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Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Is France is 'back to normal'?
Well, the French ambassador to the US thinks so. According to ambassdor Jean-David Levitte, religion had little to do with the rioting that swept his country for three weeks. Instead, he told Reuters, the mostly young rioters were angry because of discrimination and lack of economic opportunities. "We know that jihadists are recruiting teenagers, but this has nothing to do with the general unrest in those neighborhoods," he said. The teenagers want to be considered 100 percent French, he said. "They want full equality. Levitte's words about the unrest in France are more sensible than much of what has come from the government in Paris, where [among other things] the Interior Minister called the rioters 'scum.' Levitte's characterization of France's current state as 'normal' is dead-on, although not in the way that the ambassador meant. According to journalist Doug Ireland, the right-center French government has responded to the riots by doing nothing to deal with the problems that caused them, much as the Socialist government that preceded it was content to ignore the inequalities and discrimination faced by citizens of African and Mideastern origin. The Chirac-Villepin government's response to the root causes of the rebellion was pitiful -- and reflected [conservative essayist] Guy Sorman's diagnosis that, as he put it, the French political classes "believe that nothing should change because France is perfect as she is and perfect as she was." The centerpiece of the paltry social measures announced with great fanfare by Prime Minister Villepin was lowering the legal age for apprenticeships in manual technical trades -- to only 14 (multiple police reports at the height of the violence suggested the average age of arrested rioters was 16). This age-lowering Jules_ferry twist shredded a century and a half of formal French educational policy, which has always been to maximize the educational experience of children; and it now gives an official imprimatur to permitting kids to end their schooling just when it becomes most crucial. Ireland's comments above are part of an excellent article describing how the riots ended, what the French government has been doing since the rioting stopped, and how the riots may affect the electoral fortunes of the opposition Socialist party. We highly recommend reading the whole piece, which you can find here. | | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 AM | Get permalink |
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