Maybe change is happening, maybe the average Frenchman is fighting back, but I’ve got to say I feel like we’ve been writing this same post year after year here at RRW, and I don’t see where the French are doing anything other than, as this article points out, becoming more morose!
From the Irish Times (French identity crisis indeed!) The Irish better watch out because this same thing is coming to Ireland in the not too distant future!
French officials discreetly applauded the British prime minister David Cameron’s proposals this week to restrict immigration from poor EU countries.
Immigration is becoming the thorniest issue in French politics and will figure prominently in next year’s municipal and European elections. Socialists and the conservative UMP are toughening their policies, in the hope of blunting the appeal of the anti-immigrant, far-right National Front.
The UMP wants to abolish the right to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born in France, and wants to end free medical care for illegals. Interior minister Manuel Valls has promised to re-examine the right to asylum.
Immigration and national identity are often cited as contributing to France’s chronic state of moroseness. But when the former president Nicolas Sarkozy established a “ministry of immigration and national identity,” the implication that immigrants threatened French identity prompted an outcry.
The theme hasn’t died though. Philosopher Alain Finkelkraut’s Unhappy Identity, one of the most talked about books this autumn, claims the French no longer feel at home in their own country. “When the cybercafe is called ‘Bled.com’ [bled is Arab slang for the countryside] and the butcher’s shop and the fast-food are halal,” Finkelkraut writes, “these sedentary [French people] experience exile without having moved. Everything has changed around them.”
At Marine Le Pen’s National Front rallies, crowds chant “On est chez nous!” (We’re at home.) There’s unspoken resentment that Arabs and Africans who drove France from her colonies are now “invading” and adulterating the French way of life, in a sort of reverse colonisation. The French no longer refer to “travailleurs immigrés” but to immigrants, full stop; Muslim immigrants are apparently no longer seen as workers.
The French long believed their secular, republican education system would transform the children of Muslim immigrants into loyal citizens. Ghettoised in the banlieues, rejected by potential employers, Arab and African Muslims are instead re-islamicising, as shown by the widespread presence of headscarves and djellaba robes.
The article continues here.
It has nothing to do with living conditions and employment—Muslims are in France to change (to colonize) France, not to become more secular and more French!
Photo is from the Christian Science Monitor.