France's despair that lead to riots were forwarned in movies and music

France should have listened to its artists
Riots have been presaged by films
Rap lyrics as early as 1991 showed rage
Nov. 26, 2005. 01:00 AM
ALAN RIDING
NEW YORK TIMES

PARIS—So life often imitates art. Yet with the recent uprisings in some French immigrant neighbourhoods, this cliché came with a new twist: art, in the form of movies and rap music, has long been warning that French-born Arab and black youths felt increasingly alienated from French society and that their communities were ripe for explosion.

Certainly anyone who saw Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film Hate had no reason to be surprised by this fall's violence. At the time, Kassovitz's portrayal of a seething immigrant Paris banlieue (or suburb) seemed shocking and exaggerated. Today, the movie could pass for a documentary.

...


Disiz la Peste, a black rapper, captured this sense of hopelessness just a few months ago in lyrics that ended:

``Those who treat me with disdain,
Who make rotten jokes,
Which don't even make sense,
Neither humour nor love,
And France cares little what I do.
Forever in its mind
I'll just be a young man from the banlieue.''


So life has not been imitating art; cinema and rap have been mirroring the life and mood of France's immigrant underclass. The problem is that, in the corridors of power in central Paris, no one was listening.

Until now. This week, a group of conservative legislators asked the justice ministry to investigate whether seven rap groups had incited violence and racism through their lyrics. Is shooting the messengers the best solution?

Toronto Star

This is a good reason for governments not to infringe on free speech and expression. One could learn a lot about how a society feels, from how it expresses itself artistically. Though once you express yourself, and no one listens, it can definitely lead to frustration.

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--
and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes

[edit on 5-12-2005 by curme]

It's a shame that some people who warned about what would happen were ignored by others.

I'm not speaking about Rap artists, I'm speaking of politicians like Enoch Powell in Britain and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, who both warned of the dangers of unchecked immigration.

www.sterlingtimes.co.uk...

news.bbc.co.uk...

Wait, you're seriously suggesting that Le Pen's response to France's immigration would have defused the situation? This is the same Le Pen who's Front National party used the slogan "La France pour les Français" (France for the French).

I think that, to the contrary, it was the marginalization the Magrebs in the suburbs, much the way the US's own blacks have been marginalized in urban ghettos, that caused the uproar. While the riots themselves were a bad way to voice this anger, they'd been trying for years to be heard through more legitimate means. Hopefully France will step back and take a good look at the actual causes of the riots, rather than something penned, if you'll forgive the pun, by the FN's racist founder.

Originally posted by Whiskey JackHopefully France will step back and take a good look at the actual causes of the riots, rather than something penned, if you'll forgive the pun, by the FN's racist founder.

The riots were caused by immgrants and their children, just like the riots in Britain, Denmark, Belgium, etc...
Get rid of them and a major cause for future riots will go away.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this happening in Germany soon too because the muslims are isloating themselves over there just as they do in almost every other country.

In Germany, Muslims grow apart

Alarmed by the honor killings, Germans have begun to investigate the parallel society: a society proud of its isolation; purist and traditional yet, in its own terms, creative, forward-looking and often contemptuous of the German host society.

The recent riots in France have increased the sense of alarm. German politicians and experts lined up to point out why such riots are unlikely in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart or Hamburg. They claimed that young Muslims in Germany - although up to 50 percent of them are unemployed - had full access to the welfare state and were not isolated in high-rise projects as in the suburbs of Paris.

Yet there was an undertone of panic. At stake is German confidence that their nation can continue as it had been: integrating immigrants without an integration policy, remaining true to the traditional German identity and preserving the reassuring post-1945 chronology of advancing modernism.

The isolation of muslims is self imposed by the muslims themselves, not by the French, German, British, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, etc...

Originally posted by AceOfBase
The riots were caused by immgrants and their children, just like the riots in Britain, Denmark, Belgium, etc...
Get rid of them and a major cause for future riots will go away.

Right, so if we deport the brown people, the enlightened can live in peace?

