Picking sides in the fight for France

But some do follow the call. Often it’s people who feel some affinity, Muslims born or converted, often with, at first, only a shaky grasp of the Quran’s content.
 
Economic conditions may also have some effect. Long-term unemployment has been high for a generation in France, has increased sharply since 2009, & hits hardest in the largely Muslim “zones urbaines sensibles” (ZUS), hundreds of problem neighbourhoods targeted for special government intervention. Successive studies ...of these ZUS neighbourhoods show that their populations are shrinking only very slowly, while economic conditions rapidly deteriorate. It’s hard to escape the feeling, living in these desolate neighbourhoods on the outskirts of big cities, that France has no interest in seeing you get out.

 
One 2011 survey of ZUS residents found that almost 90% of descendants of immigrants living there agreed with the statement, “I feel French.” But when the question was whether they were perceived as French, the number fell to 67%. Among descendants of Moroccan & Tunisian immigrants the number shrinks to 40%. It’s a big problem when many thousands of a country’s most economically vulnerable citizens feel their affection for France is unrequited.
 
Of course, money doesn’t explain everything. “The socio-economic correlation is valid for many,” Amellal said, “but it has its limits.”

What binds them loosely together is a blanket rejection of everything modern societies seem to value. Amellal calls them “electrons that become free, that completely break with society. It’s not hate, it’s a rejection of everything that makes the system: elites, politics, but also values, the Republic, secularism. Of course, Charlie Hebdo was an extraordinary symbol of all of that. Extraordinary.”

The Muslims of France are there. They have spent their lives in France, learned its history & its pop culture, & in most cases want nothing more than to participate in France’s still sorely unrealized potential.
 
The polarizing effect of the attacks isn’t over. The murders forced everyone in France to pick a side. Most—not all but most—French Muslims are happy & eager to pick freedom’s side. It would be tragic if nobody in power dared listen to them.

http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/picking-sides-in-the-fight-for-france/

 

Europe threatened by its own 'Clash of Civilizations'

A great opinion piece. Assimilation of immigrants is a 2-way street. When the indigenous population is not willing to help assimilate immigrants with jobs, education, & social & ethnic segregation, then immigrants with criminal intentions will do something regrettable to the indigenous population. Then, who is to blame here?
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The challenge, rising from below during these difficult years, comes from a different vision: One that sees the world & its peoples as divided into “civilizations,” fundamentally incompatible with one another. The most extreme holders of this vision, such as the Kouachi brothers in Paris or Anders Breivik in Norway, believe that this incompatibility is a material threat deserving a violent response. Others simply want to turn it into a political reality.

The first group comes from a criminal subgroup on the fringes of Europe’s Muslim populations.

France faces this problem most dramatically. It has the largest Muslim population in Europe, accounting for 8% of its people; they are also by most measures the most culturally & politically integrated religious-minority population in Europe: fluent, very secular, prone to intermarriage, very loyal to France, politically moderate. They’re not a new population, & have very small families, so are not growing much.

But they, like most European Muslims, are generally very poor, & excluded rather dramatically from France’s very closed employment & education systems. Among the young males who drop out of high school, there is a group – generally the least religious in origin – who are attracted to crime & political extremism.

This male, alienated sub-population is manipulated from abroad: The extremist armies of Syria, Iraq & Afghanistan have drawn some in, inculcated them with a “clash-of-civilizations” vision, radicalized them, & sent them back on deadly missions.

7 years ago, after an earlier moment of violence, I sat down with the ambitious mayor of a south Paris suburb with a large Muslim-immigrant population. He warned that the high-school dropout sons of poor but ambitious immigrants were at risk of extremism: “The root causes of the violence of course are still present, & it’s still a powder keg,” he said. “The poverty still exists – the ethnic segregation, the social segregation, the unemployment, people suffering from violent crime & also suffering from a sense of not being part of the national community.” He urged a politics of inclusion.

His name was Manuel Valls, and today he is the Prime Minister of France – launched to that position in good part by his response to this religious-minority alienation, a response that sadly was not as inclusive as his earlier words suggested.

That population is generally of Christian descent, more elderly, & politically conservative. While less frequently prone to violent acts of terrorism, they are an order of magnitude larger in population & pose an even bigger threat to Europe’s integrity.

In France, almost a fifth of the population has been willing to vote for an extremist party, the National Front, which is founded on the same clash-of-civilizations ideology that motivates the jihadis. As with the Islamic-extremist underclass, it targets Jews & pro-European liberals, & opposes European unity.

She, like her political cousins in Britain (Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party) & the Netherlands (Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party) is an explicit supporter of, & is backed by, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has turned the clash-of-civilizations ideology into his guiding mission (with the addition of an equally fictional third, “Eurasian,” civilization).

But Islamic-extremist attacks ... are intended not just to punish, but to polarize: Jihadis explicitly want a war of “civilizations” in Europe. If that other, larger group of divisive believers prevails at the ballot, then their mission will have succeeded.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/europe-threatened-by-its-own-clash-of-civilizations/article22383222/