Seine-Saint-Denis, eventually reaching cities throughout France. Groups of adolescents charge one mayor’s car as he drives through his city. Journalists take refuge in police vans. Schools and hospitals are burned, but few people die. Many who did not join in the vandalism complain of police harassment and social exclusion. On November 9 the government proclaims a state of emergency, which allows prefects to declare curfews. On November 17, the police say that the situation has returned to normal throughout the country because only 98 cars were burned overnight.

From the first day of the riots European and North American commentators offered the conventional explanations. They told us, correctly, that men and women living in these outer cities faced high unemployment rates and discrimination in jobs and housing, and that in any case jobs were hard to find in France. Prescriptions were comparably predictable. According to The Economist in Britain, creating more jobs would require liberalizing the economy; for France’s anti-globalization Left, it would demand fighting free-market liberalism. French politicians introduced (or reversed cutbacks in) job-creating measures.

But something more was happening. As the skeptical weekly Marianne noted, most unemployed people don’t burn cars; they look for work.

In France, some politicians and intellectuals claimed to have the answer: cultural deficits in the outer cities. One minister, albeit a lowly one, said that polygamy among West Africans led parents to neglect their children, who could then indulge their desire to burn cars. On November 23, 153 deputies in the National Assembly petitioned the Ministry of Justice to prosecute rap groups for inciting “anti-White racism” and “hatred of France.” The prominent intellectual Alain Finkielkraut decried the search for social causes of the riots and declared that the real problem was hatred of France by those who have a “Muslim identity.” American reporters seized upon a French study from September that documented an increase in religiosity in the workplace and suggested that there might be a connection to the riots. (The French secret police instantly dismissed the conjecture.) Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose harsh words for the “scum” in the housing projects helped to spark the riots, momentarily blamed “radical Muslims”—before cooler heads pointed out that the rioters had included non-Muslims, too, and that Muslim organizations had done their best to calm the situation.

But what was missing in these speculations was an adequate account of why so many of those who live in these neighborhoods but attacked no one were so bitterly angry at France. Few residents failed to mention Sarkozy’s insults; his ill-chosen words—or, perhaps, well chosen for the far-right voters he hopes to attract in his presidential campaign—were, along with the deaths of the two boys, the sparks that ignited long-simmering resentments.

What fueled the underlying anger? Feelings of betrayal, for one: many whose parents or grandparents came from overseas territories see France as deeply hypocritical, and some see continuity from colonial to neo-colonial ways of governing immigrants. France’s leaders preach republican theories of equal citizenship for all, regardless of origins. In practice, however, France has sharply stigmatized those who have the wrong origins. The anger at this hypocrisy resembles the attitudes toward the United States that the political scientists Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane call “liberal anti-Americanism”: a strong resentment of the United States for failing to live up to its own principles.

Something analogous is at work in France: “The state claims to be color-blind, [but] society still is not,” Newsweek proclaimed, referring to France’s unwillingness to take account of ethnicity when fighting discrimination. The policy of blindness to ethnic difference, made official in a 1978 law that forbade the state to collect data on ethnic or racial origins, does indeed hamper the state in creating substantive equality for all its citizens. But the problem goes beyond the state’s incapacities in fighting discrimination to the state’s role in creating the discrimination that violates republican principles.

To appreciate this role, we need to set aside two misguided ideas. First, the riots do not, as some have alleged, prove the bankruptcy of the “French model,” whatever that might be. French leaders have no reason to apologize for the core ideas of French republicanism: that everyone ought to be fully accepted as a citizen of France and that the state is responsible for protecting the individual dignity of each citizen. France’s state-centeredness cannot be switched out for a British laissez-faire approach—it developed over the long term from a centralized royalty and from equally centralized efforts to create a set of educational, cultural, and political institutions that could give everyone equal entry into public life. French politicians are constantly tinkering with the system—recent steps to transfer powers from the state to local governments have overturned long-held ways of doing business. And certain features of French life that prevent positive social change—the rigidity of the school system, the lack of data about job discrimination—could be reformed without abandoning the core ideals of republicanism.

Second, the rioters were not all “Muslims,” and few were “immigrants.” The boys and young men who were arrested include what are called “French with roots” (Français de souche), blacks of West African ancestry, and northern Africans (maghrébins), with parents from Algeria, Morocco, or Tunisia. (The difficulty of finding neutral terms for these categories is a symptom of the problem of confronting ethnic distinctions in a country that proclaims such distinctions to be inappropriate for policy discussions.) Some of these young men may consider themselves Muslims, and others assuredly do not, but in any case none of those interviewed mentioned God or the afterlife as having anything to do with their actions. This was neither Hamas nor suicide bombing, though some politicians tried to play the radical-Islam card. Furthermore, the overwhelming number of the boys and young men arrested were citizens of France; they were no more immigrants than Nicolas Sarkozy, whose father came from Hungary.

And yet, Islam and immigration are part of the broader story—of dilapidated housing projects, of insulting treatment by the police, and of a sense of not being heard. Islam and immigration also figure into how the French state has treated the marginal populations and why it has taken French policymakers so long to arrive at the realization—and not all have yet arrived—that their memories of a successful French “melting pot” (creuset) of immigration do not provide useful guides to current realities of exclusion and integration.

* * *

French colonialism contradicted the egalitarian ideals of the republic. Colonial policies treated one portion of the citizenry as subordinate to the other, creating social institutions and attitudes that continue to shape French culture and everyday life. Current divisions, or “fractures,” as they are called in France, reach back to the long history of French settlements overseas and the second-class citizenship held by Algerian Muslims, the brutal Algerian War and the state’s cover-up of its atrocities, the spatial isolation of workers brought from Africa to live in French slums, the longstanding police brutality and far-right hostility toward immigrants, and the state’s continuing tendency, left over from colonial days, to treat Muslims in France as a matter for arrangements with and subsidies from foreign powers. Some recent invocations of the colonial era are explicit, as when Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin activated a law designed to control Algerians in 1955 to control French rioters in 2005.

France has never fully come to terms with this colonial past or its lingering effects. Part of the difficulty comes from another, very different aspect of the French treatment of outsiders: France’s claim to a history of successful integration of immigrants rests on memories of how workers from nearby European countries came eventually to reside in France.

That history began in the mid-1800s, but it was hardly free of conflict. In the 1880s and 1890s, anti-Belgian riots in the northeast and anti-Italian riots in Lyon and the Midi were bloody and bitter. By the early 20th century, Italians, Poles, Portuguese, and Spaniards were arriving in France in large numbers—Portugal remains the largest single source of foreigners on French soil today. In the 1920s and 1930s French workers and growing far-right movements protested their presence—workers resented the competition and considered the Poles too Catholic. Many thought that the immigrants could never assimilate. The state housed the Poles separately from other workers, taught their children Polish so they could return home, and did indeed send many back to Poland.

