Who Done It?

What caused a two week riot in France? Reciting every nominee would take a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters--and would be about as accurate. A partial list:

• mom



• mom's "youths"



• France's overly state-directed economy



• France's weak state institutions



• unworkable multiculturism



• culture



• alienation



• governmental oppression



• isolation imposed by deliberate French apartheid (comments of Faber)



• suburban life in "immigrant districts"



• the paucity of communication between city and suburb



• the "patriarchal structure"



• the reluctance of traditional France (i.e., non-rioters) "to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation."



• immigrants from "Black" Africa, as opposed to Maghreb Africa



• too much discrimination



• not enough discrimination, i.e., affirmative action (the WaPo, naturally: when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail)



• "incipient French racism"



• fear of the "extreme-right"



• because it's "fun"



• coming soon to a newspaper near you, President Bush

Now it's true France's economy is awful:

• GDP per capita (real; at purchasing power parity) 25 percent less than the US according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Table 2)



• an unemployment rate (after conforming different counting methodology) of 9.6 percent in September (5.1 percent US)



• unemployment in 2001 among French youth (18-24 years old) was 70.1 percent (35.4 percent US)



• those without jobs in France remain unemployed longer: an average of 12.8 months in 2002 (3.8 months in the US) and 42.9 percent of the unemployed in France in 2003 were unemployed for 12 or more months (11.8 percent US)



• the French tax burden on labor in 2000 was 24.6 percent of GDP (24.1 percent US)



• the overall tax rate in France amounts to 44.2 percent of GDP (25.4 percent US)



• the "social" and "insurance" taxes required of French manufacturers in 2003, on top of wage costs, were 31.1 percent of worker hourly wages (22.1 percent US)



• average hours per employed French worker in 2001 declined to 1532/year (US 1821/yr)



• France's private sector is stunted--twenty-five percent of jobs are as government civil servants; 10 percent of all Frenchmen receive social welfare benefits



• unsurprisingly, in 2003 government spending in France was equivalent to 54.6 percent of GDP (39.2 percent US)



• the rate of return on French equities between 1900 and 2004 averages 3.4 percent (6.8 percent US)

But that doesn't make "social injustice" the riot's root cause (as the Arab press claims). That argument proves too much--though joblessness hits immigrants disproportionately, plenty of Frenchmen (especially the young) are unemployed, and but only a few non-Muslims were among the rioters (contra M_O_M). In fact, argues Kirk Sowell at Publius Pundit, French social benefits are part of the problem:

[O]ne widely discussed solution, an increased investment in social programs aimed at these areas, can be rejected out of hand. In fact, the French welfare state has been intensely involved in poor neighborhoods for the past two decades, and that is part of the problem. French policy has created a two-tier system in which the productive are guaranteed jobs and extensive benefits, while the unproductive are guaranteed a basic living with social services far greater than what they would receive in most countries. Yet the very nature of the regulatory-welfare system precludes increasing economic productivity in low-income areas.

And Bruce Thornton speculates the "economics only" crowd is on a 60's acid flashback:

To attribute the riot to "frustration" and "no work" is to indulge a highly questionable view of human action that reduces it to environmental forces outside the individual. This materialist determinism — the idea that material causes in the environment, especially economic ones, are the prime mover of humans — is not a scientific fact but an ideological prejudice whose roots lay in pseudo-scientists like Marx and Freud. It discards the fact of human free will.

Rather, there's ample data connecting the participants and their targets to Islam. For example, news footage showed rioters chanting "Alluhu Akhbar", not "Onward Christian Soldiers." Second, the riots waned following pleas from French Imams. Further, two synagogues were firebombed--was it a suicide? And it's no coincidence the riots were rooted in "Muslim ghettoes have been no-go areas where the authorities have basically abandoned the responsibilities of government, creating little emirates where the Islamic leaders hold sway."

Certainly, the other factors were relevant. But I agree with SC&A: "There is no single cause, but there is one cause common to all of them -- and Europe isn't going to fix it by tweaking economic policy or banning piggy banks." And it's Islam, not poverty, not skin color, not joblessness, that's straining European "tolerance". Rather, religion is the common denominator, says Mark Steyn in the Spectator (London):

[I]t’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest. And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques — and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims — have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe.

