Thopinions: Paris

Showing posts with label Paris. Show all posts

Monday, April 13, 2015

A Dark Truth, Quote 3

Lorax, the 2012 animated movie based on the 1971 book by Dr. Seuss, is essentially based on the same idea that with the air pollution & smog problems many major cities, e.g. London, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi, Mumbai etc are facing & since governments are not doing enough to tackle climate change problem; eventually, air will become so polluted that selling air will become a business.

After all, who ever thought that water will be sold in bottles, all over the world, 20 years ago. I think no one. Now, if somebody can afford to buy water, they buy it in nice little bottles & large containers. Whereas, poor people around the world are left to survive on dirty water.

IMDB RottenTomatoes Wikipedia

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Dieudonne M'bala M'bala charged with inciting terrorism

Dieudonne M'bala M'bala, 48, was in the dock at the Palais de Justice in central Paris charged with inciting terrorism, as prosecutors called for a fine equivalent to £22,000.

But the controversial entertainer denied any wrongdoing & said the case exposed the hypocrisy of a country which 'pretends' to be a bastion of free speech.

'Je suis Charlie' (I am Charlie) has since become the French government-backed rallying cry for those who support the magazine, but Dieudonne says this displays double-standards.

Dieudonne, who has convictions for anti-Semitism, said his humour was no different to Charlie Hebdo's.

He wrote: 'Tonight, as far as I'm concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.'

The comedian told the court yesterday that he 'condemned the attacks without reservation & without any ambiguity'.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2940446/French-comedian-joked-Charlie-Hebdo-massacres-faces-22-000-fine-despite-claiming-condemned-attacks-without-reservation.html

Monday, March 30, 2015

France identifies its terrorism breeding grounds

As I have blogged in some of my previous blog posts that assimilation is a 2-way street. Most, if not all, countries of Northern & Western Europe, & North America, are being chosen by immigrants, from South Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, & even Middle East, as their new adopted home.

These immigrants come with so much hope & so many dreams to these countries. They all range from different backgrounds; religious, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, economic etc. But, once they land in these countries, they are relegated to the back of the society by the indigenous or born-nationals of that country. These immigrants are subjected to discrimination in education & jobs.

When these immigrants or their kids are sidelined by their new adopted country, regardless of how much they want to assimilate or love their new country, they grew hatred towards their new adopted country. And that time, they are easy to be radicalized & molded by people & organizations who can get them to do whatever these kids can do.

Blaming those kids or their families for not assimilating or hating their adopted country is not the solution to resolving the issue of uprooting criminality & terrorism out of the country. That blame unjustifiably will only radicalize those youths even more.

The solution is to provide education & jobs to these immigrants & kids; not doing them any favours, but based on objective merits. Then, immigrants can't complain if they don't get a certain job or degree, because they can see that they themselves don't posses the skills for those jobs. But, in reality, we see hurdles / demands which are clearly been put up to sideline these immigrants & their kids; networking, relevant work experience, education obtained from that country's institution (math is same everywhere, Newton's & Einstein's theories are same everywhere, Debits & Credits are same everywhere, in the world).

For example, in Canada, we can see in any major city that taxi / cab drivers are, overwhelmingly, South Asians. Once you start talking to them, you come to realize that most of them are quite educated; doctors, engineers, PhDs, CAs, MBAs etc, but they are told to bring Canadian education & experience to get any job in their field.

Their kids usually suffer almost similar fate. Since, they have Canadian education &, in most cases, work experience, too, they get better jobs than what their parents are able to do, but, not better than, the similarly educated & experienced Canadian counterpart. Compared to that born-Canadian (esp. a Caucasian), that immigrant's kid is actually underemployed. That's why, we see immigrants, esp. South Asians, Africans, & even Eastern Europeans, gather several designations & degrees to move up the corporate ladder, but only a few are able to do so.

Some people of these European & North American countries counter that why don't these immigrants leave their country, if their conditions are so bad. Where they are going to go? Back to their own country? They may not have any financial means to go back; spent all their money to get in their new adopted country in the hope of a better future. We all have heard stories of people scrounging money to pay to human smugglers to get into a country.

Those people, perhaps, can't go back to their own homeland. Most people love their homelands, but due to civil wars & terrorism, they are forced out of their homes in their homelands. We can't say to those people that it's their country's fault, because in most cases, those civil wars & terrorism & their governments' heavy-handedness is supported by these Western countries.

For example, take the example of Yemen & Egypt right now. Egypt arrested many of its citizens during Arab Spring demonstrations, & imprisoned them on false charges. Their ruler has the full blessing of Western countries & the government receives millions in aid from these Western countries. Yemenis are being killed by Saudi Arabian army. Saudi Arabia doesn't have any arms-manufacturing facilities in its own country. It buys all of its arms & weapons from US, Canada, & several European countries, including France, Germany, UK, Sweden etc. Those arms are also used by the country's rulers on their own citizens to subdue any dissidents & opponents. We all know this. So where will or can these immigrants go? They certainly can't go back their own countries.

So, the solutions are that either these Western countries stop arms selling to these corrupt countries in Asia, Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, Central & South America OR accept these immigrants in your countries with open arms & get them education & jobs, which they worked hard for & they rightly deserve.
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French counter-terrorism experts have identified 64 suburbs in dozens of cities that act as breeding grounds for Islamic extremism.

So-called 'ghettos' with high rates of youth unemployment, immigration and single-parent families, such as L'Ariane near Nice, have been linked to the radicalisation of young & vulnerable people.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls last month admitted that the country had collapsed into social & ethnic 'apartheid' - the first time a senior politician has conceded that economic marginalisation & religious tensions have led to serious divides.

In total 64 French suburbs have been identified as breeding grounds for extremism, each of them sharing startling similar characteristics, according to Sky News.

Unemployment, for example, is on average 23% in the suburbs, rising to a staggering 45% among the young. Up to half of all families in the 64 suburbs also have just one parent.

For those lucky enough to have work, the average income is just €11,000 (£8,300) a year, leaving many with barely enough money to survive.

As many as 50% of those living in the suburbs are also first generation immigrants or their children, many of them having travelled to France from war-torn nations.

Such patterns of have now proved to the French leadership that vast swathes of the population are falling behind economically, resulting in ghettoised suburbs where mental & social attachment to France as a nation holds little sway, & where criminal & religious leaders often wield power.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2937879/France-identifies-terrorism-breeding-grounds-Ghettos-high-unemployment-large-numbers-single-parent-families-mainly-immigrants.html

Friday, March 27, 2015

Killings in Europe in 2015

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

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/

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

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.