It was the “30 glorious years” of rebuilding after World War II that encouraged some of the Poles, Italians, and Portuguese to stay in France and that made it possible for them to find jobs without displacing other workers and generating resentment. These new workers joined unions, fought for higher wages, and assimilated culturally. Their story is not entirely unlike that of the late-19th-century wave of immigration to the United States, in which Protestant anger against Catholics led to urban gangs and the anti-Catholic public schools movement; and in the 20th century the immigrants’ children and grandchildren reached the suburbs and ran for national office. In France the children of the Poles and Italians grew up speaking perfect French, went to the same schools as French children, and eventually found jobs alongside those of longer French ancestry, those “with roots.” One Hungarian immigrant’s son became interior minister.

The outer-cities immigration story, in contrast, is not about a melting pot but a bouillabaisse: the mussels and the fish were never supposed to contaminate each other with their tastes, much less blend together. By the 1870s, France had a plentiful supply of cheap, temporary labor in a second-class region of France—Algeria. Invaded in 1830, Algeria became part of France by the 1870s. French Algeria was bifurcated. The colonizers were fully French citizens, with French political and social institutions at their disposal. The Muslim colonized remained as a separate, “indigenous” population with a distinct personal status. They came to be governed by the indigénat, a distinct legal regime under which their family affairs were judged according to a version of Islamic law—unless they renounced that status and applied for citizenship, a step most considered to be a betrayal of their religion. (In contrast, France gave automatic citizenship to all Algerian Jews.)

From the late 19th century onward, then, three categories of residents coexisted in France: citizens, foreigners (who might be immigrants from other European countries), and indigénes, native peoples on French territory. These Africans or Asians had “ethnic characteristics that cannot be reduced to ours,” said a ministerial report from the time. This official system continued into the 1960s, such that in 1961 the Paris police were able to arrest “Algerian French Muslims” on the street—their identity cards, mandatory at all times, made it clear what they were. The legacy of this colonial system was the memory that, as the entrepreneur and advocate for “positive discrimination” Yazid Sabeg has put it, “France established in Algeria a social and interethnic organization based on communalism and discrimination, ignoring its own republican principles.”

Although all immigrants from Africa (northern or sub-Saharan) shared poor housing, police insults, and job discrimination, the early and psychosocially deep structure of immigration and separation in France was laid down in Algeria. In the 1920s, a new government office recruited men from Algeria (as well as from Italy and Poland) to work in metropolitan France and then return home. They remained outside the mainstream. It is not even, as economist Éric Maurin put it, that Paris’s outer cities are the “far-off and last echo of the failure of the republic of the universal.” The French model for building up metropolitan industrial capacity while not bleeding Algeria dry of its labor force depended on a “failure” of integration, in which workers from Algeria would remain apart so as not to integrate into French society. Individuals or families arriving in France generally found lodging either in shantytowns, the famous bidonvilles that sprang up in a ring around Paris and other large cities, or in low-cost “transit hotels,” where they shared rooms and even beds with other workers.

Ironically, the very length of the North African experience made integration more difficult. Many of the workers stayed in metropolitan France only a short time and therefore were less likely to develop the networks and habits that would have facilitated integration. They were segregated at work and in their housing by policies pursued by employers and by agents of the French state, who treated them as natives out of place and due to return home. In addition, most Algerians resisted assimilation. Because obtaining citizenship required Muslims to renounce their Muslim identity, few did so—only about 26 per year between 1865 and 1934. Even by 1990 only about 13 percent of Algerian immigrants to France had acquired French nationality, compared with 60 to 70 percent for European immigrants. Furthermore, the nationalist movements in Algeria and the post-independence Algerian governments discouraged Algerians from considering permanent settlement in France and tried to exercise control over Algerians in France.

The rapid growth in settlement by Algerian families in metropolitan France coincided with, and was thus colored by, the bloody war for Algerian independence from 1954 to 1962. The war killed thousands of people, featured the systematic use of torture by French soldiers against French citizens and assassinations in Algiers and Paris, and created bitter memories of betrayal on all sides. We might compare the Algerian War to the U.S. Civil War: both were battles for independence fought by a southern, poorer, agricultural region against an industrial, politically dominant North. Both tore apart the society.

* * *

The legacies of that long-term colonial experience are to be found in emotional memories and in social structures of separation and discrimination. At the moment of Algerian independence in 1962, about one million people were living in Algeria as settlers or civil servants, and these pied noirs returned to metropolitan France angry at the French state they felt had abandoned them. About five million French soldiers had fought against those siding with the Algerian Liberation Front. Hundreds of thousands of Algerian Muslims had been arriving in France each year, and they were bitterly divided. Some, the harkis, had fought on the French side, and their pro-colonial engagements became an embarrassment for a France seeking to forget the past. Most Algerians had supported the Liberation Front either actively or passively, but they found themselves now living in the country of the former enemy. Few sentiments were clear; fewer still were proud and positive.

The conflicts and the anger were imported to the mainland. The state sought to cover up the more delicate moments of the “operations to maintain order” in Algeria and the 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris. It was only in 1999 and 2000 that the lid began to come off: in June 1999, for the first time, the French parliament acknowledged that there had indeed been a “war” in Algeria. The first use of the term “massacre” for the October 1961 killings came in March 1999, during the trial of the man who in 1961 was the Paris police chief: Maurice Papon, on trial for sending Jews to gas chambers during World War II, not for his massacre 19 years later. In 2000 and 2001 revelations of torture in Algeria emerged, as did the fact that high officials, including François Mitterrand, had known about it. In 2001, Paris’s mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, placed a plaque on the spot where 40 years earlier police had thrown Algerians into the Seine, and a similar ceremony with the same mayor was held in 2005, but no representative of the state has yet to acknowledge the massacre, and, indeed, two archivists who leaked incriminating documents from 1961 received reprisals.

Under these conditions—a century of second-class legal status, a bloody civil war and bitter aftermath, continued isolation and discrimination—what sense of French citizenship and memory could be available to African immigrants and their children and grandchildren? Part of the question is what sort of memory does France wish to promote and enshrine? The authors of the recent book The Colonial Fracture argue that France is the only European country to have dissociated national history from colonial history. France’s history of itself is internal, structured around battle sites or wines or monuments. The seven volumes of France’s quasi-official “Sites of Memory” do not include sites overseas. Colonial histories, on the other hand, are nostalgic, exotic, and increasingly rosy. The several museums of colonial history now being planned will celebrate what Jacques Toubon, the head of the museum commission, has called the “work” (l’oeuvre) of colonialism. On February 23, 2005, the National Assembly passed a law (with few deputies present) stipulating that schoolteachers teach “the positive role of the French presence overseas, notably in North Africa.” The resolution led to an outcry by many historians, but touched a chord among many who wish that the “civilizing mission” carried out by France not be forgotten, particularly the harkis who had fought on the French side in the Algerian War. In several cities in the southeast, these constituencies succeeded in erecting monuments to members of the paramilitary OAS, an organization engaged in assassinations in Algeria. In November, after the riots, the majority UMP party, anxious to preserve support by the harkis, defeated an effort to repeal the article in question.

