NOTE: This was originally posted at The Moderate Voice on Tuesday, 8 November 2005, I am re-posting it here for those who have not read it.
GRENOBLE, France: As an expatriate in France, I have the dubious privilege of being able to view (from inside the country) the violence while it becomes more widespread. As is typical with most events, there is a complexity underlying the immediate but facile reactions.
It might be useful to begin with the a true first-hand reaction, showing the effects the news of the violence in France has on everyday life within the country. I live in Grenoble, a medium-sized city between Geneva and Avignon, fairly close to Lyon in western France. It is a college town, along with being one of the main technology centers in France, having a major government laboratory similar to that in the US at Sandia National Labs, performing research in a number of fields including nuclear technology along with advanced semiconductor device fabrication, my area of work. In many ways it is similar to Austin, Texas, the high-tech-focused college town I lived in before moving to France.
Grenoble also suffers from the economic malaise that the entire nation of France has endured for more than a decade, with national unemployment seemingly stuck at 10% or more, with the rate among those under the age of 30 much higher.
I live in the downtown area near many cafes and bars, and frequently in the evenings I can hear the singing of the youths who have had too much to drink as they slowly make their way home.
Part of my commute involves a longer walk than I was accustomed to with my house in the US. Here, I have about a 300-yard walk from the garage where I park, a bit farther than the 3 yards in the US. This walk takes me through the city’s Garden Park to the small street leading to my apartment building. This rue, which is remarkably dark at night, is a prime walking path exiting an area where many bars and cafes are located.
Monday evening I parked my car in the garage a little after 7:30, which is after nightfall in this part of the world in early November. As I descended the stairs from the Garden Park to the rue sombre leading to my apartment, I first heard and then saw three men who looked to be in their mid-twenties. Usually, I would keep an eye on them and choose my path carefully to ensure that I do not have any interaction that exceeds my limited French. I have never truly felt unsafe but, in any city, anywhere in the world, it is always wise to remain alert.
The situation has changed.
The riots that started in Paris and have spread to other cities in France reached Grenoble on Sunday night, when 40 cars were burned. Perhaps a small number compared to the hundreds destroyed in Paris, but with an uncomfortable proportionality to the relative populations.
So, on Monday evening, the random encounter with three young men had a new air about it. As I walked down the dark street towards the door to my apartment building, I regarded the obviously drunk characters more closely than usual, and I shifted my laptop-containing backpack to a position where I could quickly sling it about to use as a weapon, if needed. Fortunately, it was not.
By the peculiar metric being used by the French police forces, the intensity of the riots has decreased as “only” a dozen cars were burnt in Grenoble on Monday night.
Yet, the situation has changed.
There are many asking “Why?” with respect to the violence, and many trying to use a false correlation to root out some causality. When the true foundations underlying the riots are discussed, if they do not match the beliefs and preferences of some, they claim that the explanation is somehow “excusing” the rioters for their criminal actions.
Seeking explanations is NOT making excuses.
If we seek out why a building collapses, are we trying to say that the architect and builder are not responsible? No. We are trying to find out the reason so we can make sure it does not happen again.
The origins of the unrest are myriad, and none are simple to describe, nor are they simple to solve.
One of the most fundamental causes was best described by Jane Galt at Asymmetrical Information in a post well-worth reading in full, despite the extensive excerpt here:
Why are French muslims rioting?
Is it because Arabs/Muslims are a roiling repository of violent, seething hatred, ever threatening to bubble over onto unsuspecting victims in their path? Because the French are so damn mean?
Let me suggest another possibility: Muslim youth are rioting in France because breaking windows and setting cars on fire is fun.
Everyone who has ever taken their .22 out to the back forty and shot up a line of old bug spray cans knows this. Seeing things break, disintegrate, or explode, at absolutely no personal risk to yourself, lights up some primitive reptilian part of our brain with searing glee. I’ve often thought there would be big money for the firm that figured out how to build an adult recreation center where frustrated Americans could go to have a beer, take a sledgehammer to a used computer, and throw some glassware at the walls.
