This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1232
November 7, 2005
MIM: Two days ago French Minister Villepin met with the head of the Grand Mosque in Paris and promised that he would come with a new housing plan at the end of the month. This failed to appease the Muslims who continued rioting and proceeded to attack the police - vowing they would not stop until two police were killed in revenge for the two Muslim youths who electrocuted themselves after breaking into a power station. For their part the Muslims are reveling in French submission as French government officials beg them to use their influence to stop the violence promising to meet their demands. One example of this can be seen on November 3rd when the riots were into their 5th day : http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1214
MIM: The abject dhimmitude which has turned the French Republic into the French Khalifate and the lie that the riots were spawned by poverty and not Muslim rage at infidel society, can be seen by the fact that the French have appointed a Muslim Minister for Equal opportunities who, instead of trying to calm the situation by appealing to his fellow Muslims, has sided with the rioters and blamed the French government for "not doing enough" saying that they must "assimilate" (i.e.. defer) to the immigrants. He also mocked the disagreements between government ministers on how to handle the situation.Note that his bellicosity is described as "feisty".
"...Azouz Begag, the feisty Minister for Equal Opportunities and a native of the suburban housing projects, has advocated a different approach, blaming the outbreak of violence on a persistent sense of disenfranchisement in the slums that is aggravated by the failure of the state to include minorities in the security forces.
He has called for a full public debate on France's policies for assimilating immigrants and overcoming discrimination. "After all," he said recently, "it's not uninteresting to see that two ministers do not see the same France..."
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"...Muslim leaders have urged politicians to show respect for immigrant communities.
Dalil Boubakeur, the head of the Paris mosque and the president of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, said Muslim immigrants in the suburbs "must be given the conditions to live with dignity as human beings", not in "disgraceful squats"...".http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4404362.stm
They have no work. They have nothing to do. Put yourself in their place," said Abderrahmane Bouhout, president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque..." http://lfpress.ca/newsstand/News/International/2005/11/03/1290567-sun.html
"...We must tell youths that France does not want to hold them down," says Rachid Hamoudi, director of the Lille mosque in northern France..."
"We must ensure that the community trusts its country, and vice-versa..."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4375910.stm
MIM: Someone who will kill you will also lie to you...
MIM: The idea of trusting a community and trying to bring them up to the 'social level of the French' by throwing money and vocational education at them is perversely amusing.Besides the question of how can anyone trust a group of people who doused a woman on crutches with gasoline and set her alight - punched an elderly man who died as result, and murder of a man in front of his wife and children while stealing a camera, the idea that a diploma will civilise them can easily be disproved by listing the names of wealthy, Western educated terrorists with Phd's such as Osama Bin Laden, Mohammed Atta and Sami Al Arian.
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MIM: For their part the French government concurs with the Islamofacists and Muslim leaders that the reason for the violence is that the country has not shown enough deference and respect to Muslims and must do more to accomodate them. Besides Minister Sarkozy, who was critised for provoking trouble when he rightfully referrred to the rioters as "scum" no one has dared demand that Muslims be held accountable and only talks about the need for ' helping immigrants'. Instead of confronting the rioters and asking "what are you doing here?", they ask their enemies ,"What can we do for you?".
"....The minister of social cohesion, Jean-Louis Borloo, said the government had to react "firmly" but added that France must also acknowledge its failure to deal with anger simmering in poor suburbs for decades.
"We cannot hide the truth: that for 30 years we have not done enough," he told France-2 television..."http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1608024,00.html
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Dr. Daniel Pipes wrote this article in 1995 which shows that the France have been living in fear of the Muslims for a decade before the present Jihad was launched.
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/272
by Daniel Pipes
Middle East Forum Wire
October 1, 1995
With eight bombings or attempting bombings in three months, France is convulsing over the problems of terrorism, fundamentalist Islam, and Algeria. During a recent trip to France, spent in Paris and at the Riviera, this writer had an opportunity to concentrate on the Middle Eastern dimension of life in that country. What's happening there will probably come as a surprise to most Americans.
Problems. With a population of over three million Muslims, about half of them citizens, France has the largest Islamic presence of any country in Western Europe, both absolute and relative. Of this number, some 90 percent have North African origins (Algeria especially, followed by Morocco and Tunisia). In addition, France suffers particularly acutely from several problems.
(1) The Muslims live more concentratedly together in what the French call the "suburbs of Islam." In part, this reflects a characteristically European difference from the United States: whereas here the affluent and the middle class have virtually abandoned the city for the suburbs (in order to have more space), in France and most of Europe, the well-off have stayed in the city (wanting to travel less). This has relegated immigrants and other poor to dreary "suburbs" in the periphery of the cities. In the French case especially, Muslims tend to live isolated from others, creating their own subculture and building their own resentments.