Colonial-era memory may prove increasingly divisive in the years to come. Even as a loose alliance of anti-racism organizations declared the existence in France of “The Indigenous People of the Republic” in an effort to underscore the perduring effects of colonial rule, other groups emphasized the legacy of slavery and of anti-Semitism. Shortly after the riots ended, 56 associations representing people of African and Antilles ancestry formed the French Federation of Blacks to give blacks more visibility in relation to North Africans and to demand that France face more openly its history of slavery.

* * *

This colonial history is crystallized not only in memories but in immediate, lived experiences. People in the poor outer cities seek to make sense of why their lives are as they are, even as they clamor for jobs and better housing and respect.

France’s labor and housing policies left poorer populations living on the geographical and thus social margins of French cities—in marked contrast to the inner-city segregation of American blacks. Their neighborhoods are not museums to the past; they are populated by recent immigrants as well as the descendants of older ones because immigration continued, even after the 1974 halting of most labor migration. About three quarters of legal immigrants arrive in France today through claims of marriage or family ties.

For a sense of this mixing of old and new consider the Créteil académie, the governing unit of school districts, which includes three of the major catchment areas for immigrants near Paris, the prefectures of Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne, and Seine-et-Marne. Between 3,000 and 4,000 new immigrant schoolchildren arrive in the district each year who do not speak any French. They are of 70 different nationalities, but most come from the same countries that have provided the majority of immigrants. In Seine-Saint-Denis, for example, 28 percent of these immigrant children are Algerian, 12 percent Moroccan—and 11 percent Chinese. Thus the second generation sits, school desk by school desk, with a new first generation from the same countries.

This story is not of unbroken gloom, but it is full of unintended consequences. Physical conditions in the outer cities improved markedly during the 1960s and 1970s, when the state built huge complexes of apartments as low-rent housing, or HLM (habitations à loyers modérés), which each housed thousands of families. These new complexes were heartily welcomed at the time. They were clean, had toilets, and at first they housed together native French and immigrants from all parts. But better-off families (especially native French and Asians) were able to move out and buy small homes, and as the nearby factories closed their doors in the 1970s and 1980s, those who stayed found themselves increasingly without work. The projects became traps rather than springboards, and it is the children who grew up in them who burst onto the front pages this fall.

Perpetuation of inequality works in myriad and sometimes subtle ways, starting with interactions between housing and schooling. In France, as in the United States, residential concentrations of poor minorities make income disparities worse. The concentrations of immigrants in certain neighborhoods—about twice as high as in the United States generally—had their beginnings in state policies toward immigrant labor and have persistent effects on schooling and employment. Who sits in the school desk next to you has significant effects on how likely you are to complete school. These effects help explain why 20 years of special state investments in poorly performing school districts (the ZEP, zones d’éducation prioritaires) have had no measurable effect on school success. The concentration effects continue after school: immigrants earn much less than native-born French with the same level of education.

Ironically, the low-cost housing projects, though often blamed for social problems, serve to counteract ethnic self-segregation even as they reinforce economic segregation. It is very difficult to find a place in an HLM—people compete to get out of unsafe and filthy privately run apartments—so you end up wherever the housing office sees fit to put you. As a result, blacks, North Africans, and “native” French live side by side in the projects. But they observe boundaries. You date across those lines at your own risk; when one black-brown couple tried it last year a shoot-out followed and prompted Sarkozy to make the first of his incendiary remarks.

There are bright spots where institutions and associations thrive and gloomy spots where they do not. Within the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, where the riots were concentrated, the cities of Saint-Denis and Clichy-sous-Bois at first glance seem similar: high unemployment rates, subsidized housing, foreign residents, and poor schools. Saint-Denis, however, is a bustling market center with easy access by subway or train to the center of Paris, a campus of the University of Paris, private Islamic schools and associations, and the Basilica, a major tourist attraction. Clichy-sous-Bois (where the riots began) has isolated housing projects, no cafes or bistros, no educational institutions beyond the mediocre public schools, and very difficult access by public transport.

Public schools are supposed to be the major French mechanism for integration. But, as in the United States, schools in principle take their pupils from the surrounding neighborhoods, thus reinforcing residential segregation. Parental strategies exacerbate these effects because many of the better-off parents manage to place their children in schools in a better district—40 percent of Paris-area parents are estimated to have done so through legal methods and an unknown number through illegal ones. These strategies for getting around the rules make the concentration of immigrants in any one school two to two and a half times what it otherwise would be.

Within schools, teachers channel pupils very early on toward those professions that seem to best fit their social and cultural profile. High schools were created by Napoleon in 1802 in order to form an elite, and they have never lost their essential gate-keeping quality. Social-class differences show up massively in the schools children attend, which tracks they pursue (math, arts, technology), whether they take the baccalaureate or a less demanding exam, and what they do afterward. Ghislaine Hudson, the principal of a school south of Paris, points to the way in which pupils are evaluated: if they are weak in any subject, they fail and have to repeat a year, so weaker students experience failure after failure, year after year.

Pupils who fail together also live in the same neighborhoods, adding to their sense of class determinism. As two sociologists recently wrote, young people in the poor outer cities experience schools not as a way to advance but as “a site of selection that turns their social fate into so many personal humiliations.” Better-off parents have the option of private school, and 40 percent of all French parents place a child at one time or another in a private school.

People in the outer cities have higher unemployment rates, but the official numbers understate the realities youth face. A town may have 20 percent unemployment, twice the national average, but for younger residents the rate may be 30 percent, and for those who left school and populate the projects, the rate may be 50 or 60 percent. Discrimination makes already poor chances worse. A 2005 report on employment is one of the few to have examined the difference ethnicity makes in France. The authors conclude that having a North African background makes you two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than if you are (or more importantly, if you look and sound) “native French,” controlling for level of education, and that this difference has changed little in 15 years. Ominously, in a December 2005 poll, one third of all French residents said they considered themselves to be “raciste,” a sharp rise from the previous year.

Compounding these structural features is constant harassment by the police. Officers use the informal tu, received (and intended) as an insult—after the riots began Sarkozy ordered the police to stop this particular practice. Citizens with darker skin report being stopped frequently, some four or five times a day. At each stop, the police demand to see identity papers, sometimes tossing them to the ground. It was fear of being hauled down to the police station and held for hours (a fear based on their own experience) that probably led the boys in Clichy-sous-Bois to flee to their deaths in October. (The introduction of neighborhood police, who would get to know residents, was curtailed by the governing center-right party in 2002 as part of budget cuts.)

