Category Archives: Civil Rights

C’est un Riot!

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If you follow Memeorandum or other blog aggregator sites you’ve noticed that for the past several days the entire Right Blogosphere has been wallowing in the French riots. Truly, I have never before witnessed such undiluted Schadenfreude. Most people have at least a little twinge of guilt about rejoicing in the misfortune of others, but not our righties. They are rollicking in every fire, every shooting, every broken window. Righties haven’t had this much fun since the Dan Rather smackdown.

The French riots apparently feed into several of their collective detestations–of France, of Muslims, and of socialism. A trifecta! And they can’t let go of it. I thought that when they caught a sniff of Cindy Sheehan in Argentina they’d change course and go howling in that direction. But Sheehan in Argentina barely caused a ripple.

Of course, the truth is that the riots in France were not caused by a failure of “socialism.” Conservatives, not socialists, are in charge of France right now, and awhile back they adopted a hard-right immigration policy that any rightie would love. No multiculturalism allowed; if you live in France, you had better assimilate right now or get bounced. No affirmative action–employers can discriminate against Muslims without penalty. And French schools do not treat all religions equally, but give preferential treatment to Christians.

Today they’ve hit a new low; rightie bloggers are gleefully linking to an article written by an Israeli college professor titled “Got That ‘Ooo La La, Intifada’ Feeling?”

Well, there are very few things as amusing these days as watching the French grapple with their backyard intifada. The suburbs of Paris are now more dangerous than Jenin, and the French are getting their comeuppance for decades of snootiness, for anti-American and anti-Israel agitprop, for decades of cowardice, and especially for the repulsive French love of old Jerry Lewis movies.

That’s sick. Je ne suis pas amusé.

Finally the Left weighs in–Jonathan Miller of Blogoland writes,

I’m struck by the unrestrained glee emanating from righty bloggers over the rioting in France this past week.

For instance, this is just one of many, but InstaPundit links to a blogger who bizarrely declares: “The current intifada in France has stripped the American Left of its second Utopia in a generation. The Left lost its earlier worldly utopia when the Soviet Union fell apart.”

Are they kidding?

As the NYT points out today (and a passage that InstaPundit curiously omits in his linking to the same article) France’s policy towards immigrants is every hard-right, total-assimilationist’s wet dream:

    The government has been embarrassed by its inability to quell the disturbances, which have called into question its unique integration model, which discourages recognizing ethnic, religious or cultural differences in favor of French unity. There is no affirmative action, for example, and religious symbols, like the Muslim veil, are banned in schools.

What’s not to love? National unity, denial of heritage, no affirmative action, subjugating ethnicity to the larger state, a “French Identity.” Paging Patrick Buchanan!

Exactly. It isn’t “multiculturalism” that started the riots in France. It was “assimilationism.” Immigrants to France are required to sign a bleeping integration contract that stipulates instruction in the French language and French values. No multiculturalism allowed.

Over at the Peking Duck, we read:

Nothing is more depressing than seeing those on the right jump for joy over the Muslim youths rioting in Paris. They’re thrilled because it confirms how dysfunctional and bad France is, and confirms that Muslims are animals. (For a fine example, head over to this monstrous site — a real “hate site,” and one linked to enthusiastically by InstaPuppy and Michelle Malkin.) It’s depressing because their joy is ill-founded and based on two lies: 1.) that this is part of a worldwide Islamofascist “intifada,” and 2.) that the rioting is due to France’s liberal, multicultural, Muslim-loving tendencies.

Actually, France takes a rather right-wing, Charles Johnsonesque approach to Muslims, isolating them from mainstream society, ghettoizing them and enforcing a unicultural policy. …

…And returing to No. 1, this isn’t about Muslim terrorism. It’s about poor disaffected youth on the fringes of society, warehoused in project housing with no hope and no future. The rioting may be totally wrong and inexcusable, but at least see it for what it is. It is not a 911-like attack, but the result of many years of stigmatization and poverty. First try to understand it, then criticize it. Is that too much to ask?

Yes, it is too much to ask of righties. It would require them to think and learn stuff and all. Too much work. They’d rather fall back on their comfortable old fears, prejudices, and hatreds.


Echidne adds,

The best short reading of these riots is that they are like the 1960’s race riots in the U.S., as Atrios suggested. The main cause for the riots is in unemployment, poverty and marginalization of the French immigrants and their descendants. The religious angle complicates things, naturally, and makes the chasms in the French society (as well as in the societies of quite a few other European countries) more dangerous to navigate. And as usual, the actual violence also has other elements, from accusations that the police are egging it on to hints that some of the arson is manufactured by drug overlords.

