Here's a reading of the situation from the right-wing blogosphere:
Quote:
Henri Astier: Trudging Through The French Intifada With Sadek
November 3, 2005
Having spent the best part of a week ignoring the story in the hope it would go away, the British MSM have finally (and grudgingly) acknowledged that Muslims have decided to burn sizeable parts of their beloved Paris to the ground.
Here's the BBC's Henri Astier, bemoaning the 'plight' of French Muslims:
Days of rioting in the bleaker suburbs of Paris have highlighted discontent among many French youths of North African origin.
As part of a series on French Muslims, the BBC News website's Henri Astier looks at the issue of discrimination, a leading source of frustration in France's unemployment-riddled ghettos.
... So unemployment's behind the Paris riots, is it? And behind the unemployment, presumably, there are lots of evil, white racists just itching to stick it to poor, underprivileged Muslims? Muslims like, oh, Sadek:
Sadek recently quit his job delivering groceries near Saint-Denis, just north of Paris. He was tired of climbing stairs with heavy bags.
Sadek, 31, has a secondary school education [that's high school for U.S. readers] and aspires to something better. But he knows his options are limited: "With a name like mine, I can't have a sales job."
Well, and at the risk of distracting poor Sadek from his wallowing, it's also worth pointing out that 'I quit my last job because I didn't like the trudging' is probably more of a blight on his CV than ethnicity -- Whereas some employers like Muslims and some don't, it's a fair bet that very few are on the lookout for someone who thinks delivering groceries is too much like hard work.
As far as Henri Astier's concerned, though, neither the behaviour of Muslims in general, nor Sadek in particular, has any bearing on the French riots -- For him, the issue reduces to the simple notion that if Muslims suffer, it must be the fault of racist whites. This is a tactic the left everywhere are fond of employing; they invoke the spectre of racism (which genuinely appals most civilised people), then use it to push us deeper into a victim/entitlement culture by arguing that rioters/terrorists/hurricane victims wouldn't be such a problem if only we'd agree to a to tax hikes and a whole raft of social engineering projects. It's a clever manoeuvre, to be sure. But is it justified?
Well, France's immigrant population is made up so overwhelmingly of North African Muslims that it's difficult to test the theory there -- Since the mass-immigration comes from a single source, it's native French vs. Muslims all the way.
But not so in Britain. Here, after our Empire folded, we took large numbers of immigrants from both Hindu and Muslim cultures, from India and Pakistan. Forty years and three generations on, the situation the two groups are in couldn't be more different. Indians have integrated perfectly. They work hard, contribute to the life of the nation, and are now actually out-performing whites -- 25% of British medical schools' intake is now Indian. British Muslims, on the other hand, are dogged by pretty much the same problems as their French counterparts: poverty, unemployment, social unrest.
Isn't it at all worth pondering why two groups of Muslim immigrants (Pakistani in Britain and North African in France), should both fail so spectacularly, while, at least in Britain's case, non-Muslim immigrants often out-perform their hosts? Couldn't it be that the problems Muslims face are self-inflicted, brought by their backwards culture, and nothing to do with racism whatever?
07 Nov 2005, 4:31 pm