* * *

French official responses to the crisis have been halting and often contradictory—Sarkozy tells police to use the formal vous but repeats his use of “scum”; the government promises to restore some neighborhood subsidies but has little new to offer regarding discrimination in jobs and housing; de Villepin avoids celebrating Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz because the Corsican reinstated slavery but he tightens up immigration and his party insists on colonialism’s positive impact.

France’s leaders must acknowledge the contradictions of the past and the continuing psychological and social reality of that past. France’s taboo on discussing ethnic and national origins has served to hide their impact on present inequalities and discrimination. This taboo can be lifted without abandoning the republican model. Some post-secondary schools and corporations give preferential access to young people in outer cities, and the use of anonymous resumes is growing. Patrick Weil has proposed that France can learn from U.S. policies to admit a certain percentage of high-school students to state universities. Gathering statistics on the origins of employees would help detect systematic discrimination. None of these steps violates the idea of individual equality; they seek to counteract the effects of past and present discrimination. And in this way they resemble American affirmative action programs, wrongly confused with quota systems by many in France.

French leaders must also acknowledge the positive role that Islamic associations can play in developing the sense of citizenship and membership in the outer cities. During the riots, the groups most actively trying to calm matters were Islamic associations. Some politicians evinced their distaste that any Islamic group would play a public role, and objected when the largest federation of such associations, the UOIF, told Muslims that destroying property was un-Islamic. France’s allergies toward public manifestations of Islam (see John R. Bowen, “Muslims and Citizens,” February/March 2004 Boston Review) are reinforced by the suspicion of neighborhood associations that have an ethnic or religious character. As Riva Kastoryano notes, the long-standing opposition to intermediary groups in France—opposition that traces to the anti-guild Le Chapelier Act of 1791—has meant that associations have had to represent themselves as facilitators of integration rather than representatives of communal interests. A deep suspicion of “communalism” (communautarisme) drives political leaders to condemn activities that stem from a specific ethnic or religious group.

Islam is now part of French public life; it will become ever more so, and France needs to recognize the critical role that local ethnic and religious associations play in creating social ties in neighborhoods where such ties are stretched dangerously thin by the pressures of poverty and exclusion. Despite politicians’ reference to angry residents of the outer cities as “immigrants,” those who showed or expressed their anger in the autumn of 2005 are by and large citizens of France, in need of recognition of their origins and respect for their beliefs. Facing the contradictions of the past and the diversity of the present must be part of a new French model of citizenship. Rooted in the egalitarianism of the republican tradition, it must give equal public recognition to all its citizens by acknowledging their human differences, not by denying them. < John R. Bowen is the Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a 2006 Carnegie Scholar. He is the author of Why the French Don't Like Headscarves.

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C L O S E R – Pictures of you

Posted on January 15th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Public Islam.

C L O S E R

The release of the prophet Mohammed cartoons by the Danish Jylland Posten has become a hot topic, online and offline.

First in a few sentences the whole story. After the complaint by an author that no one dared to illustrate his book (because, according to him illustrators feared that extremists would find it sacrilegious to break the Islamic ban on depicting Mohammed – or people in general), the newspaper urged cartoonists to send in drawings of the prophet.

So twelve people did on the newspaper posted all the photo’s. It caused (and still does) a huge debate about ‘Islam and free speech‘ and several Muslims launced a complaint.

“The newspaper has with its action deliberately stepped on Islam’s ethical and moral values with the purpose of contempt and ridiculing Muslims’ feelings, their holy sites and their religious symbols,” the group said.

(My italics, MdK)

The Danish PM refused to talk with Muslims about the issue:

Meanwhile, Denmark’s prime minister on Tuesday accused a group of local Muslims of smearing the country’s reputation in the Middle East as they sought support against a newspaper that published caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he was “stunned” that leaders of the Islamic Faith Community had travelled to Egypt, Syria and Lebanon “to stir up attitudes against Denmark and Danes”.

The group’s leader, Ahmed Abu Laban, a cleric, has defended the December trip, saying the Muslim community was feeling marginalised in Denmark in its protests against the paper.

Dutch MP Hirsi Ali supported him

European leaders should step forward and support Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s refusal to meet with eleven Muslim ambassadors to discuss press coverage of Islam, Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali said on Sunday.

Rasmussen, however, declined to meet the ambassadors, saying that if they had the slightest understanding of the workings of Danish society, they would know that he had no desire or powers to change the newspaper’s editorial policies. ‘The Danish prime minister’s reply to the ambassadors should be an example for every European leader,’ Hirsi Ali told Jyllands-Posten’s reporter. ‘The prime minister steps forward to tell Muslims loud and clear that the freedom of expression is a deciding factor for a free society, and that a prime minister in a free society neither can nor wishes to regulate what newspapers do or do not do. The fact that he makes a special point of explaining this to the ambassador from Turkey – which is seeking entrance to the EU – is an expression of true statesmanship.’

‘It’s necessary to taunt Muslims on their relationship with Mohammed, because otherwise we will never have the dialogue we need to establish with Muslims on the most central question: Do you really feel that the prophet Mohammed is completely infallible, and that every Muslim in Europe in 2005 should follow the way of life the prophet had 1400 years ago, as the Koran dictates? The provocation is necessary to spark the debate,’ Hirsi Ali said.

The debate is therefore about islam and freedom of speech and the need to tackle the prophet Mohammed as an example for all Muslims by provocations. I don’t know if that was the intention of the author mentioned above, but that’s off topic probably.

So one might be pragmatic and saying what is the need the draw the prophet Mohammed in a book about him. Muslims can do without (see the movie Al Rissala). On the other hand there are muslimgroups who did make drawings of the prophet. So what is actually the problem for them. Well the pictures could be a problem for some, but more important is probably the part in italics I mentioned above, and will repeat here:

the purpose of contempt and ridiculing Muslims’ feelings,

The Muslims who are upset, seem to be upset because they think this is done with a negative reason, or with a more neutral phrase (by Hirsi Ali) to provoke them. This seems also the opinion of Zubair Butt Hussain, Spokesman “Muslims in Dialogue“, Denmark:

But long before these drawings came into the public domain, there was widespread apprehension among Danish Muslims over the way they and their religious affiliation were presented in the media. The image projected in the Danish media of Islam has been one of a faith that did not undergo a reformation and renaissance similar to Christianity and is thus stuck in the middle ages. The drawings are simply a culmination of several years of media persecution of the Muslim minority in Denmark.

Even worse is the role elected politicians have played in stoking this fire. It is not unusual for certain politicians to make the ill-willed and mistaken but common equation that Muslims are immigrants, and immigrants are badly integrated and therefore the root of all evil in Danish society. Beyond the prejudice against immigrants in general this belies, it also contradicts the fact that most Muslims in Denmark have been here for 30-40 years and many are born here. But if that is pointed out, they are simply called second or third generation immigrants. Even ethnic Danish Muslim converts are described by the derogatory “ersatz-immigrants”; one politician has gone so far as to compare these converts to Nazis, and, in all seriousness, advocate that they be placed under surveillance as they constitute a threat to society. A politician from the same party described Muslims as a spreading cancer, while others have suggested criminals of non-Danish ethnic background should be interned or exiled with their closest family.