SC&A agrees:

It is religion that is driving these riots- two religions, really. There is the religion of Islam and the religion of entitlement- the same religion that has kept French authorities from entering the suburbs and enforcing the law and the same religion that is reinforced everyday, by religious authorities that have done nothing to change the situation. . .

[Instead, t]here has been no long real attempt at participating in French society- just the opposite, really. French society, like western society, is corrupt and Muslims may not participate. They are Muslims and must live as Muslims (even if that means a bit of rape and a bit of crime). They can extort what they can, live 'on the dole' and protest their sad situation, without regard to reality. Most of all, they can blame everyone else for their own failures.

These ideas did not originate in the Parisian suburbs. They originated in the Middle East, in every Arab country the region. The noble Arab has been the victim, always. All indignities are the result of unfair treatment at the hands of others. Islam and Muslims are being persecuted. That is why Muslims butcher each other- because of others. That is why Muslim societies are monuments to failure- because of others. That is why there are despotic regimes in the region--because of others.

Sure, there were other issues, but the proximate cause is clear, according to Rod Liddle in the Spectator (London):

It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam which gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d’être. The political aspirations of many French Muslim organisations and explicitly of the most important political Islamic organisation on the Continent, the Arab European League. . . The appalling Arab European League, in fact, likens assimilation or integration to ‘rape’ and calls upon all Muslims to resist such cultural imperialism. And the director of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, who delivered that nice fatwa, has seemed to request that the French government give Muslims autonomy within the state; to, in effect, allow them to follow their own rules. So for those pundits on French TV, apologies, but au contraire: the French Muslims do not, as a whole, want greater integration. They want less integration.

In other words, the failure of French integration is more the fault of Islam than of the native French, as even Marlena Telvick at PBS admits:

This question is inextricably linked to whether Muslim immigrants as a whole are willing to respect Europe's deeply-engrained secular traditions, which Europeans insist is the key component to working towards greater integration. "What Europeans share is a very strong feeling that religion has nothing to do with citizenship," says Harvard's Jocelyne Cesari. "One of the big misunderstandings between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe has to do with the fact that Muslims have to build a religious minority in a context where religion doesn't make sense anymore in the public space for most Europeans."

WSJ reporter John Carreyrou agrees the root cause is specific to Islamic immigrants:

Muslims should identify themselves with their religion rather than as citizens. Effectively, they are promoting a separate society within society and that brand of Islamist philosophy is seeping into many parts of Western Europe. Countries from France and Germany to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands haven't succeeded in integrating their Muslim minorities -- and Islamic organizations have carefully positioned themselves to fill the breach.

Finally, DC Watson says it's more creed than color:

They play the race game, claiming to be "oppressed." Perhaps if Muslim immigrants would make an attempt at assimilating into the societies to which they have migrated instead of expecting special privileges because they are Muslims, they would have far less trouble.

Why can't France -- or Europe or the United States -- presume immigrants want to be French, Americans, whatever? Why can't most migration be conditioned on leaving old identities, and quarrels, behind? Mark Steyn's answer is profoundly depressing:

[T]he trouble with the social democratic state is that, when government does too much, nobody else does much of anything. At the very least, European citizens should recognise that the governing class has failed, that the conventional wisdom has run its course, and that it is highly unlikely that those culturally confident Muslims will wish to assimilate with anything as shrivelled and barren as contemporary European identity.

Conclusion: Is Western Europe -- and possibly Western Civ. -- doomed? Some Islamics plainly hope so. Before abandoning hope, read Dennis Prager's five questions "that law-abiding Muslims need to answer for Islam's sake, as well as for the sake of worried non-Muslims":

1. Why are you so quiet?



2. Why are none of the Palestinian terrorists Christian?



3. Why is only one of the 47 Muslim-majority countries a free country?



4. Why are so many atrocities committed and threatened by Muslims in the name of Islam?



5. Why do countries governed by religious Muslims persecute other religions?

The responses might be the right answer to the riot.

MORE:

Howard at Oraculations: "Root cause? Young guys just love to fight.

(via Cheat Seeking Missiles, A Certain Slant of Light, Publius Pundit, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred and the Sundries Shack)