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The Other France
- djyde 11y agoNeed you in Paris, Bruce Wayne.
- jacquesm 11y agoI note that the first indications about who was behind this indicate that at least 3 of the people carrying out the attack were from Belgium (a suburb of Brussels to be precise) and that one entered the EU through Greece somewhere in October. I don't know anything about the rest of the attackers and that does not detract from the points made in the article but it is worth noting that this is not an issue confined to France but pan-European even though France has some unique elements that definitely factor into all this.
- PlzSnow 11y agoI'm not sure it's pan-European. I would say that France and the french speaking Belgium share similar problems of exclusion and segregation, much more so than other European countries.
- shitgoose 11y agoInstead of simply downvoting, could someone provide more insight into why you oppose this statement?
- slau 11y agoThe Procureur de la République indicated that the people who lived in Belgium were French. They are formally recognised as being French nationals who resided in Belgium. One of the three suicide bombers at the Stade de France appears to have been of Syrian origin (they found a passport, belonging to someone born in 1990). They have not been able to confirm whether the passport belonged to the person who committed suicide. One of the three terrorists at the Bataclan is confirmed to be French. They found one of his fingers, and the fingerprint matched someone who was known by the police, but not security services. Please don't confuse everything.
- jacquesm 11y agoThank you for the correction that extra info was not in my source (Dutch news agency).
- paol 11y agoEven if none of them turn out to be from the banlieue the issues will be conflated, like they always are. Just as, if none turn out to have been part of the immigrant wave, it will be conflated with that and the open borders issue. Politics can be irrational even at the best of times, and this isn't the best of times...
- danharaj 11y ago> Politics can be irrational even at the best of times, and this isn't the best of times... The people and institutions pushing these confusions and trying to signal who The Real Enemy is know exactly what they're doing.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoAlready in my Facebook feed I'm quoting information from 'slau because people are saying that the attackers are definitely immigrants because Syrian passport, while carefully ignoring the "French and the fingerprints" angle.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoIs this french person Muslim? With immigration background? If both answers are "no", you are right about selective blindness. If not, it is you who are ignoring an angle.
- nightspirit 11y agoTechnically, this comment is factually correct and also it is spot on. Some people trying to defend some ethnic groups in this thread are hypocrites.
- atmosx 11y agoAs always great content from the New Yorker (one of the few worthy subscription magazines IMHO) but extremely long article.
- Gys 11y ago'Are the suburbs of Paris incubators of terrorism?' If true then this might be the case for most poor suburbs in many countries. People with nothing to loose who want to make a point.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoYet we don't see terribly much christian terrorism, buddhist terrorism or agnostic terrorism. All kinds of people are impoverished but we only see extreme violence from one background. This rules out poor suburbs as prime cause. One can argue mass shootings of US of A is another example, but it doesn't seem to exist much outside of USA.
- adventured 11y agoMass shootings have a very low correlation to poverty. Aurora, Columbine, Newtown, Isla Vista, et al. - none of them had anything to do with poverty.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoDoesn't that reinforce my point? It's not poverty, it's culture.
- georgeoliver 11y agoNor do we see ISIS launching drone strikes on Iowa.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoIf they could, they would.
- georgeoliver 11y agoYou've completely missed the point. The thought that "we only see extreme violence from one background" is absurd at best and willfully ignorant at worst.
- briandear 11y agoA suprisingly good and nuanced look at the French situation. Very high quality writing this one!
- agumonkey 11y agoDidn't read the whole article yet, but being close to such places since birth, I'm often thinking about it. From immigration, post-war building efforts, architectural and urban paradigms[1], the new technologies that make these projects possible. From a distance it can look as governments just wanted to park immigration, and that was part of it, but they also believed, if you look at the ads of the 60s, they were opening the gates of heaven. Which was partly and honestly true since at that time many populations lived in ghettos. The idea of having a place to sleep with a modern electric kitchen even (the average family still had countryside way of life), with parks and services under your window ... isn't far from a dream. Unfortunately nothing went as planned. Failed integration, failed approach to urban planning[1], ... hard to say what was the real problem. [1] Often blame has been put onto people like LeCorbusier, but his ideas have also been stretched too thin for socio-political purposes.
- andrewclunn 11y agoIt lost me somewhere around paragraph 12.
