France: The Model of How to Deal With Moslem Integration?

That is the opinion of Matthew Kaminski, editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe, who lives in Paris. He believes that with the riots that have been raging in France for a year, "French Muslims, like Muslims elsewhere in Europe, exhibit the pathologies that have long characterized the American underclass"--but at the same time Kaminski thinks the French do have a unique advantage in their relationship to their Moslem citizens:

According to a Pew Global Attitudes survey published in July, 42% of French Muslims consider themselves French first; 47%, Muslim first. (In Britain, the numbers are 7% British first; 81%, Muslim first.) In the same poll, 78% of French Muslims say that they want to adapt to French customs. Another recent survey, this one for La Vie, a Catholic monthly, appears to show that French Muslims aren't averse to "French" values: 91% of those interviewed approved of gender equality, 73% of the separation of church and state; 69% said that they don't oppose Muslim women marrying outside the faith.

What is not clear in Mr. Kaminski's article is whether these numbers include the opinion of the radical Moslems who have been rioting, burning buses, and attacking police during the past year? As the riots continue, how will the opinions of this element grow and influence the overall Frence Muslim community?

He quotes from Integrating Islam, by Jonathan Laurence and Justin Vaisse who focus on France--home to Europe's largest Moslem population. Laurence and Vaisse argue that France's Moslems are in many respects moderate and had few protests against Denmark's Mohammed cartoons. (Of course, with the year-long riots going on, maybe the potential protesters were otherwise occupied.)

Kaminski also notes that Dalil Boubakeur, the head of the French Muslim Council, is quoted liberally in "Integrating Islam":

He calls Islam "a religion and a culture that has combined itself with other cultures and that is now combining itself with Western democracy." French Muslims, he adds, "wish for a tolerant Islam, humanist, inviting the faithful to live with their times, to accept modernity."

Still, it would do well for the authors of "Integrating Islam" to keep in mind that historically Islam has often combined itself with other cultures by taking over the country through expansion and occupation.

Kaminski notes that France recognizes the radical element of Islam that has also found a home in France:

It matters, then, that France's anti-terrorism laws are the toughest anywhere in the Western world. French prosecutors can hold terror suspects for years without charge; the definition of "links to terrorism" is loose. Every mosque in France is monitored. Since 9/11, the government has cracked down on foreign financing and moved to train "French imams." All this--more than the slow integrationist trend that Messrs. Laurence and Vaisse celebrate--may be the reason why France hasn't been hit by terrorism since a wave of subway bombings in 1995.

While this may be impressive, it reflects Kaminiski's view of the ongoing riots as a social unrest and not an intifada.

But how much less terrorized does France feel at having their buses burned as opposed to having their subways blown up?

Technorati Tag: Paris Riots and France.

The Intifada In France

Some are saying that the outbreaks of violence in France against the police (2,500 wounded so far this year) is just the result of the battle against organized crime, but not Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the Action Police trade union:

"We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails. You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their 'comrades' free when they are arrested."

Not everyone agrees, but at least what is happening in France is being reported on to some degree.

Now, all they have to do is figure out how to deal with it.

Technorati Tag: France.

Rabbi Sacks on France (sort of)

Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, has an article in The Times entitled "We are in danger of forgetting that waiting comes before wanting," addressing the goings on in France--at least he says he is talking about France.

Rabbi Sacks addresses the riots in France without once mentioning Moslems, Islam or Intifada. He writes that "the causes are simple: ethnic ghettos, immigrant enclaves, concentrations of poverty, unemployment and young people with strong feelings of exclusion and resentment." But he admits that there is something more:

When television becomes more powerful than parliaments, people quickly realise that the newsworthy gesture gets you more attention than years of lobbying and representation. Violence becomes photo-opportunity.

The problem, which he hints at in the title of his article, derives from "Freud’s definition of civilisation as the capacity to defer the gratification of instinct. Society depends on waiting as well as wanting":

...Language suggests a connection between these things. Think of the words "political" and "polite", "urban" and "urbane", "civilisation" and "civility" all derived from Greek or Latin words for "city", the place where strangers come together to live and trade. They remind us of the myriad habits of self-imposed restraint that alone allow people of different faiths and customs to live together graciously. Cultures built on anger cannot survive.

...You have to build a society before you can have a state. States exist by reason of power. Societies exist through a shared moral code and a sense of collective responsibility. The symbols of states are palaces and parliaments. The institutions of society are families, neighbourhoods, communities and schools.

For some years now we have been living under the illusion that you can have a state without a society, politics without politeness, civilisation without civility. You can't.

There is no shortcut that allows us to bypass the long, slow task of society-building; integrating minorities, creating a shared sense of history and destiny and cultivating a national conversation in which each of us has a voice. Otherwise the prospects are dark. When conversation ends, violence begins.

The odd thing I found about Rabbis Sacks' piece is that while reading his article, it didn't seem like he was really talking about France--or Europe, for that matter--at all.

"...Violence becomes photo-opportunity"
"...Cultures built on anger cannot survive"
"...You have to build a society before you can have a state"
"...When conversation ends, violence begins"

For all intents and purposes, he seems to be describing the Palestinian Arabs--and the reasons why a proposed Palestinian state, even on its own 'merits' (putting aside suicide bombers, Katushya rockets, etc) is doomed to fail. After all, France's culture is not built on anger and their state is built on an established society, no matter what bad political decisions have been made in the last few decades.

