“Newsweek feverishly asks whether ‘the riots [will] swell the ranks of jihadists in Europe’ and calls the events the ‘beginning of jihad in Europe’.
This is all more than a bit over the top, and drips with the very undisguised racism that is the cause of the disturbances…”
“Nonetheless, the commentators, even if they articulate themselves through the orientalist prism, alight on the heart of the matter: Europe, like anywhere else in this deregulated, unemployed, privatised, pulverised, atomised, lobotomised cosmos, where the slavering corybantic market fundamentalists would yet privatise the heavens and lay off Saint Peter and the Archangel Gabriel if they thought it would enable them to compete better with Estonia’s flat tax, sits atop a powder keg of righteous anger, the predictable product of gross inequality and racism both within its borders and in its relations with the developing world.”
“The paternalist left has abandoned them at best, and at worst actively participates in racist and Islamophobic attacks disguised as a defence of la laïcité républicaine, and the far left is only marginally better. The left must remember, as in New Orleans, globalisation is not merely a question of class, but explicitly one of race (and, one might add, gender).”
“It is true that this abandonment of the field allows fundamentalists to fill the void, just as a similar attitude by social democrats to their traditional (white) working class constituency opens the door to the far right, but it is not true, as not a few have been reporting, that the riots are a product of Islamist agents provocateurs. First of all, it should be noted that the rioters are not just ‘beurs’ – French verlan for Arabs – but also black youth. Secondly, to be sure, the riots are anger uncorked, but there is also an explicit political aspect to their actions: “We’ll stop when Sarkozy steps down,” said a Strasbourg rioter, according to the Guardian.”
excerpts from, ‘L’Intifada Française’ – Between Ramallah ’00 and Paris ’68, off of the blog Apostate Windbag
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