- jacquesm 11y agoTry harder. It is an excellent piece. The only false note are the cartoons alongside it which do not contribute at all and seem totally out of place.
- valm- 11y agoNew Yorker cartoons aren't meant to comment on the articles they appear with. They are just distributed throughout the magazine (a tradition they have maintained on the web).
- brandon272 11y agoDid the article randomly jump around as you were trying to read it? Incredibly frustrating.
- conjugate 11y agopretty much this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWaWsgBbFsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWaWsgBbFsA
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- SixSigma 11y agoThe Battle of Algiers, in French https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-7j4WVTgWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-7j4WVTgWc I watched it in French and I don't speak French. The story is easy to follow.
- cbd1984 11y agoIt's been shown multiple times on TCM (American basic cable movie channel) with subtitles. It pairs well with The Day of the Jackal.
- mercurial 11y agoHaven't seen it, but unfortunately, I'm told it was pretty close to reality. That said, it's not particularly relevant.
- hackuser 11y ago> it's not particularly relevant I disagree. (If it's the film I'm thinking of) it shows brutal oppression perpetrated by the French on Algiers. It might inform an understanding of current relationships between France and Islam.
- mercurial 11y agoThe French oppression in Algeria was real, and there was a bloody episode right after WWII, and then the Algerian War of Independence was extremely brutal. But this doesn't have much to do with Islam. The Algerian FLN was mostly a nationalist/left-wing group. In fact, Algeria was the theater of a bloody civil war in the 90s between the FLN dictatorship and Islamic extremists.
- mvdwoord 11y agoFor anyone interested, La Haine (Hatred) is a fascinating film about a day in the life in the Paris suburbs anno 1995 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/ This quote has stuck with me ever since I first saw it: "C’est l’histoire d’un homme qui tombe d’un immeuble de cinquante étages. Le mec, au fur et à mesure de sa chute se répète sans cesse pour se rassurer : jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien. Mais l'important n’est pas la chute, c’est l’atterrissage." Which loosely translates as: "This is the story of a man falling from a fifty-story building. The guy, during his fall reassures himself by constantly repeating: so far so good, so far so good, so far so good. But the important thing is not the fall, it's the landing."
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoGood quote, but seems fairly applicable to ... Well, everything. What's the context if I have not seen the film?
- mercurial 11y agoIt's a way of saying the movie doesn't end well. Great film, anyway.
- notsony 11y agoSocial and economic deprivation is not the root cause, otherwise explain why educated students, doctors and engineers are joining IS?
- chr15p 11y agoBecause they see their friends, family, neighbours etc live their entire lives in social and economic deprivation and want to help them maybe?
- hackuser 11y ago> educated students, doctors and engineers are joining IS How many are? Do we have any good information on this? I doubt IS releases the professinal and educational backgrounds of its hires! Generally, my impression is that historiclly the middle class has provided the idealogues; the theory is thhat if you're living hand-to-mouth you have more immediate worries and less time to study such things, and if you are illiterate you have other obstacles. That's just one possible but commonly repeated hypothosis: I don't know what basis there is for it.
- sz4kerto 11y agowhat a fantastic read, thanks for submitting. I planned to read something on my phone until the kid falls asleep, then stayed in the room for 1.5 hours. :)
- guard-of-terra 11y ago> ...where the police dare not enter ... Here, I've pinpointed the precise moment where their troubles began.
- shitgoose 11y agoSo we all grew up as law abiding citizens just because police was able to enter our neighbourhoods?
- guard-of-terra 11y agoBasically, yes. And it's not about us personally, it's about who they take away thus freeing us from being affected by bullying, crime and bad influence. Maybe they only have to take away one in hundred, the bad seed.
- shitgoose 11y agoWell, I was hoping to leave some credit to my parents and family too for not raising me a murderer. But it turns out it was the cops, relentlessly rooting out the bad seeds around me, that I should thank.
- guard-of-terra 11y agoWhy do you think you would be a murderer if not for your parents? Why would you murder and why?
- jacquesm 11y ago> And it's not about us personally, it's about who they take away thus freeing us from being affected by bullying, crime and bad influence. Where I grew up the police was free to come and go as they pleased. That did not stop plenty of bullying, lots of crime and a ton of bad influences being readily apparent and I credit my parents (even though they were divorced), the teachers in my school and my interest in technology for not going down some dumb path (most likely not to be a murderer though). A friend of mine who grew up much the same did in fact end up in a different situation and had none of those advantages that I had, otherwise our situations are mostly interchangeable.
