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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Nov-05
The Paris riots and Hurricane Katrina

Web Log - November, 2005

The Paris riots and Hurricane Katrina

After 13 days, the Paris riots are subsiding, but not after enormously embarassing France.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced strict curfew laws and a strong law and order program, along with the promise of new social programs for immigrant ghettoes.

The social programs are needed because of decades of pervasive unemployment, poverty, discrimination and racism, endured by the residents of the ghettos where the rioting has been taking place. The rioters were young men, native Frenchmen, and almost all Muslims, sons of parents who immigrated to France in the 1950s and 1960s from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and black Africa.

The embarassment to France is that it has long been demonstrating a kind of "holier than thou" attitude, criticizing England and America and the "Anglo-Saxon model" which, according to the French, allows unemployment, poverty, discrimination and racism in the free market capitalist system. When hurricane Katrina struck, France was one of the main critics of the American system, claiming that it exposed the racial divide in America, with the implication that no such divide exists in France. It's now pretty clear that it does exist, and there's a lot of gloating going on.

For example, an analysis in Wednesday's Washington Post says,

"[The] refusal of French politicians to lift restrictions on employers, to promote entrepreneurship or to deregulate make it impossible for young people to integrate through the economy, as immigrants do in this country, despite discrimination. The only real long-term solution -- that France should join the dreaded "Anglo-Saxon" world market and open up its economy -- is precisely the one that no French politician dare speak aloud."

Remarkably, the press in other nations is also comparing America favorably to France.

According to a column in the Toronto Star,

"The Paris riots have done to France what Katrina did to America: rip open its Third World underbelly and expose its deep divisions of race and class. But unlike America — which, with its reservoir of guilt and goodwill toward its black citizens, is making a huge effort to compensate and rehabilitate the displaced of New Orleans — one suspects that France, with its anti-immigrant pathology, will continue to muddle along."

And a Muslim columnist says that Arabs and Muslims have better lives in America than in France:

"While Arab Americans and Muslims suffered a spike in hate crimes after the September 11 attacks, they do not face the same level of disenfranchisement as their French counterparts, experts say. “They’re discriminated against but they have jobs - this is the major difference from Europe,” Yvonne Haddad, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University in Washington told AFP."

The message from these sources is that the French social model has failed.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, the choice of social model doesn't make any difference. America does have racial problems, but we've also had a civil war fought over them in the 1860s. Enough time has passed since then that the fault line has softened.

But the situation is much more recent in Europe, and so much more serious, and we've discussed this problem before on this web site. The July 7 London subway suicide bombers were the children of immigrants from Kashmir, and the Muslim population that convulsed Holland following the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim extremist consists mostly of children of Muslim immigrants who arrived from Turkey and Morocco in the 1960s and 1970s as "guest workers."

The European country with the largest Muslim minority is France, with 5 million Muslims, as a result of immigration Africa during the 1950s and 1960s. It was very generous of so many European countries to offer immigration opportunities to so many Muslims -- from Africa, the Mideast and Turkey -- in the 1950s and 1960s, but no good deed goes unpunished and it's now time to pay the price.

The French riots appear to be subsiding, but their principal effect has been to further polarize the fault line between Christians and Muslims throughout Europe.

Generational Dynamics predicts that there will be a new European war, as there has been so any times in the past. As we've said in the past, a new war between England and France is all but certain, but the size of the Muslim minorities guarantees that another component will be a civil war based on this fault line. (10-Nov-05) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Nov-05 The Paris riots and Hurricane Katrina

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Nov-05
The Paris riots and Hurricane Katrina