For these reasons I wouldn’t read the events as a clash of religions or civilizations as so many right-wing bloggers do. I think that they are plugging into their own fears and add to that a lot of ignorance about the French political system. For example, it’s the conservatives who are in power in France right now, not some socialists as I have read on the wingnut net.

In short, the French are making most of the same mistakes with immigrant populations that white Americans did with African American populations, and with many of the same results–ghettoization, poverty, and now violence. Same old, same old. France isn’t experiencing “l’intifada.” It’s experiencing “Les Watts.”

Update: Steve Gilliard writes,

Any African American who doesn’t find this familiar would be lying. The death of the two kids was a charge on long simmering feelings of anger at the police, which is mostly white and French. Sarkozy should put down the Giuliani bio and listen. Order has to be restored, but this will happen again unless real change takes place.

You shouldn’t have to lose your culture to be French. That was the same crap the French did in the colonies: be French, but get treated like niggers.

When people who play within the system still aren’t treated fairly, eventually someone will strike back at the system.

Rosa Parks

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There’s little to say about Rosa Parks’s courage and the significance of her life that hasn’t already been said. Jeanne d’Arc is particularly eloquent.

Across the Blogosphere, left and right, bloggers are paying tribute to Mrs. Parks, who died last night at the age of 92.

Although mostly heartfelt, the praise from some rightie bloggers underscores what to me is the most amazing attribute of rightiness, which is the inability to apply lessons of history to the present. Although the faces and causes change, the American Right still reflexively smacks down anyone who dares to take a stand for the dignity of the individual or to speak a truth the Right doesn’t want to hear. Like Rosa Parks.

The liberal struggle for equality and individual rights versus the conservative struggle to keep power and privilege in the hands of a select few is the most persistent theme in American political history. Although slavery was the mother of all inqualities, abolition didn’t stop the struggle. New movements gain attention–labor, women’s suffrage, civil rights, women’s rights, native American rights, gay rights. Time and again, a segment of American citizenry rises up and declares it will sit in the front of the bus with The Man. And then we go through the same old dance–the Right lashes back, smears the instigators, swears that if X happens it will be the end of civilization as we know it, attempts to use law to hold back the liberal tide, fails, and then gradually loses popular support as people figure out the change wasn’t so bad after all. And two or three generations later, the Right declares it was for X all along.

And they cannot learn. Earlier this year I had a conservation with a rightie about “activist judges.” I mentioned Brown v. Board of Education, and the rightie lashed back in irritation — how come you lefties always bring up Brown? We bring it up because it exemplifies the same old learning curve we keep having to repeat. In fact, I believe the Right’s bugaboo about “activist judges” originated with the Brown decision. Later would come other decisions, such as Engel v. Vitale and Roe v. Wade, always followed by the same rhetoric. X is a threat to the American way of life. X takes rights (i.e., privileges) away from people. X is a usurpation by the federal government of states’ rights. And X will lead to moral depravity (e.g., miscegenation after Brown, godlessness after Engel, rampant promiscuity and a “culture of death” after Roe).

Same old, same old. When the privileged few are prevented from using state and local government as agents of oppression–whether oppression of racial minorities, religious minorities, women, or any other not-privileged group–they throw collective temper tantrums and whine that government is taking away their rights. And anyone who stands up for equal treatment under the law had better have a thick skin, because the Right will attack.

And the learning comes slow. After 40 years, there are still pockets of resistance to the Montgomery bus boycott. I found some on the blogosphere today. This blogger calls Parks a “pawn” of the NAACP, for example. (Fact is, Parks was a long-time NAACP worker who knew very well what she was doing when she sat on that bus; she was nobody’s “pawn.”) Although I was a toddler when the Brown decision was handed down, the resulting fight over school desegregation was still white-hot when I was high school. An all-white high school, btw. And the standoffs on school prayer and abortion seem not to have budged much after all these years.

This blogger writes, “The civil rights leaders of today pale in comparison to Parks and her compatriots.” That’s what they always say. In the 1950s, Parks and Martin Luther King were vilified soundly by the Right. As were Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass in their day.

Tweak the racial epithets, and the invective hurled at Rosa Parks in 1955 becomes the same invective hurled at Cindy Sheehan today.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.