- shitgoose 11y agoI wonder is Charlie Hebdo is going to come up with one of their taseful caricatures this time.
- wangii 11y agoGood read, thanks! I'd like to thank uBlock even more: after finishing the article, it has blocked something I don't like for 221 times.
- Mikeb85 11y agoAs interesting as this would be on another occasion, the fact is, its not poverty which leads people to commit terrorism. The problem of les banlieues is a social problem for France, but ghetto youth are more interested in girls, drugs, and otherwise acting out than in terrorism. As Osama Bin Laden and others show, you can be given every opportunity in life and still choose terrorism. You can be well educated (many Daesh members are) and choose terrorism. The elephant in the room that many refuse to address is that terrorism exists anywhere Islam does, there are insurgencies in nearly every country where Muslims are a sizeable minority. A little anecdote - my wife comes from a very poor country, from a Muslim region. The poor kids aren't the ones growing up wearing hijabs, aren't the ones committing terrorism. Terrorists have been apprehended from her village trying to get into the west - the one thing they had in common - they went to a local madrassa funded by a Gulf state. A similar comparison can be made in the US. Ghetto youth don't go around committing mass shootings. They don't join Daesh. It's the middle class, outcast white kids that are doing mass shootings, or newly converted/radicalized middle class youth that join Daesh. Anyhow, it is a brilliantly written piece, but on this occasion I'm not sure its particularly relevant.
- tomohawk 11y agoThere appears to be a not-insignificant minority in Islamic countries who favor violence as a means of achieving goals. http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/10/muslim-publics-share-concerns-about-extremist-groups/ http://www.pewglobal.org/2013/09/10/muslim-publics-share-con... Having 20% of the populace believe that suicide bombings are justifiable is a real problem.
- mercurial 11y agoIt's not suicide bombing the problem. That's just the delivery method. The problem is suicide bombings targeting civilians. Now, it would be interesting to have the answer to the percentage of people in the western world thinking that "attacks on civilians can be justified to defend democracy". If the previous question was "Do you think the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified?", you probably won't like the numbers you get for the second question.
- d3rhstar 11y agoThe article makes an important point. It points out that those drawn to Jihadism in the west tend to be woefully ignorant of the teachings of Islam. Whenever there is an attack, both the snark about the "religion of peace" as well as the claim that Muslims don't condemn these acts both resurface. The fact is that both terrorism and ISIS have been roundly condemned by large panels of Islamic scholars. It would not surprise me that, once the religious background of these terrorists is examined, that it is proves to be very flimsy. The challenge, in my mind, and as a Muslim is that Muslims need to figure out how to prevent the brainwashing of impressionable young people in an era of instant communication.
- jacquesm 11y ago> The fact is that both terrorism and ISIS have been roundly condemned by large panels of Islamic scholars. If the media would act as good as a lens for those instances as they do for the terrorist acts themselves it would be splendid.
- ern 11y agoThe more fair-minded outlets do seem to try, but even then, they seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-is-an-offence-to-islam-says-international-coalition-of-major-islamic-scholars-9756255.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-is-... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/17/saudi-clerics-fatwa-declares-terrorism-heinous-crime-sharia-law http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/17/saudi-clerics-f... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/muslim-scholars-islamic-state_n_5878038.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/muslim-scholars-isl...
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoWhere does Mohammed condemn actions of this sort? Does it matter what the scholars say when the 'perfect' copy of the Koran written before time in Allah's heaven says that Mohammed's followed should slay unbelievers wherever they are found? Even if you want to argue that was only for a specific time (those verses however are, I understand, non-abrogated). If it was morally proper then surely it is also proper now. The only way around this I see is for the scholars to say Mohammed was wrong. Mohammed was wrong to lead his followers to kill, rape, plunder and enslave. Mohammed being wrong doing these things would allow them to remain consistent saying those who purport to follow him are also wrong in doing those things. However it undermines central tenets of Islam to say any of that was wrong. Is it not entirely incompatible with peace for the founder of a religion to be a warlord who justified his killing with his 'revelations'.
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