Seriously, are you familiar with the history of North African immigration in France? You do know, right, that many of the parents and grandparents were brought in in the 3 decades following WWII to help rebuild the country? While there was a boom for illegal immigration during those years, there was also a great deal of legal immigration. Unfortunately both types of immigrants ended up in the French suburbs. These suburbs aren't the neatly manicured yards that we think of in America, they have more in common with Chicago's Cabrini Green than they do with American suburbia.

That's not to say that the responsibility for the rioters' actions fall on any shoulders other than the rioters' own, but to simply say "Get rid of the immigrants" is a huge oversimplification.

The isolation of muslims is self imposed by the muslims themselves, not by the French, German, British, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, etc...

Right, just like the blacks' isolation and marginalization in the US is because they choose it as well?

Originally posted by Whiskey Jack
Seriously, are you familiar with the history of North African immigration in France? You do know, right, that many of the parents and grandparents were
brought in in the 3 decades following WWII to help rebuild the country?

I am aware that the vast majority of North Africans arrived after the 1962 Algerian war. Were you? Post-war reconstruction had already ended by that point.

There were only 500,000 muslims in France in 1962 and there are now about 6 million.

RAND

The Muslims among the immigrants practiced their religion freely, as did the Jews, except during Vichy. Since the Hexagon (European France, named after its shape on the map) had only 100,000 Muslims in 1945, they presented no problem. Algeria was legally part of postwar France, and during les trente glorieuses, the 30 years of rapid economic growth beginning after the war, Algerians were brought into European France particularly to work in the burgeoning automobile industry. Even so, in 1962, when Algeria became independent, the Hexagon had fewer than 500,000 Muslims

Then, le déluge. In 1962, President Charles de Gaulle ended eight years of bitter civil war in Algeria by withdrawing French claims and troops and recognizing Algerian independence.
The simple description of the antagonists—the Muslim natives of Algeria versus the governing French authorities plus a million colons, people whose ancestors had been recruited from across the European shores of the Mediterranean, some many generations earlier—is too simple. Many Algerian soldiers—harkis—had fought on the French side; other Algerians had sympathized with the French, or were thought by the revolutionaries to have sympathized and had well-founded fears of retaliation in the postindependence chaos.
They came to France, which, if it did not exactly welcome the Muslim refugees, admitted them. Mass immigration accelerated rapidly in 1974; before that year, workers were free to come and go between France and Algeria, but the strong constraints on such movement imposed in 1974 had the ironic result of motivating Algerian workers to stay in France and bring their families with them. That, plus high birth rates, doubled the Muslim population to a million in the 11 years from 1962 to 1973, redoubled it by 1981, and then redoubled it again to 4 million in 1995. Ten percent—6 to 7 million Muslims—is the consensus of current estimates.

Hell why stop at deporting them all lets just send them off into space into the sun so we can be rid of em for ever.. /sarcasm

Ace whats got you all xenophobic all of a sudden? It was a riot not an intifada. The same has happened in your country or have you forgotten?

Does the fact that they are mostly Moslums make it different then the LA Riots?

Please don't bring up the whole history of the situation. Throughout history, everyone get screwed, and reaps great rewards at some time or other. When history is told, groups are lumped together based on whatever is the reining ideology, and stories are concocted so as to support some political agenda. While history may be a powerful propoganda, history does not explain conflicts.

Next, we turn to living conditions. A lot of people all over the world live in #ty conditions. It sucks, but I don't think that alone causes riots. Maybe, the problem is the live in #ty conditions near people, who are well off, and insufficient force has been employed to properly supress them.

Although, I think the real reasons lie in the ideology, and ideas of these people. Unemployment and living conditions may make these ideas spread more rapidly, but the ideas stand on their own. The propogandists/imams/etc. have convinced lots of people to be upset with the their society, which people conceptualize as the physical pieces of their society.

The rioters do not appear to have a real political goal. If they did, they would likely have more targeted riots. It appears the rioting has been pretty random. This indicates they lack a clear goal.