(2) Muslims engage disproportionately in criminal activity, and mostly of a violent nature. Muslim youth gangs, not all that different from American gangs of the inner cities, for example, like their counterparts here, smash a stolen car into a luxury store, push aside the bewildered shopkeeper, and run off with the loot. It's gotten to the point that Arabs intimidate the French without specific reason. For example, the household I visited in the Riviera employs three gardeners, named Nabil, Ali, and Mustafa. Although one of the three has proven to be incompetent, the owners of the house dare not fire him, fearing retribution. When I asked if they knew of violence in other cases of dismissal, they said no, they simply had a bad feeling. Behind the idyllic appearance of the Côte d'Azur, in other words, lurk some quite powerful fears.
(3) Terrorism committed by Muslims takes place more often than elsewhere. One spasm of violence took place in 1986; another has occurred over the past three months, including attacks on a busy subway station and a Jewish school. The terror has prompted not only a massive manhunt (which led to a shootout and death of the apparently lead perpetrator) but a host of security measures. Public trash bins throughout Paris have been sealed tight (to prevent them from being used as bomb containers) and air travelers must run a gamut of physical and paper obstacles. The police set up impromptu road blocks here and there, causing traffic delays. Virtually every person I talked to agrees that the French population, famously ornery when it comes to authority, has accepted these inconveniences without complaint. This, they further agree, points to the widespread conviction that the country needs to protect itself.
Future of the country. Beyond these specific problems, some French believe the very nature of their country to be in play. One prominent journalist in Paris told me he thinks that France may change from what it is into an Arab and Muslim country in the course of the next century. How so? He pointed to two main trends, the demographic and the political. The French, like almost all modern peoples, are not sustaining their own population even as the nearby North Africans have one of the highest rates of reproduction in the world. Over time, he holds, the North Africans will ineluctably fill the vacuum in France.
Secondly, there's the matter of will. As a post-Christian country, he sees the French lacking the will to maintain their own against the powerful wishes of the Muslim immigrants. As the latter population gains in numbers and sophistication, he sees a real possibility of French civilization drying up and the country fundamentally changing course.
I checked out this astonishing prediction with others and found that while no one else put the case so strongly as did the journalist, no one entirely disagreed with him either. Rather, a wide agreement seems to exist that unless something changes, the historic French population will over the long term not be able to control the immigrant population. Needless to say, this prospect worries more than a few of the French.
http://www.rferl.org/features/2002/07/19072002155826.asp
By Joel Blocker
More than most Western nations, France is a country obsessed with the memory of its history -- recent, revolutionary, and ancient. Yet, paradoxically, the country has yet to come to terms with much of its past.
Paris, 19 July 2002 (RFE/RL) -- It is France's revolutionary and post-World War II past that generate the most controversy in a country where the sense of history -- true or false -- is pervasive.
French historian Marc Ferro told RFE/RL: "One can say that, in France, the recourse to the memory of history is a permanent exercise. The country's past plays a much bigger role in its present than in other countries. Of course, the Germans took their time to acknowledge their guilt for [wartime] crimes, but when they did so, it was complete. For the past 10 years, the Russians have tended to blame the [Communist] Party -- to blame Lenin or Stalin -- for the crimes committed in their country. That's a means of exculpating themselves: 'It's not our fault.' But in France, it's completely different because, for several centuries now, we have had the habit of constantly returning to the past, which has become an object of both polemics and politics."
Today, Ferro says, there are still ongoing debates in France about the French Revolution of 1789, World War I, and other crucial events. He regards knowledge of French history as a very active element in the nation's political life, and contrasts it with the United States. "In America, analysis of the past is never related to the present, while with [the French], it's an active political issue all the time."
But Ferro and other French historians say that for all its obsession with the past, France has left many of its memories unresolved. For some 20 years after the end of World War II, for example, many -- perhaps most -- French citizens and some of the country's historians accepted the myth of a broad internal resistance to France's Nazi occupiers. There was, indeed, some resistance, particularly after it became clear the Allies would triumph, but there was also considerable collaboration with the Germans.
Comforting to many citizens, the resistance myth also suited many politicians, whose own pasts had been ambiguous. They included the late French President Francois Mitterrand who, after being a member of the Vichy collaborationist government, became a resistance leader.
There was no serious academic debate in France on the complicity of the Vichy government in war crimes until the 1960s, when a U.S. historian, Robert Paxton, found proof of it in files that had always been accessible to French historians. His work, plus the release of Marcel Ophuls' film "The Sorrow and the Pity," which included interviews with French collaborators, served to reveal the reality of French wartime behavior. But the Ophuls film was not permitted to be shown on French television, then entirely controlled by the government, until 10 years after it was released commercially.
French historian Benjamin Stora says, however, that the full extent of French complicity in war crimes was not clear until the 1970s and '80s. For this, he credits less Paxton and Ophuls than Jewish organizations in France, particularly those led by Serge Klarsfeld, much of whose French family perished in the Holocaust. A lawyer by training, Klarsfeld has devoted his life to uncovering the full record of Vichy and Nazi atrocities in France and bringing French and German criminals to justice.