But if morals and more are breaking down, as Rabbi Sacks suggests, what are we supposed to expect when armed terrorists are allowed to roam freely and chaos reigns? If "television becomes more powerful than parliaments," what are we supposed to expect when countries create and show movies that demonize an entire people or indoctrinate children in the ways of suicide bombers?

If what Rabbi Sachs writes about France and Europe is true, how much more so for a potential Palestinian state?

Crossposted on Israpundit

Technorati Tags: Paris Riots and Palestinians.

Paris Intifada Repercussions?

Even as the riots in Paris continue with no real end in sight, the media is not clear on who it is that is rioting. According to John Lichfield of The Independent:

Is this France’s intifada? Do the riots have wider significance for the West?

Talk of an intifada is absurdly misleading. Firstly, the rioters are far from being all Muslim (although more than half are from Islamic backgrounds). Second, they have no sense of political or religious identity and no political demands. Their allegiance is to their quartier and their gang. Their main demand, so far as can be established, is to be left alone by police and the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sark-ozy, to continue with their life of low-level violence and drugs trading. The wider significance is therefore not politico-religious but a warning of what happens if problems of deprivation and violence are allowed to fester.

On the other hand, Captain’s Quarters writes about indications that the riots in Paris are very much an intifada:

The riots in France have little connection to the Islamist terrorist offensive against the West, if the American media coverage gives any indication. However, alert CQ reader Mr. Michael points out that both American and French media sources warned of coordinated Islamist action against France in the weeks before the riot. Agence France Presse even had a quote from the maligned Nicolas Sarkozy noting the imminent nature of the threat in its 9/27 dispatch:

An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as “enemy number one”, intelligence officials said Tuesday.

“The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr,” the group’s leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.

“France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community,” he was quoted as saying. … Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is “at a very high level… There are cells operating on our territory.”

Either way, no matter who is behind the riots, where does this leave the Jewish community in Paris? The riots started in Clichy-sous-Bois, and as Gateway Pundit reminds us:

One of the last times Cliche was in the news, in October 2001, molotov cocktails were thrown at the Jewish Synagogue, a non-descript building during Kol Nidre services. In August 2002, the synagogue was attacked again.

And given this background and the kind of anti-semitism that Jews have been suffering in France, how does the Jewish community in France feel about the ongoing riots?

After a half-decade surge in anti-Semitic attacks and a long history of troubled treatment of Jews, [Paule H.] Levy (of France's Radio Communite Juive) added that the recent violence is "the first time in French history that it's not a Jewish problem." She continued, "In the mind of the French people, it's not a Jewish problem. The Jewish community is not in this story, and that's a very good thing."

"Thank God it is a phenomenon that has roots in the lack of integration of the the population," said European Jewish Congress secretary-general Serge Cwajgenbaum, himself French. "It's societal, it's economical, it's educational. It has nothing to do with any other subject or matter. It's a social phenomenon and the government must take the necessary measures to bring peace back and take the necessary steps to integrate the population. I really hope this will not affect any particular group of citizens in France, and hopefully not the Jews."

Though last Friday a projectile was flung at a synagogue outside Paris, causing some minor damage but no injuries, Jewish officials stressed that the Jewish community has not been targeted and is only nominally more concerned than others.

Security at Jewish institutions, for instance, has not been beefed up more than at non-Jewish places, according to David Roche, general manager of the Jewish Agency in France and Europe. But he said he was surprised that Jews aren't expressing more concern about the implications of the lawlessness that has prevailed in France for almost two weeks.

Apparently the opinion of Jews who are in the middle of the violence, and have experienced that violence first hand, really do see this as an issue of unassimilated--and angry--immigrants. Let's just hope that the Jewish community there is not being overly optimistic and a bit naïve.

Meanwhile, what does all this mean for Israel? According to Caroline Glick:

One could ask why Israel should care what happens in France. Given France's traditional and rather obscene hostility towards Israel, a certain level of good old-fashioned schadenfreude would seem justified. But the fact of the matter is that Israel has two reasons to care about the future of France. First, five years into this global jihad we see that while Muslim terrorists or militants in Ramallah, Paris, Jakarta, New York, New Dehli, Tikrit, Amsterdam, London, Teheran, Umm el-Fahm and Beslan may not speak to each other directly, they are certainly aware of one another's actions and successes. And were France to fall, all of us would feel the aftershocks.

Secondly, if France begins to assert its authority and responsibility for unassimilated Arabs and Muslims in France, perhaps Israel will be inspired to do the same for our Arab minority in Israel and Judea and Samaria, and thus move our country from a position of policy paralysis and defeatism to one of movement and strength.

So if the violence is just the anger of immigrants, the Jews of France will be relatively safe and it is mostly a French issue.

However, if this really is the makings of a French Intifada, then the stakes are high, both for French Jews and Israel.

Back to John Lichfield:

When and how will the riots end?

In tears or in rain. It is a miracle no one has died since the first two boys. A tragedy might bring the kids to their senses. Or it might not. Police, meanwhile, have been praying for a downpour, which has usually ended outbreaks in the past. The forecast for this week is fine and dry all over France.

Well, as long as it's the time of year to pray for rain anyway...

Crossposted at Israpundit

Technorati Tag: Israel.