Riots in France


In the last few years, a lot of Europeans talk about how America is so violent, so filled with inequalities, so intolerant, etc, etc.

The Europeans need to look at the mirror before pointing fingers in America.

The riots that have been going on in France is proof that the Europe isn't so peaceful, tolerant nor a society of equality.

These riots started after a police chase which resulted in two North African immigrants getting electrocuted.

But this wasn't just over 2 kids getting electrocuted. This is was the result of many North Africans in France (some immigrants, some descendants of immigrants) feeling left out of mainstream society and wanting to destroy things. And off course, the usual group of thugs take advantage of an emotional event to vandalize just for the sake of vandalizing.

This isn't the first time these sort of things happen in Europe.

At the end of last year, after a Morrocan immigrant killed a Dutch film-maker, there were riots in Amsterdam, with fights between neo-Nazis and North African immigrants.In this past summer's bombing in London, a few Pakistanis (and one Jamaican) who grew up in Britain) were involved.

There are many factors contributing to all this.One is that whites in Europe don't really accept non-white immigrants. So those immigrants clutter together for protection. Their children grow not fitting into mainstream European society. But those children wouldn't fit into their parent's homeland either. Their neighborhoods are all they got.

Add to the fact, that many of the immigrants in Europe are Muslim. Being that those immigrant teens are being rejected by mainstream European society, even more they'll defensively cling on the Islamic culture, even more so than their parent's generation. And with Islamic fanaticism gaining steam, this is a deadly combination.

Some say that those riots are the result of liberal multi-culturalism.

Here is Naomi Klein's reply to that (though the article was on London's bombing, it still fits the current situation in France

http://www.thenation.com/article/terrors-greatest-recruitment-tool



This last statistic shows that the brand of multiculturalism practiced in Britain (and France, Germany, Canada...) has little to do with genuine equality. It is instead a Faustian bargain, struck between vote-seeking politicians and self-appointed community leaders, one that keeps ethnic minorities tucked away in state-funded peripheral ghettos while the centers of public life remain largely unaffected by the seismic shifts in the national ethnic makeup. Nothing exposes the shallowness of this alleged tolerance more than the speed with which Muslim communities are now being told to "get out" (to quote Tory MP Gerald Howarth) in the name of core national values.

The real problem is not too much multiculturalism but too little. If the diversity now ghettoized on the margins of Western societies--geographically and psychologically--were truly allowed to migrate to the centers, it might infuse public life in the West with a powerful new humanism. If we had deeply multi-ethnic societies, rather than shallow multicultural ones, it would be much more difficult for politicians to sign deportation orders sending Algerian asylum-seekers to torture, or to wage wars in which only the invaders' dead are counted. A society that truly lived its values of equality and human rights, at home and abroad, would have another benefit too. It would rob terrorists of what has always been their greatest recruitment tool: our racism.

Talking about multi-culturalism, it is a challenge. I have mentioned on this blog that in Honolulu, immigrant teens from the Phillipines, Samoa, Vietnam and Micronesia dont always get along, causing some fights at schools. But not everyone Filipino hate every Samoan, not every Samoan hate every Vietnamese, etc, etc. In fact, some learn to get along. That's how many people do it worldwide.

Even with those troubles, Honolulu has yet to see riots on the scale of what's happening in France. Even with it's troubles, Hawaii has been very good in integrating many cultures.

But then again, there isn't a community of Islamic fanatics here, like there is in Paris.