O CENTRO DO CHOQUE


Are the many mosques contributing to the Muslim violence that is rampant in the banlieues of France? Despite hundreds of millions of euros invested in urban renovation to destroy the oldest tower blocks and rebuild entire districts, alienation and poverty in the area is off the charts. The area is a festering sore, illustrated for years by a very high unemployment, a level of crime with no equivalent in the Ile-de-France [area around Paris] and massive educational failure.

Even the Iranian state-owned Press TV notes the connection between car burning and Muslim districts. “While not a single car was burned in Paris, its suburban region of Seine Saint Denis led the nation in torchings,” it wrote. “Heavily Muslim and just as heavily dependent on welfare, the area has 75 percent of the population of Paris, but Paris is protected by five times as many police officers.”

Whether you believe that Muslims are rioting or that French police refuse to protect France’s poor Muslim districts (à la Press TV), it’s clear France has a problem with Islam. And that’s becoming obvious to the French too. They can hardly escape it after last year’s shocking attacks on Jews.

This week, the Gatestone Institute, a U.S.-based think tank, published a comprehensive report titled “The Islamization of France” detailing Islam’s confrontations with French society.

“In August, the French government announced a plan to boost policing in 15 of the most crime-ridden parts of France, in an effort to reassert state control over the country’s so-called ‘no go’ zones (Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that are largely off limits to non-Muslims),” it wrote. These zones “include heavily Muslim parts of Paris, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Lille and Amiens,” according to the report—in other words, the areas where people burn cars. Obviously the government’s plan hasn’t succeeded.

But the Gatestone Institute’s report notes that French attitudes to Islam are changing. “Opinion surveys show that to voters in France … Islam and the question of Muslim immigration have emerged in 2012 as a top-ranked public concern,” it writes. “The French, it seems, are increasingly worried about the establishment of a parallel Muslim society there.” The government’s efforts, however, “were halting and half-hearted,” the report said.

A survey published in October last year found that 60 percent believe Islam has become “too visible and influential.” Forty-three percent said the presence of Muslim immigrants is a threat to French national identity, compared to 17 percent who said it enriches society. Sixty-three percent oppose Muslim women wearing veils or Islamic headscarves in public. Only 18 percent support the building of new mosques.

“Our poll shows a further hardening in French people’s opinions,” said the head of the French Institute of Public Opinion’s polling department, Jerome Fourquet. “In recent years, there has not been a week when Islam has not been in the heart of the news for social reasons: the veil, halal food, dramatic news like terrorist attacks or geopolitical reasons.”

The most headline-grabbing resistance to radical Islam came from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Islamists firebombed its offices in November 2011 after it published cartoons of Mohammed. Its response? This week it published Mohammed’s biography in cartoon form.

Nearly a thousand years ago, France was at the heart of the clash between Islam and Europe’s Christian civilization. Now, as home to the EU’s largest Muslim population, it is at the heart of that clash once again. The politics haven’t changed to reflect this. But the people have.

Le Monde, 05/04/2011
- Enviado por Janer @ 8:09 PM