Of course, normally we don’t go around torching automobiles, because the owners of those automobiles would be angry, and we would be arrested, and our friends would look at us funny. But take a group of people who have relatively little to lose from an arrest, since they’re never going to get jobs anyway, and who are, not without reason, permanently angry at the people who own those cars, and thus have very little of the social control that comes from feeling you are in a mutual social contract that protects you as well as the car owners, and add a minor provocation . . . voila! With a peer group giving us permission to bust stuff up, I bet a substantial number of us would go on a rampage too. The riot is only the mirror image of the lynch mob.
Her concluding paragraph highlights a key point missed by those who are using their partisan glasses to view the world:
But that doesn’t really answer the question that everyone is asking: is the peer group ratifying it because they’re Muslim/North African, or because they’re a member of a segregated underclass? I vote number two. Poor, uneducated, ghettoized people everywhere display a tendency to riot, because they have little to lose, and because they feel little part of the reciprocating bonds that hold us together in a web of mutual exchange, rather than violence. There’s no special magic to culture that I can see, which is why Irish Americans rioted in 1863 and not 1963.
What Galt writes is almost identical to a discussion I had with one of my French colleagues at work today. He and I frequently engage in political discussions; it is the national hobby in France, and it gives me a lot of practice expressing non-technical, abstract ideas in French. Despite being a native (meaning white) Frenchman who loves his country, he freely said that discrimination was practiced by the society in France against those who although born in France were not necessarily regarded as French, nor did they have an even shot at a job. I pointed to empirical evidence of this problem (which includes living in the “wrong” neighborhood) in a post at my weblog, Random Fate, that was noted in The Christian Science Monitor:
“Working class suburbs have become ethnic ghettos,” says Marc Cheb Sun, who edits “Respect,” a magazine aimed mostly at young black and North African readers. “That is the origin of the problem.”
And it is not easy for even ambitious young people to break out if they come from a district with a bad reputation, as Jean-Francois Amadieu, a university professor who founded the “Discrimination Observatory” discovered in experiments over the past year.
He sent out fictitious applications for sales jobs, allegedly coming from six different sorts of applicant, ranging from a white male to a woman of North African origins, all with the same résumé.
Applicants writing from addresses known to be in “difficult” areas received half as many invitations to an interview as those from less notorious districts. The “North African” male candidate received five times fewer invitations than his white counterpart, says Prof. Amadieu.
At the same time, complains Michèle Lereste, who runs the “Green Light” social-work agency in Villetaneuse, just North of Paris, where the projects are almost entirely inhabited by immigrant-descended families, government funding cuts have closed a number of job-training institutes, “and we are finding it harder and harder to get employers to take apprentices from our district.”
What is the risk of a false correlation creating a link between Islam and the violence?
In the first place, if a group that already perceives it is being treated unfairly (regardless of the truth or falsity of that perception) is also told that their religion is one of hatred and death, is this really a way to avoid our enemies who already use radical Islam as a tool to achieve their goals gaining even more recruits? A post at Incite is very insightful on this point:
The real effects of the French riots will become apparent later on, and they will have less to do with the actions of the French State than with the actions of the international Islamic terrorist threat. The Islamic terrorists have long seen and understood the potential of using Europe’s Muslim population to further their agenda, and have long had a significant presence in France. The scale and coverage of these riots, however, has probably surprised even them, and will encourage them to focus more of their efforts and resources on the promising European front.
After all, if you were an Islamic terrorist, which would you prefer if given the option:
a) to fight in Iraq, living in tough, uncomfortable conditions, where your likely fate is to be ratted out by fellow Muslims and hunted down and killed by American troops, or…
b) to agitate and lay the groundwork for insurrection in France, living on a comfortable government dole and enjoying all the perks and entertainments of modern life?
The riots that are occurring now are mostly a result of disaffected, bored, disillusioned, uneducated male youths, i.e., “scum,” to use Sarkozy’s term, doing what disaffected, bored, disillusioned, uneducated male youths usually do when given the excuse - cause trouble. But with the interest and ambitions of the international Islamic terrorist movement now attuned to France, the next time the Muslims of France riot you can be certain that it will be about much more than that.