So well they got what they wanted. Muslims are provoked and it is striking to see how people are islamizing their complaints about a lack of respect and all. And also how non-Muslims are islamizing this protest by speaking of a holy war or by speaking of jihad. And of course some Muslims are doing the same with the violent jihad towards Denmark.

But one can of course be very principal and state the freedom of speech is absolute not matter what the intentions are.

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C L O S E R – De dood van Salahdin

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

C L O S E R

In Amsterdam schijnt het wat onrustig te zijn na de dood van Salahdin, een 17-jarige jongen uit Amsterdam-west. Hij vluchtte op zijn scooter voor de politie.

Toen de agent de scooter naderde, kwam de 17-jarige Marokkaan naar zijn scooter gesneld om er vervolgens op te springen en met hoge snelheid weg te rijden. De agent liep daarop weer terug naar zijn auto.

Even later trof de agent de jongen aan tussen de brokstukken van zijn scooter. Hij heeft de jongen nog geprobeerd te reanimeren. De scooter was niet gestolen.

Achtervolging
In tegenstelling tot wat de Marokkaanse jongeren denken, is er volgens de politie geen sprake geweest van een achtervolging.

De grimmige sfeer in de wijk ontstond gisteravond even na 23.00 uur. Een auto die stond geparkeerd in de Hart Nibbrigstraat werd in brand gestoken, vanaf een balkon werden langsrijdende politieauto’s bekogeld met stenen en even voor middernacht werden de ramen van het politiebureau aan het August Allebéplein ingegooid.

Buurtregisseurs en buurtvaders moesten er aan te pas komen om de gemoederen tot bedaren te brengen.

Zowel op Maroc.nl, Marokko.nl, AT5 wordt er flink en af toe fel over gediscussieerd. Niet alleen over de ware toedracht van deze zaak, maar bijvoorbeeld ook over de stille tocht (of is het herdenking) van gisteren en de bedreigingen aan het adres van een MTNL verslaggever.

Vergelijkingen met de rellen in Frankrijk en Australië liggen voor de hand. De vraag is toch waarom de situatie zo licht ontvlambaar is?

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C L O S E R – Netwerk, Maroc.nl en normloze ouders

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

Recent heb ik hier het volgende onderwerp geplaatst:C L O S E R » Blog Archive » Netwerk – Voetballer stimuleert integratie

In die uitzending vroeg een verslaggever aan Allach waarom Marokkaanse ouders criminelen minder zouden corrigeren dan autochtone ouders. Laks als ik ben fronste ik alleen mijn wenkbrauwen en deed er niets mee. Op Maroc.nl wel:

Geachte redactie,

Graag zou ik wat meer informatie willen krijgen over bepaalde onderwerpen die zijn genoemd in de uitzending van woensdag 4 januari 2006. Om precies te zijn in het item over Mohammed Allach de Marokkaans Nederlandse voetballer.

In het interview met Allach is verwezen door de interviewer naar een onderzoek(en) waaruit blijkt dat marokkaanse ouders het criminele gedrag van hun jongeren meer goedkeuren dan nederlandse ouders. Kunt U mij alstublieft helpen aan de bron van deze uitspraak van de interviewer? U zou mij daar een grote dienst mee doen.

ook wordt er in de voice over deze uitspraak gedaan, “Bovendien blijkt dat het meer nog dan werkloosheid of een laag inkomen, een groter rol speelt dat de omgeving van de marokkaanse jongens misdaad onvoldoende afkeurt.”

Kunt U mij wijzen waarop deze uitspraak wordt gebaseerd?

Ik kan niet genoeg uitdrukken hoezeer ik U dankbaar ben als U mij aan een antwoordt helpt op deze vragen.

Hoogachtend

Daar kwam de volgende reactie op van Netwerk:

Geachte heer,

Allereerst dank voor uw reaktie. Het onderzoek waar wij het over hebben is er één van Lex Borghans en Bas ter Weel, economen van de Universiteit van Maastricht. Zij schrijven: “De invloed van de directe omgeving is de belangrijkste oorzaak van de hoge criminaliteit onder Marokkanen in Nederland. Meer nog dan werkloosheid of een laag inkomen, speelt het een grote rol dat familie, vrienden en buurtgenoten misdaad onvoldoende afkeu- ren.”
Verder:
“In Amerika is er wel een duidelijk relatie tussen inkomen en criminaliteit, maar dankzij de sociale voorzieningen in Nederland is dat verband er hier niet. De invloed van de directe omgeving is van grotere invloed.
Het lijkt erop dat de directe omgeving misdaad niet afkeurt, en dat heeft vooral ermee te maken dat Marokkanen niet goed zijn ingebed in de maat-schappij.”
Verder is er een boek van antropoloog Hans Werdmölder, die 25 jaar jonge criminele Marokkaanse criminelen bestudeert. Hij zegt:
“Afwijkend gedrag wegredeneren, wegmasseren. Altijd is de nadruk gelegd op de sociale positie. Dat moet je niet wegpoetsen, maar de vraag dringt zich toch op: waarom zijn Turken dan zoveel minder crimineel dan Marokkanen? In die Riffijnse cultuur is verdeeldheid troef, dat zie je in Nederland terugkomen. Er is een hoog eergevoel, veel schaamte en een dubbele moraal. Met als gevolg: de ontkenning van criminaliteit. Voor alles moet de vrede in de eigen kring worden bewaard. En als die ontkenning niet langer valt vol te houden, dan worden de problemen gebag atelliseerd, in de sfeer van: waar heb je het eigenlijk over.”

Ik hoop u hiermee voldoende te hebben geïnformeerd,

Vriendelijke groet,

*******
Verslaggever Netwerk

Er wordt dus verwezen naar een onderzoek van Borghans en Ter Weel en van Werdmölder. Bezoekers van Maroc.nl plaatsen terecht grote kanttekeningen bij het refereren naar Borghans en Ter Weel. Hun onderzoek staat beschreven in:
Borghans, Lex and Bas ter Weel, “Criminaliteit en etniciteit”, Economisch Statistische Berichten, vol. 88, no. 4419, 14 November 2003, pp. 548-550

Daar staat de vreemde zinsnede:

Het bevorderen van de integratie van allochtonen – door middel van het bijbrengen van het Nederlandse normbesef en wellicht
het verhogen van de straffen voor bepaalde delicten – zou de afweging crimineel gedrag te vertonen naar alle waarschijnlijkheid laten dalen.

Hoe zij tot die conclusie komen is echter volslagen onduidelijk wanneer je dat artikel leest. In een stuk uit Trouw wordt dat wat duidelijker:

Ter Weel vermoedt dat familie, vrienden en buurtgenoten het wangedrag van Marokkanen onvoldoende corrigeren.

