Fear & Loathing in France. posted by Richard Seymour

As I suggested, the Muslim Scare is already being raised. Newsweek wonders if the riots in Paris will increase the ranks of Jihadists. This on the basis of some people reportedly saying "its Baghdad here" and others uttering the word "jihad". World Net Daily brings news that US Congressman Tom Tancredo thinks it shows "you can't integrate some people into your society", while they cite bigot Daniel Pipes ("an expert on Islam") saying that Muslims scorn European ways and conspire to take it over. Similarly, the rightist website cites Lee Kaplan, founder of an extreme Zionist outfit called Dafka, and head of the United America Committee which strives "to educate more Americans to the threat of radical Islam". Chronwatch, meanwhile, wonders how long it can be before Europe falls. For The Observer, the real worry is how come multiculturalism and "successive models of integration" have gone wrong, especially as this is "frightening in the age of radical Islam". Again, "France finds itself with more Muslims than it had reckoned with. In the age of Islamic militancy, that is a worrying trend". Indeed, there has been a torrent of this sort of drivel. Islamophobia Watch has coverage here and here. Note how similar the reaction of the mainstream right is to that of the neo-fascist BNP. (None of the American stuff is surprising, of course, since the US allows the FBI to arrest Muslims for merely praying).


Daniel Pipes: an "expert on Islam".

In France, too, the reaction of the political establishment has been repellent. Alerted to the fact that Western correspondents miss the connotive import of certain turns of phrase by Sarkozy, I asked my transatlantic friend Doug Ireland - who lived for some years in Paris and speaks the language fluently - for his thoughts:

One of the words Sarko used for the ghetto youth was "racaille," which does indeed translate literally as "scum," but which has a much, much nastier and aggresively perjorative flavor to it in frog than "scum" does in English. It's a dreadful, dehumanizing word in French to use about the young, and was absolutely like throwing kerosene on the fire...

The other Sarkozy word that doesn't translate well is "karcheriser" - "Karsher" is the registered brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peals away the outer skin of encrusted dirt, even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. Again, to apply this to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethinic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in frog? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses completely the inflammatory violence of what Sarko is really saying.

Doug also notes that the rioting has spread well beyond this Parisian suburb to places like Dijon and Marseilles - seeing Sarkozy dehumanise and threaten the Muslims in Paris has infuriated residents of the ghettos across France. Many French people blame Sarkozy for having "lit the fire", and as a consequence the opposition parties are showing a tiny little bit of backbone and saying things like "Well, zero tolerance for Sarkozy then. Zero tolerance for verbal provocation, the disappearance of neighbourhood policing and the absence of any preventive policies". As I said, 'tiny'. That said, while France 2 (a public television station) announces that several Catholic bishops have denounced "repression and inciting fear", a poll taken lately shows that 57% of French people approve of what Sarkozy is saying and doing. Some nearby middle class residents are quoted by the BBC saying they'll shoot anyone who tries to burn their car. One man said he was only sorry these kids were born in France as he wished they could be sent home so where "they wouldn't be allowed to cause trouble like this". Quite so - back home in Algeria, for instance, trouble-making might get you tortured, raped or killed by some of the security forces. And what an interesting thing to pine for.

I should also point out that Sarkozy has not suddenly come to this rhetoric anew, as if prompted by the riots into an intemperate fury. He has been saying this stuff for months: he first used his 'Kärcherise' expression some months back, and was rebuked by Chirac and Villepin for it. Actually, he seems to get off on playing Clint Eastwood: when a judge freed one of two men suspected by police of murdering Nelly Cremel, he announced that the judge would "pay for his mistake". (That kind of grandstanding and legislative interference with judicial decisions might well have inspired our dear departed David Blunkett). And if Sarkozy's rhetoric is not new, neither are blazes in Parisian suburbs. Back in August, several Parisian apartments housing immigrants caught fire - arson was believed to be involved (see here, here, here and here. Sarkozy responded by shutting down the housing blocks and suggesting that the real problem was that France had accepted these immigrants in the first place. (France Inter, August 30, 2005). He has pledged to permanently station riot police and mobile police brigades in "difficult" estates.


Sarkozy Kärcherising the estates.

Now, French imams have already denounced the riots, anticipating the inevitable witch hunt. Sarkozy has been trying to claim in the last couple of days that the riots are organised and systematic, (this would involve a rather enormous plot across much of France by hundreds of thousands of Muslims), which is transparent demagoguery. Some have tried to claim that Islamic fundamentalists are involved - French officials say not. The only story that obtains here is that unrest began as a reaction to the suspicious deaths of two teenage boys who were fleeing the police yet had done nothing wrong; it intensified after a mosque was tear-gassed; and it has spread as Sarkozy has barked out veiled threats and insults. Further, eyewitnesses suggest that the police are deliberately provoking violence.

The backdrop is not mysterious either. These kids are growing up in squalid banlieues, where their parents and grandparents were deposited upon arrival. Doug Ireland notes that they are in France largely due to state and industrial policy. During the 1950s and 60s, when France was experiencing an economic boom, a policy was initiated to recruit from the former colonies labourers for menial and factory work, because two successive wars had killed off much male labour power and lowered the birth rate. There was a similar policy in Britain: it was Enoch Powell, he who later drowned in rivers of his own froth, who encouraged residents of the Commonwealth to migrate to the United Kingdom and take up roles in the NHS. Generations of largely North African Arabs were abandoned to the banlieues, pushed to the bottom of every available pile, blamed for being there, subjected to police repression and spectacularly high rates of unemployment. Meanwhile, they know that the French government has been complicit in mass murder in Algeria, and that it has armed Israel. They know that it continues to kill people in Haiti and the Cote d'Ivoire, and that it was ready to send 15,000 troops into Iraq before Chirac fell out with Bush over the timing of an invasion, and has supported the occupation.


Haiti: victims of Bush and Chirac's invasion.

And they know that Sarkozy wishes to impose an even more vicious neoliberal agenda, while scapegoating some of its principal victims. He wants to slash the welfare state, cap taxes at a maximum of 50% (that's all taxes combined) of revenue for whatever income bracket (the rich), and stop all benefits to anyone who refuses to take whatever shitty job in Buerger King Muslim is offered to them. Congruent with this plan to restore profitability to French capital, he has indicated that he wants to impose quotas on immigration so that only those skilled workers that the French economy needs are allowed in - and, of course, when they are no longer needed, they will be left on the shitheap and blamed for their condition.

Just as French Algeria never accorded full citizenship to the Arabs who lived there, those now living in France are not visible. When they become visible, they are despised - as in the case of young Muslim schoolgirls, disporting themselves while being so noisome as to wear a hijab. The very sight, these days, thanks to the efforts of the Republic, is proscribed: "Off with it!" (In a market society, you must display your wares). Despite the large number of Arabs and Muslims living in France, there is not a single Arab or Muslim politician in the French parliament. The French left, as I noted before, have largely been abysmal on the question of Islamophobia. It is a particular failing on their part since the intersection of racism with class politics could hardly be more obvious in this case. The LCR demo organised the other day perhaps indicates a growing willingness to engage with this issue. As Le Colonel Chabert points out, what these kids need and demand, before all else, is respect. That is the basis upon which solidarity can and should be built.