Blaming Islam Is Dishonest

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Blaming Islam Is Dishonest
Michael Coren
November 19, 2005

Last week I wrote that the riots in France were more about the culture of 50 Cent than bin Laden and that to blame the violence solely on Islam was a gross misreading of the situation.

The neo-con web world had a fit, reminding me that when it comes to abuse and stupidity the right and the left are similarly gifted. In fact, neo-conservatives increasingly resemble the left in their simplistic and formulaic analyses and responses to complex situations. The world abounds with nuances, yet nuances are something with which absolutist ideologies simply cannot deal.

The equation is absurdly facile but awfully comforting to some. There is rioting in France. There are Muslims in France. Fundamentalist Islam can be violent and hateful; therefore, the French riots are caused by Muslims.

Part of the cause of this childish approach is that the focus of neo-con foreign policy in the Mideast has always been the security of Israel and Washington’s attitude towards the Arab states is coloured by passing through the prism of this obsession.

Not that a commitment to Israeli security is in any way a bad thing, but when it becomes a fetish it obscures greater truths. It also, by the way, plays into the hands of every anti-Semite and conspiracy theorist who sees collusion every time he leaves his bed-sit.

In the French context, too many columnists have embraced a caricature fuelled by their own fears and hatreds. Let me emphasize that I am totally opposed to the notion of an Islamic Europe and wish that Catholic Christendom still ruled that continent.

But dishonesty about cause and effect and sheer racism will not help the situation. Remember, some of us have been warning for decades that abortion and artificial birth control, aside from being immoral, will destroy the very cultures that the pro-choice zealots of the left and the neo-con right so revere.

The current assumption concerning France is that Muslims from North and sub-Saharan Africa went to Paris and Marseilles and Lyon because of the largesse of the French people and because, as Muslims, they wanted to eventually become the majority population.

As I said, the world is a little more complex than that. France colonized various parts of Africa and often treated their colonial subjects appallingly. When their empire collapsed, Muslims who had been force-fed with the French language and lies about French superiority wanted to live in the country they had been told was their motherland.

Once in France, they were marginalized, ostracized and oppressed. The great French soccer player, Zinedine Zidane, put it so well when the national team was asked about the rioting. "I was raised in one of those suburbs," said the gentle genius. "They built a supermarket in the town, but nobody who lived there and bought there was allowed to work there."

Many of the French players, half of them products of these areas but still proud Frenchmen, made similar comments. When, by the way, the French team won the World Cup they were celebrated as national icons. Now their cousins and friends in the suburbs are "scum."

The parents of the rioters tend to be far more religiously conservative than their children and often speak Arabic rather than French. They complain that their sons are secular, western, refuse to speak Arabic and that the French state prevents them from using corporal punishment on their unruly teenagers.

Once again, the paradigms of left and right become redundant. It’s as much about the failure of liberalism as about the closed-mindedness of conservatism. The rioters have often lived through years of neglect, yet so many of them refuse to be self-reliant and relish the life of the thug.

The political picture cannot be improved by a painting-by-numbers response and Europe, in spite of what some would have us believe, is not the Mideast. There, e-mail your worst.