Het is dus klaarblijkelijk een vermoeden, giswerk dus. Dat ze daartoe komen is op zich niet zo verwonderlijk. Cultuur en etniciteit worden vaak als restverklaringen gebruikt om zaken te verklaren. Als we willen verklaren waarom de criminaliteit onder Marokkanen hoog is, dan moeten we kijken naar de relatie inkomen en criminaliteit, eenoudergezinnen enzovoorts. Als er dan nog steeds een verschil over blijft, moet dat wel cultuur of etniciteit zijn. Sterker nog dat rolt er bijna automatisch uit als je etniciteit als objectief vastgestelde categorie in je analyses betrekt. In een kritiek op deze onderzoekers wijzen Veenman en Groenveld nogmaals op de kracht van sociaal-economische verklaringen en eveneens op het gegeven dat de eerste generatie juist minder betrokken zou zijn bij criminaliteit. Dit laatste nuanceert dus de culturele of etniciteitsinvloeden (of je neemt de Nederlandse cultuur erbij als restfactor) in relatie tot criminaliteit.

Nu is de vraag of cultuur en etniciteit een rol spelen niet zo interessant. Het antwoord daarop is ja. Dat geldt ook voor autochtonen. De vraag is altijd hoe. In het citaat van Werdmölder herken ik ites meer, maar de vraag is of het meer is dan onder autochtonen. Het patroon van ontkenning kan wel anders zijn. Maar mijn ervaring in Gouda (nee hoor niet representatief) leert dat zowel autochtone families als Marokkaanse families er erg goed in slagen om weg te kijken en weg te masseren. Het blijft toch je kind zullen we maar zeggen. In ieder geval zogenaamde Nederlandse normen bijbrengen zal niet echt werken. Of het nu autochtone of Marokkaanse ouders zijn, ze weten heus wel dat diefstal e.d. niet mag.

Had Netwerk dit nu wel zo moeten doen? Hebben ze het onderzoek zo gebruikt dat het past bij hun vraagstelling? In ieder geval mijn complimenten aan de kritische (en actievere) deelnemers van Maroc.nl

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Middle East Online – 'Marock' causes shock and awe in Morocco

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Arts & culture, Misc. News.

Middle East Online
‘Marock’ causes shock and awe in Morocco

Filmmakers lash out at Leila Marrakchi’s controversial film about Muslim-Jew love story in Tangiers film festival.

By Saad Guerraoui – LONDON

Leila Marrakchi’s “Marock” is a movie not like any other movie Moroccans have seen or heard. The Moroccan film has caused uproar among the audience and critics in the eight Moroccan film festival held in Tangiers.

Many elites of Moroccan cinema were appalled by the story which touches Islamic values and questioned the filmmaker’s nationality.

Mohamed Asli, a film director, explained how Marrakchi had been blindly manipulated by the “Zionist ideology.”

“Neither the young lady (director) nor her film is Moroccan… and they have no place in national festival,” he lamented. “The government becomes accomplice of Imperialism and Zionism by allowing its screening.”

The film tells the story of a rich 17-year old Moroccan girl from a liberal Muslim family who falls in love with a handsome Jew from a rich family just before she graduated from high school.

Marrakchi said the title “illustrates a spoiled, wild and schizophrenic youth which adheres to western lifestyle but still attached to its traditions.”

The filmmaker unveiled a taboo in the Moroccan society. Her film simply reflects the real truth but which many would not dare talking about. Marock was filmed in Casablanca where you can come across a sexy girl dressed in a mini-skirt and another veiled from head to toe, and where you find the country’s trendiest night clubs and Islamic fundamentalism.

However, there was another cultural factor which angered the audience. The only conversations heard in Arabic were those of domestics, chauffeurs, and parking attendants. The filmmaker forgot the illiteracy level in Morocco where only a tiny minority is able to speak and understand French fluently.

Marock certainly caused a trauma in the festival, but raised many question marks that were forgotten in the Moroccan society where the wealthy teens are more and more rebellious against the country’s Islamic and cultural values.

1 comment.

Middle East Online – ‘Marock’ causes shock and awe in Morocco

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by .
Categories: Arts & culture, Misc. News.

Middle East Online
‘Marock’ causes shock and awe in Morocco

Filmmakers lash out at Leila Marrakchi’s controversial film about Muslim-Jew love story in Tangiers film festival.

By Saad Guerraoui – LONDON

Leila Marrakchi’s “Marock” is a movie not like any other movie Moroccans have seen or heard. The Moroccan film has caused uproar among the audience and critics in the eight Moroccan film festival held in Tangiers.

Many elites of Moroccan cinema were appalled by the story which touches Islamic values and questioned the filmmaker’s nationality.

Mohamed Asli, a film director, explained how Marrakchi had been blindly manipulated by the “Zionist ideology.”

“Neither the young lady (director) nor her film is Moroccan… and they have no place in national festival,” he lamented. “The government becomes accomplice of Imperialism and Zionism by allowing its screening.”

The film tells the story of a rich 17-year old Moroccan girl from a liberal Muslim family who falls in love with a handsome Jew from a rich family just before she graduated from high school.

Marrakchi said the title “illustrates a spoiled, wild and schizophrenic youth which adheres to western lifestyle but still attached to its traditions.”

The filmmaker unveiled a taboo in the Moroccan society. Her film simply reflects the real truth but which many would not dare talking about. Marock was filmed in Casablanca where you can come across a sexy girl dressed in a mini-skirt and another veiled from head to toe, and where you find the country’s trendiest night clubs and Islamic fundamentalism.

However, there was another cultural factor which angered the audience. The only conversations heard in Arabic were those of domestics, chauffeurs, and parking attendants. The filmmaker forgot the illiteracy level in Morocco where only a tiny minority is able to speak and understand French fluently.

Marock certainly caused a trauma in the festival, but raised many question marks that were forgotten in the Moroccan society where the wealthy teens are more and more rebellious against the country’s Islamic and cultural values.

1 comment.

Protected: Trouw, deVerdieping| podium – Moslimbroeder, wees goed voor uw vrouw

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues.

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Protected: Trouw, deVerdieping| podium – Moslimbroeder, wees goed voor uw vrouw

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues.

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Protected: Brabants Dagblad – Offerfeest vieren in een ’Nederlands keurslijf’

Posted on January 14th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Islamnews.

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Expatica's Dutch news in English: Man admits fabricating statement on Van Gogh

Posted on January 13th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues.

Expatica’s Dutch news in English: Man admits fabricating statement on Van Gogh
Witness admits fabricating statement on Van Gogh killing

13 January 2006

AMSTERDAM — A witness admitted to the trial of 13 terrorist suspects in Amsterdam on Friday he concocted his claim about one of the men admitting he provided the gun to kill film maker Theo van Gogh.

“It was a classic cock-and-bull story,” Jamal B. told the panel of three judges.

