LETTER FROM PARIS: Riots? What Riots?
Harriss, Joseph A.
LETTER FROM PARIS JOSEPN A~ HASRtSS Riots? What Riots? s LONG AGO AS THE PARIS MAYHEM of May 1968, France's great conservative thinker, Raymond Aron, pointed to extreme blockage as the...
...There's no yardstick even to measure the problem...
...Or viciously attack police and riot troops to cries of Allah Akhbar, using everything from Molotov cocktails to pickaxes, dropping steel pdtanque balls and manhole covers on them from apartment balconies...
...He confirmed that the group, which had already bombed the Paris Metro in 1995, killing seven, planned to hit highvalue French targets again...
...FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59...
...Maybe not, but there are disturbing coincidences: _9 IN LATE SEPTEMBER the radical Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC from its French initials) issued a statement by its leader, Abdelmalek Droukdal, a.k.a...
...In the mid-1990s a French film entitled La Haine (Hatred) vividly described suburban youths' seething resentment...
...The French, as you might expect, have a word for it: they call it dancing on a volcano...
...The danger is that French officialdom, locked into its autistic self-satisfaction, may still not have understood, as the late Aron surely would have, the country's violent paradigm shift...
...Unemployment ran 20 percent on average, twice that for men under 25...
...Lame duck President Jacques Chirac was the invisible man during the riots...
...Stashed spontaneously, of course...
...Firstgeneration North African immigrants were content to work hard and dream that their children would be fullfledged French citizens...
...In the process, the insurgents-the word seems as appropriate here as in Iraq-have shot down in flames France's vaunted "social model," which it has long held up for worldwide admiration...
...E Pluribus Unum...
...Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, calling France "enemy number one...
...Try it in Amdrique, mort ami, not in our backyard...
...Automobiles in flames became a common sight several years ago in the banlieues: in the first ten months of last year, even before the latest riots exploded, fully 28,000 cars were burned nationwide...
...With impeccable Gallic logic, France officially has no minorit i e s - e v e r y o n e is by definition equal...
...s LONG AGO AS THE PARIS MAYHEM of May 1968, France's great conservative thinker, Raymond Aron, pointed to extreme blockage as the country's enduring, intractable problem...
...The official line, supported by a docile police report, is that it is simk ) p l y a "spontaneous popular revolt...
...Until they eventually ran up against the country's innate, visceral xenophobia...
...In the 1968 tumult, which I covered as a young correspondent, the students spent most of their time yelling slogans in the Sorbonne, while workers took time off...
...Mso discovered in Clichy-sousBois, one of the main riot sites near Paris, were caches of AK-47 assault rifles, ammunition, plastic explosives, bulletproof vests, and stolen riot squad uniforms...
...So once in a while we have to have a revolution...
...Boom boxes and car stereos began throbbing with French gangsta rap with lyrics like "France is a bitch/You have to [expletive] her to exhaustion/You have to treat her like a whore, man...
...EANWHILE, THE GOVERNMENT STRUGGLES to ! ~ / i get a handle on the volatile, explosive situa~ ~L tion...
...At international soccer matches in Paris, individuals of Arab and African descent loudly jeered the Marseillaise...
...That rage has been building for decades, while France looked the other way and went on vacation...
...Here again the blockage that worried Raymond Aron comes into play, preventing affirmative action or accepting the realiW of ethnic diversity...
...It was a "land of infidels," where cops were "crusader police forces...
...Or cause anything like $300 million of destruction, provoking the country's first three-month, nationwide state of emergency in living memory...
...The ineffable, ever tanned Prime Minister Dominique-Marie-Franfois-Ren~ Galouzeau de Villepin looked a CNN interviewer in the eye and said, "There have been no riots in France, only some social unrest...
...As my journalistic colleague in Paris, John Vinocur, sums up superbly in the International HeraM Tribune, "An Arab kid in Clichy-sousBois may not articulate it, but what rage it must create to hear he lives in the greatest, smartest, most fair coun58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 JOSEPH A. HARRISS try in the world, revered as Islam's best friend in the West from Mgeria to Oman, and then have to deal with a French reality of racist scorn and rejection...
...There is no evolution in France," lamented Aron, one of the few intellectuals in postwar Paris to stand up to the Marxist pandering of Jean-Paul ("Hell is other people") Sartre...
...James Baldwin would have loved France's current bonfire of the vanities: it's the fire this time...
...They learned that ethnic epithets and sotto voce muttering about Jews and other minorities are the stuff of everyday French conversation...
...In other words, just a bunch of poor kids reacting to poverty and racism...
...Their prayer: "Allah, grant us victory...
...Neither he nor Villepin has a convincing course of action beyond hand-wringing rhetoric about the country's "profound malaise" and "identity crisis," and promised efforts at integration...
...N O WIIY THE BLOW-UP NOW...
...Or coordinate their attacks commando-style via web pages, cell phones, and instant messaging...
...There was no ethnic tension, making it easy for France to feel morally superior to an America experiencing race problems...
...The law prohibits statistics based on race or religion...
...Whatever it is, government and media studiously avoid any suggestion that Islamic jihadists may have a hand in it...
...Last July, Ariel Sharon actually urged French Jews to flee to Israel to escape anti-Semitism...
...Based on lavish welfare payments, locked-in job security, and lots of cushy civil service jobs, it seemed to work for about 30 years after WW II, thanks to rising prosperity...
...Besides, they lived beyond the pale...
...Though that chaos was no revolution, it amounted to some of France's worst homegrown violence of the 20th century and nearly brought down the proud government of Charles de Gaulle...
...And they concluded that anyone who can't talk about how his grandmother made tripe sausage or breaded pig's feet can't possibly be French...
...Large, often polygamous families were crammed into ugly public housing projects in the banlieues, or suburbs-known coyly today as "sensitive urban zones...
...9 DAYS BEFORE THE BANLIEUES ERUPTED, Mgerian police arrested a top GSPC operative...
...But they were expected to buy into the idea of France's grandeur...
...But the college kids throwing up cobblestone barricades in the Latin Quarter and the labor union strikes were an undergraduate panty raid compared with the recent burning, destruction, and defiance of public authority...
...They didn't burn some 10,000 automobiles and trash 255 schools, 233 public buildings, and 51 post offices in some 300 cities and towns all over France...
...For a while they did...
...Descendants of North African immigrants staged their first peaceful Paris demonstrations in 1982...
...Joseph A. Harriss is a Paris-based American journalist whose latest book is About France...
...not for him a shirt-sleeved visit to witness the banlieue bonfires...
...The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," he declared...
...Islamist websites picked up the message, calling on French Muslims to join the fight against France...
...9 SHORTLY AFTER THE WORST RIOTING was over--with burned cars down to a "normal" level of less than 100 per night-the biggest police sweep in years netted over two dozen Islamic radicals, several with links to al Qaeda...
...In a sort of geographic apartheid, the immigrants rarely came in contact with those who considered themselves the real French, the ones whose primary education began with rote learning of the phrase, "Our ancestors the Gauls...
Vol. 39 • February 2006 • No. 1