It is not about Islam unless we force it to be.
I cannot overstate how important it is that we understand this point, because you cannot win a war unless you understand the nature of the conflict. The history of the United States Civil War is an illustration of this principle, for the North, despite all of its advantages in resources, could have been described as losing until it gained a set of commanders including Ulysses Grant and Tecumseh Sherman who understood that the conflict was more than set-piece battles in the Napoleonic style but was the first total war that involved the need for defeating the morale of the population as a whole and not just that of the opposing commanders.
Before you assign my thesis to that of “moonbattery” I suggest you read the commentary posted today at Opinion Journal, the online editoral pages of the definitively non-left-wing publication The Wall Street Journal.
We are not in a holy war unless we make it one.
If you do not understand the nature of the fire you are fighting, you could use the wrong method. Water on an electrical fire makes the situation worse, not better.
Al Qaeda uses fundamentalist Islam as a tool. We do not ascribe the bad acts of violent Christian groups (and they DO exist, one of the creeds of the KKK involves creating a white, Christian nation) as being characteristic of Christianity as a whole. The so-called “logic” of using correlation to “prove” some kind of causality is akin to that used to justify racism, as I pointed out at Random Fate:
Correlation, despite our desire for an orderly and understandable universe, does not prove causality.
In this particular case, it is similar to the violence in the late 1960s and early 70s in the US, where there were riots that originated in areas that were mainly inhabited by people whose skin color is commonly described as black.
Does this mean that blacks are inherently violent? The predominant view today is only a racist would say so.
However, it is apparently perfectly acceptable to say that since the riots in France are occurring in regions inhabited predominantly by Muslims (many if not most of whom are African and NOT Arab, by the way) somehow proves that Islam is inherently violent.
Yet, somehow, this thinking is acceptable, even though the logic differs not at all from the “logic” of the latter half of the 20th century used to justify all kinds of racism.
I have a theory about racism; it is a way for people to avoid the hard work of thinking.
I have a theory about hate; it is a way for people to avoid the hard work of thinking.
We should seek out the true origins of the riots, and as has been written elsewhere, I suspect we will discover they have far more in common with the origins of the riots in the United States of the later half of the 20th century than with some grand Islamist conspiracy to overthrow “the West.”
Yet even after all of these words, it does even not begin to explore the complexities underlying the historical and social context within France feeding the disaffection and the violence offered in reaction nor the paralysis in meeting the crisis that is only a more intense version of the governmental sclerosis of the last decade.
Historical - the French Revolution starting in 1789 began as riots that ultimately overthrew the ancien regime, and since that time public disorder as a legitimate method of expressing discontent has become deeply embedded in the culture of France.
Social - despite the tradition of la liberté, l’égalité, la fraternité, discrimination exists that is based not only upon race, origin, or street address, but even upon which school you attend, not solely due to the networking that occurs at the “grand colleges” as they are termed. Sadly, something similar is happening in the United States, given the large numbers of Yale and Harvard graduates occupying high office.
Volumes have been and continue to be written on these topics, yet a deep understanding of them is not necessary to acknowledge that they do play a role in laying the foundation of the violence currently underway in France.
The riots in France have very complex origins, just as the grossly misnamed War on Terror that started long before September 11, 2001, even though we did not recognize it, also has complex origins. If we make decisions based upon simplistic reactions, we will likely make the mistake of fighting a fire with gasoline, much to our regret.
—
An addendum to what I posted at The Moderate Voice:
None of what I write is intended to give any kind of “cover” or excuse for the violence perpetrated. Instead, what I am calling for is a considered and reasoned reaction to the events, using them as an additional data point in the situation of the world as a whole, the situation in Europe, the situation of the Islamic community in Europe, and how that situation may affect the thinking of the Islamic community of the world as a whole.
Interactions, we forget them at our peril. In the modern world, seemingly disparate communities are related in ways we may not anticipate, in large part due to the technologies we in the West have introduced.
We should make the effort to fully understand ALL aspects of any situation that arises.
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