Stora believes it was what he calls "Jewish memory" that was most responsible for changing French attitudes toward the resistance. "What called into question, and [finally] destroyed, the resistance myth was quite simply Jewish memory -- the movement in the 1970s of the children of those deported [to Nazi death camps] who completely turned upside-down the traditional French view [of wartime behavior]. The same was true in the 1990s, when the children of French soldiers who served in [the 1954-62 war] in Algeria and the children of the Harkis (Algerians who served on the French side) knocked holes in the official version of the Algerian war."
Stora is widely considered the preeminent French historian of the Algerian war and its aftereffects. Our correspondent asked him whether the French have finally come to terms with the Algerian conflict. "No, France has not yet come to a full resolution of its memory of the Algerian war. We're only at the beginning of the process, which is very painful for France because it's a matter of the loss of a part of the nation's territory. Algeria was considered a French department. So the fact that Algeria was separated from France was felt to be a national wound, a humiliation for France."
Stora adds that the departure of a million largely French so-called "pieds-noires" -- French for "black feet," because many were farmers -- further complicated the resolution of the nation's memory of the Algerian war. So did the massacre of tens of thousands of Harkis by an independent Algeria and the failure of French authorities to compensate adequately those who survived or the families of those who did not survive.
Stora believes that the Algerian war remains today -- 40 years after it ended -- a trauma for France. It will eventually be resolved, he says, but only by new generations of French and Algerians with no direct memory of, or personal connection to, the conflict.
More generally, Stora and other French historians attribute the country's failure to come to terms with its recent past to the impact of the 20th century's two world wars.
Although France was nominally one of the victors in World War I, it lost almost an entire generation -- 1.5 million men -- in the trenches and never really recovered from the human and demographic shock.
Before recovery could take place, France capitulated to the German Army in less than six weeks in the spring of 1940. The country remained occupied for some four years.
Stora notes the defeat in 1940 was followed in the 1950s by two more -- the loss of Indochina, a French colony for a century, and the withdrawal from Algeria. The three defeats, Stora concludes, provoked "a great crisis of French nationalism and an inability to face up to the past."
The substantial -- if still far from complete -- rectification of France's postwar record by many of its historians has been accompanied by similar -- if slower and still imperfect -- progress by the state and its public school system.
For 50 years after the end of World War II, for example, no French government saw fit to admit the official complicity of the Vichy regime (1940-45) in Nazi crimes against French Jews. Some 75,000 of them were deported to Nazi death camps, and less than 5,000 survived. There is strong documentary evidence that the Vichy regime often exceeded Nazi demands for such deportations -- for instance, by including children in the so-called "shipments" to the camps, when the Nazis had clearly asked only for adults.
Yet until 1995, when then-newly elected conservative President Jacques Chirac made a public apology for French guilt, no high official had raised his voice on behalf of the truth. Chirac's predecessor in office, Socialist Francois Mitterrand (1981-95), had himself concealed his Vichy past. As chief of state, he insisted that the collaborationist government was an anomaly with no relation to what he called the "true French republic," whose record, he said, was therefore clean.
But Mitterrand, like Chirac after him, did undertake the building of a number of Jewish history and Holocaust museums and monuments in Paris and other major cities. And, perhaps more importantly, Mitterrand's education minister, Jack Lang, oversaw a thorough revision of the public school system's curriculum.
Today, a French ninth-grader's (14-15 years old) history textbook begins its account of the Vichy regime with at least an implicit condemnation that would not have been possible a quarter of a century ago. It says that Marshall Louis Petain, the regime's leader, sought an "understanding" with the occupying power. That led him, the text continues, "to satisfy Germany's demands and to deliver to the Nazis Jews living in France."
An accompanying picture of a French Jewish girl's identity card clearly states her ethnic origin. It is dated December 1940, well before the Nazis made any demands on the Vichy regime, now known to have been itself imbued with anti-Semitism from its outset.
As for France's internal resistance to the Nazis, the textbook does not exaggerate its importance -- but without ever going so far as to say flatly that the Allies liberated the country. It carefully distinguishes between the external resistance, the "Free French" led by General Charles de Gaulle, and the internal fighters who were divided into several rival groups, the most numerous of which was led by communists.
On the eight-year-long Algerian War, the history textbook goes much further toward righting historical wrongs than any French government has yet been able to do. Two pages are entirely given over to excerpts from a diary kept by Algerian writer Mouloud Feraoun until he was assassinated by French extremists in Algiers in 1962.
The textbook asks students to summarize the rise of the Algerian National Liberation Front and the French army's reaction to it, as reflected in Feraoun's diary. One ninth-grader reports that the highly controversial subject of systematic French torture of Algerian suspects during the war is freely discussed in his classroom -- while no government has ever dared to admit it in public.
In fact, the curriculum in the French school system's upper grades is now "politically correct." It leaves official pronouncements on major past events far behind, and matches the mentality and left leanings of the 2 million-strong French teaching corps, most of whom are known to have supported the Socialists, Communists, and Greens throughout their adult lives.
Sooner or later, most historians agree, official rhetoric and action on still-sensitive subjects such as Algeria are bound to catch up with what has been instilled in students' minds for some 15 years now.
This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1232