He said he agreed to make the statement after police harassed his family for six months and put pressure on him to implicate accused man, Bilal L.

Bilal L. is a friend of Mohammed B., the man jailed for life in July last year for murdering Van Gogh on 2 November 2004. Mohammed B. claimed he acted alone and that his friends did not know about his plan.

Bilal L. and 12 other Muslim men are on trial in Amsterdam for allegedly being part of a terrorist group, dubbed the Hofstadgroep by the authorities. It is alleged they met, often in Mohammed B.’s house, to discuss terrorism. The accused men claim they only gathered to pray and share their views about Islam.

Prosecutors announced earlier this week they had a surprise witness, Jamal B., who could link Bilal B. to the murder.

The police inspector told the trial on Friday that Jamal B. had shared a cell with Bilal L. for three months. Bilal L. was serving a sentence for threatening MP Geert Wilders.

A police inspector told the court on Friday morning Jamal B. claimed Bilal L. confided in him that members of the group knew about the plan to kill Van Gogh and that he (Bilal L.) provided the bicycle Mohammed B. used.

But when Jamal took the stand he said the statement he made was totally false. “I can’t help you because he never told me anything. I was harassed every day. What do you do then? I made it all up.”

0 comments.

Expatica’s Dutch news in English: Man admits fabricating statement on Van Gogh

Posted on January 13th, 2006 by .
Categories: Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues.

Expatica’s Dutch news in English: Man admits fabricating statement on Van Gogh
Witness admits fabricating statement on Van Gogh killing

13 January 2006

AMSTERDAM — A witness admitted to the trial of 13 terrorist suspects in Amsterdam on Friday he concocted his claim about one of the men admitting he provided the gun to kill film maker Theo van Gogh.

“It was a classic cock-and-bull story,” Jamal B. told the panel of three judges.

He said he agreed to make the statement after police harassed his family for six months and put pressure on him to implicate accused man, Bilal L.

Bilal L. is a friend of Mohammed B., the man jailed for life in July last year for murdering Van Gogh on 2 November 2004. Mohammed B. claimed he acted alone and that his friends did not know about his plan.

Bilal L. and 12 other Muslim men are on trial in Amsterdam for allegedly being part of a terrorist group, dubbed the Hofstadgroep by the authorities. It is alleged they met, often in Mohammed B.’s house, to discuss terrorism. The accused men claim they only gathered to pray and share their views about Islam.

Prosecutors announced earlier this week they had a surprise witness, Jamal B., who could link Bilal B. to the murder.

The police inspector told the trial on Friday that Jamal B. had shared a cell with Bilal L. for three months. Bilal L. was serving a sentence for threatening MP Geert Wilders.

A police inspector told the court on Friday morning Jamal B. claimed Bilal L. confided in him that members of the group knew about the plan to kill Van Gogh and that he (Bilal L.) provided the bicycle Mohammed B. used.

But when Jamal took the stand he said the statement he made was totally false. “I can’t help you because he never told me anything. I was harassed every day. What do you do then? I made it all up.”

0 comments.

C L O S E R – Anonimity and Credibility

Posted on January 13th, 2006 by .
Categories: Some personal considerations.

C L O S E R

An interesting discussion on several blogs about the identity of The Religious policeman. Is he/are they really (Mahmood’s Den) from Saudi Arabia or are they not (Abu Sinan).

There are some serious doubts about the identity (LGF)and therefore also about the credibility (Sabbah’s)of the Religious Policeman.

Of course The Religious Policeman are not the only ones who blog anonymous. For these anonymous bloggers the whole discussion might same an example of nagging and wining(Khalaf).

Nevertheless it’s an interesting point in case. Why should bloggers reveal or hide(Tootlog) their identity? Maybe an interesting question for you (my reader) as well? Because do you really know I’m for real? I could have a pseudonym, stole ones identity or something else. Would that be important (never mind the legal issues)?

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Protected: intermediair.nl – Kiezen voor de koran

Posted on January 12th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

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AL-QAEDA VS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD – AN ONLINE FEUD

Posted on January 12th, 2006 by .
Categories: Religious and Political Radicalization.

TERRORISM: AL-QAEDA VS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD – AN ONLINE FEUD

Roma, 10 Jan. (AKI) – This year’s Eid al-Adha, Islam’s festival of sacrifice, will be celebrated amid a escalating war of words fought on the Internet between al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. On the eve of what is considered one of Islam’s holiest days, which coincides with the end of the annual Haj pilgrimage, two prominent al-Qaeda leaders have both assailed the Brotherhood for what they say is it’s betrayal of Islamist principles.

Al-Qaeda Number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, fired the first verbal salvo when on a video message broadcast by Qatar-based TV network Aljazeera on 6 January, he accused the Egyptian chapter of the Brotherhood of serving Washington’s interests.

“That is the truth of the political game America is playing in Egypt, through presidential and parliamentary elections, to exploit the masses and their love for Islam,” he said.

“They (the Brotherhood) said they won 30 seats, now they say they have won 80 and in five years time they will say 100. And so goes [the American] strategy to conceed them some space,” he said, referring to the Brotherhood’s decision to take part in the Egyptian polls.

Al-Zawahiri, describing the Brotherhood as “these Islamic factions who have been pursuing the same strategy (parliamentary legitimacy) for decades” pointed to how the Brotherhood’s founder, Hasan al-Banna, “had tried this experience twice since World War II and failing.”

The Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt) sharp response came from the mouth of its spokesman Essam al-Erian. “Those who are opposing reformist Islamic movements [like the Brotherhood] are the Americans, the autocratic Arab regimes, the secular extremists and al-Zawahiri. What’s that like for a strange alliance,” he said.

The Brotherhood spokesman added that his organisation believed in the use of jihad, or holy war, but only in contexts “like Iraq and Palestine” of self-defence against external attacks.

Just days later, in an audio message posted on the Internet, Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq also raged against what he saw as the Brotherhood’s treachery.

“How can anyone choose any other path but that of Jihad? They (the Brotherhood) have chosen to enter parliament and accept the constitution. Well, they are deviants,” he said.

“I appeal to the Islamic party (the Brotherhood): abandon this strategy which is a losing one for Sunnis and which is not in accordance with (Islamic) Sharia law… Where do you think that road will take you?” he added.

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BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Hundreds killed in Hajj stampede

Posted on January 12th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Islamnews.

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Hundreds killed in Hajj stampede

At least 345 Muslim pilgrims have been killed in a crush during stone-throwing ritual at the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, officials say.

Hundreds of pilgrims have also been injured. A BBC correspondent at the scene in Mina saw dozens of bodies lined up on the ground.

The ritual has seen many lethal stampedes but the number of dead this time is the highest in 16 years.

After a crush in 2004, barriers and stewards were added to improve safety.

0 comments.

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Hundreds killed in Hajj stampede

Posted on January 12th, 2006 by .
Categories: Islamnews.

