French Crescent

One of the most remarkable features of un-integrated immigration in which lower class Muslim economic migrants seem to specialize is that they flee a home country which is an economic failure for a foreign one which has more successful social and cultural systems, yet they insist on bringing with them, standing by and even propagating the habits and practices of their failing homeland and publicly vaunting their moral superiority over that of their host state. It’s not surprising they get their mosques burned from time to time.

The race riots in America, Australia, Britain and France brought into focus the global scale of 21st century religious and ethnic racism, growing divide and the violence it breeds. Yet racism continues rolling on into the 21st century. Whether it’s in America, where popular radio talk show host Don Imus called Rutgers women’s basketball team, the national champions, “nappy-headed ho’s.” That was not his first on the air racist or sexist remark, and probably not his last, especially if he remains unemployed.

In France during their recent 2007 presidential election, farmers got more political attention ─ and subsidies ─ than the burning North African Muslims ghettoes in its major cities. The ambers of the last race riots a couple of years earlier, were warming up and ready to re-ignite. Police are being ambushed in the Paris outskirts by young banlieusards alienated by racial discrimination, poor housing and a rate of joblessness that hits 40 percent in some hoods. “With Sarko winning the presidential election….people will be killed” they warned. An urban guerilla war is on-going in the run-down neighborhoods that ring the nation’s major cities, much like the U.S. ghettoes of the 60s. The introduction of “ethnic statistics” after the 2005 riots is a forbidden taboo since the French Revolution, reconfirmed in 1978, French government officials are forbidden to collect information about a citizen’s ethnic or racial origins when conducting a census or other efforts to gather statistical information on the population. One of the main reasons being that the painful and still vivid memories of the Vichy regime of the second world war, when citizens’ “racial” and religious origin was stamped on identification documents and used in rounding up French Jews for delivery to the death camps. Any wonder North African-French Muslims are concerned and upset? They could wind up in concentration camps in a Catholic dominated Christian Europe.