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Hundreds killed in Hajj stampede

At least 345 Muslim pilgrims have been killed in a crush during stone-throwing ritual at the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, officials say.

Hundreds of pilgrims have also been injured. A BBC correspondent at the scene in Mina saw dozens of bodies lined up on the ground.

The ritual has seen many lethal stampedes but the number of dead this time is the highest in 16 years.

After a crush in 2004, barriers and stewards were added to improve safety.

0 comments.

Moslim van het Jaar 2005 – Ibrahim Afellay

Posted on January 11th, 2006 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

Moslim van het Jaar 2005

Je kunt natuurlijk discussiëren over het nut van zo’n verkiezing. Je kunt ook discussiëren over alle mensen die genomineerd zijn en je kunt zeker discussiëren over alle mensen die niet genomineerd zijn. De uitslag staat in ieder geval vast:

Ibrahim Afellay

is moslim van het jaar. Gefeliciteerd!

Op Wijblijvenhier.nl (de aanstichters van dit alles) een gesprek met hem en een lange discussie erbij.

1 comment.

Qantara.de – Muslims in Germany – Islam Implicated as Motivating Factor behind Social Conflicts

Posted on January 11th, 2006 by .
Categories: Multiculti Issues, Murder on theo Van Gogh and related issues.

Qantara.de – Muslims in Germany – Islam Implicated as Motivating Factor behind Social Conflicts

An interesting article by Eberhard Seidel on Qantara.de which has many implications for and references to the Dutch situation as well. Qantara.de also has an interesting question to ask to YOU:

Do Muslims have the obligation to actively distance themselves from violence and terror? What do you think? Write to us… Ok write to them, but I would like to know your answer as well.

The political and social climate for Muslims in Germany has deteriorated significantly within the last year, says Ebehard Seidel, as for instance the newly introduced “convictions tests” in the state of Baden Württemberg show.

For many years, it was possible to reproach the citizens of Germany for many things, but not for being hostile to Islam. The xenophobia of the 1980s and 90s was not directed against Muslims. Instead, it targeted (Catholic) Angolans, Roma and Sinti, the homeless, members of subcultures or (secular) Turks as well as Poles and Arabs. The German brand of racism formed along ethnic and cultural dividing lines. It was only in the case of anti-Semitism that religion played the leading role.

Even after the shocking events of September 11, 2001, the appeal for tolerance was the foremost response on the part of the German majority. Unlike in England or the Netherlands, assaults on Muslim residents were few and far between. And whenever anti-Islamic sentiment did flare up, politics and the media could be relied on as corrective forces. In fact, the Germans were sometimes so starry-eyed in their efforts to show understanding for Islam that for decades they failed to recognize the challenge posed by totalitarian Islamist movements.

Today, many things have changed. The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on 2 November, 2004 by an Islamist triggered a “moral panic” in this country as well, as the Dutch journalist Geert Mak called the eruptive spread of Islamophobic attitudes. The horror evoked by the incident sparked in Germany a free-from debate that verged on hysteria. At the center of the discussions was not so much an interest in learning more about radical Islamist groups, but rather a focus on Islam in general.
(more…)

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Times Online – Gay, Muslim and trying to come out of the closet

Posted on January 11th, 2006 by .
Categories: Internal Debates, Multiculti Issues.

Britain, Gay, Muslim and trying to come out of the closet – Times Online

By Ben Hoyle

The conservative mainstream is forcing Islamic homosexuals into sham marriage and a secret sex life

THE marriage proposal described the prospective groom as a successful and devout second-generation British Pakistani who would pride himself on showing duty and kindness to his new family.

But it was the finer details of “Muslim Man’s” offer, recently posted in an internet chatroom, that might concern his future in-laws and lead them to see their own daughter in a new light. “I am looking for a bi- Muslim woman,” he wrote. “Someone who aspires to stability whether that is as husband and wife, or as husband, wife and same-sex partners.”

In the week that Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Britain’s most senior Muslim figure, described homosexuality as a harmful, immoral vehicle for spreading disease, the internet remains the only place where many gay or bisexual Muslims can truly be themselves.

Sir Iqbal is regarded as a moderate and his comments were the latest in a long line of similar statements from mainstream Islamic leaders.

These have in turn provoked outbursts of Islamophobia from sections of the gay community, with some activists at the Gay Pride parade last year berating Muslim marchers as “suicide bombers” and a gay magazine categorising Islam as a “barmy doctrine”.

Trapped in the crossfire, the vast majority of gay, lesbian and bisexual British Muslims live secret double lives or never acknowledge their feelings.

The Times contacted members of this underground community this week. Their testimony reveals a world where thousands of lives have been wrecked by sham marriages, elaborate deceptions, unacknowledged HIV and crippling loneliness.
(more…)

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Protected: AD.nl – 'Internet-imams gevaarlijk'

Posted on January 10th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Internal Debates, Religious and Political Radicalization, Young Muslims.

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Protected: AD.nl – ‘Internet-imams gevaarlijk’

Posted on January 10th, 2006 by martijn.
Categories: Internal Debates, Religious and Political Radicalization, Young Muslims.

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Lifemakers NL – Live Hajj

Posted on January 10th, 2006 by .
Categories: Islamnews.

Soms is internet toch wel erg leuk. Op Lifemakers NL, een site van Nederlandse Amr Khaled bewonderaars, kun je live de Hajji volgen via Nile Helpdesk. Soms is de beeldkwaliteit wat vaag en moet je even opnieuw op -play- drukken, maar dan heb je ook wat: beelden van het tentenkamp, mensen op weg naar Arafat. Erg de moeite waard.

Je komt er via de hoofdpagina: let op kan zijn dat het geblokkeerd wordt als je een pop-up blocker hebt. Schakel deze uit van Lifemakers.nl en ververs de pagina; dan komt alles goed. Veel kijk plezier!

1 comment.

AD.nl – ’Jihad? Nee, ’t was vakantie’

Posted on January 7th, 2006 by .
Categories: Young Muslims.

AD.nl – ’Jihad? Nee, ’t was vakantie’

Door PATRICK POUW DEN HAAG

Driss, Said en Ramazan waren een maand spoorloos. Op jihad, vreesden hun families. Ze zijn weer thuis.
Voor het eerst praten ze uitgebreid over hun ’vakantie’.

Bekennen? Toegeven dat ze ’terroristen’ waren? Zeggen wat hun Azerbeidjaanse ondervragers wilden horen, om maar van die, niet bepaald zachtzinnige, ondervragingen af te zijn? Ze konden net zo goed meteen tekenen voor twintig jaar cel. Of erger. En dat beseften Driss, Said en Ramazan maar al te goed. Driss: ,,Ze wilden weten wat we in Azerbeidzjan deden. ’Vakantie vieren’, zeiden wij.’’
En dat werd meteen geloofd? Drie jongens uit Nederland, die komen wandelen in Azerbeidzjan?
(more…)

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