Paris/France burns, Live thread (night #10)

"And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints."

Sonds good to me. And, quite fitting with today's gospel.

Nice to hear from you Barny.

I hope you don't mind but I repeated your TR quote on a few other threads today. It is so right on! Have a wonderful evening.

God is good.

I hope you don't mind but I repeated your TR quote on a few other threads today.

Mind? That's what it's all about.

Have a good week.

I hear she's cut too...

at least from what I hear... ... she right??

I can't believe you put it all in one post.

What is happening in France is not about religion.

It could turn into a religious issue, but right now it is not from the perspective of either (most of) the rioters or the government. There are, of course, Islamist elements who desperately want to harness the unrest and turn it into a jihad, but thus far they have not succeeded.

"Do they ever commit honor killings of sisters and daughters who disgrace the families, or have they given that up as well?"

Rarely. Mostly it's beatings and intimidation. This is not particularly religious. Think of Italians and Spaniards or Greeks of 100 years ago and their suspicious protection and control of their women, or for that matter rebellious backwoods daughters in Appalachia in the 19th Century and you'll see the same thing. Within Arab, and many other, cultures there is an atrocious inequality of men and women. That is why the headscarf was banned in France. Families pressed it upon girls as a sign of their subordination - and this was just as true of families that barely see the inside of mosques as the families' of imams (maybe even more so, since coarser people tend to have coarser habits). The headscarf law was designed to prevent the symbolic subjugation of women to men by prohibiting men, including fathers and brothers, from forcing their daughters and sisters to remain covered.

One can see it's cultural, too, but the fact that there are Beurs in Paris, but also many Iranians who fled the fall of the shah. The Persians are urbane and successful, and much more integrated than the North Africans. There is not much issue of the "foulard" with Persian families. Nor is there much among the Palestinians or Lebanese who live in France. North Africans who came to France in the 1950s and 1960s were the poorest laboring class: tough and uneducated. They came to work the mines and the factories, intending to go back. But had children, and stayed. And now the mines are closed and the factories are automated. So, they passed along that culture to the children, but Islam is just the religious backdrop of it. Catholic Christianity didn't stop Italians and Spaniards from beating their daughters and sisters into submission over matters of pride. Not all, but many, and for centuries.
Yes, Beur don't have a particularly enlightened view of women. And before they were Muslim, they didn't. This is a feature of North African and Arab culture which predates Islam and was incorporated into Islam. Islam isn't the source of the crappy behavior, any more than Christianity was the source of the subjugation of woman in various parts of the Christian East and West.

"Do they grant women the same freedom as their white fellow citizens?"

France? In France one is a citizen, with identical rights, regardless of color or sex. Of course, getting a JOB if your name is Mahomet - that's a different thing entirely. White French don't trust Beurs for anything important.

"I would appreciate learning more about the beurs of Paris."

Alas, watch the news and listen to them (particularly if you speak French, on the Internet France Info and the other News channels have been running street interviews, etc., with many of the jeunes Beurs, and you can get it straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak).

2 months ago my sister-in-law was driving to her new job in Sicily and her car broke down and she was stuck in the Savoy region in France for 9 days. Says they generally treated her like posion but the scenery was beautiful.

"Beur" is slang for "Arab". It's "Arab", said backwards more or less.

It means those who are born in France of North African parents. An Iranian is Muslim, but he's not a Beur.

A French-born Palestinian might be mistaken for a Beur, but he's Palestinian.

A Saudi is an Arab, and his child will be a French Arab, but not really a Beur...unless he lives in the HLM in the banlieu, looks like a Beur, and burns cars...

"At any rate, the situation is one which doesn't seem to have a solution, either immediate or long term."

It has a solution, several solutions.

Rather than talking about the various solutions that would make things better, I'll just tell you what will happen.

The government will talk a lot about law and order, and send in police to many places, but they won't start shooting down the rioters.

The rioters will be confined geographically to the areas where they live, and there will be many arrests. Eventually, when a lot of cars have been burnt and windows smashed, relative calm will be restored by simple gravity. People cannot remain on riot forever. The Beurs will be worse off than ever, because shops in their areas will be destroyed. The rest of France will be as determined as ever to keep them out of jobs, etc.

And things will return to the status quo, albeit with more simmering violence and property damage.

The other things that could be done: full-scale affirmative action and expansion of government jobs programs, have problems with them. The first violates French morality by favoring one citizen over another based on race. Americans under Nixon went the affirmative action route, and it worked, but French thinking about the equality of man is too rigid, and the French will rather endure riots and erect barriers to further isolate the bad areas than they will be willing to consider a derogation from the principle of fundamental equality under the law.

Massive government jobs programs will not be sustainable on the French budget.

Cutting labor regulations so that the private sector could produce more jobs is politically acceptable also, for that will provoke a General Strike of the working whites all over the country, and bring down the government.

So, the "solution" will be to further isolate and hem in the Beurs, and to keep them more closely guarded.

Your was the most intelligent and cogent Anglo-Saxon post I have read to date.

It is true: what is happening in France is about social exclusion.

It is also true that France SHOULD change.
Being something of an Anglo-Saxon myself, I recognize that the vault key to the whole thing lies in LABOR LAW. France's labor laws are so restrictive that all French business are emaciated in personnel, and use automation for everything that can be automated. Either that, or they simply make customers wait. The long afternoon of pleasant coffee at a cafe, during which everyone who cares to can smoke a whole pack of cigarettes (and most do) is not because everyone really wants to take an hour to drink a cup of coffee. It is because there is one waiter, and he will work all day, and no more will be hired no matter how busy, because the cost of an extra waiter is permanent, and you cannot ever get rid of him. In France, to hire an employee is to marry him.

This, of course, is ridiculous. It, more than any other thing in the structure of the country, is the reason the French private sector is hamstrung and cannot create jobs.
France's medical care and pension regime is pretty enlightened, and cheaper per capita than the American model. There is much that is admirable and reasonable in French business law. But it all comes apart at the seams when one comes to the part about employing people to do things. Then, suddenly, it is impossible.

It is also impossible, at present, to change the labor law, because it is fiercely protected by small, highly organized Communist unions, and by the willingness of the whole population to go on general strike in defense of it.

Sadly, that means that - in effect - nothing can be done except at the margins. Those same HLM used to be filled with Portuguese, when they were built, and they were not tinderboxes of crime then. But the Portuguese got jobs (the economy was booming then) and moved to other apartments which are not, truly, very different from the HLM.

There are cultural features involved, which resist legislation. In particular, French whites are unlikely to want to hire Beurs or Blacks for responsible positions. In America, direct affirmative action legislation bludgeoned down barriers to work and effectively imposed quotas, but in France direct affirmative action is too violative of the principles of equality under the law for the people to accept it.

In America, the large black unemployed class was partly absorbed by massively expanding the size of the government civil service at all levels. In France, the government sector is already arguably too large, and it would be expensive, in a tight budget, to even attempt to hire all the Beurs.

And so, in a nutshell, since labor law cannot be reformed at present, the Beurs cannot really be put to work. Which means the police will be present until the riots burn themselves out, and the government will then claim that law and order prevailed. The Beurs will be more closely watched and confined in their neighborhoods, and more excluded. And the cycle will repeat itself in a few years.

Someday, labor law will be made much more liberal, and when that happens, there will be employment in the private sector as the economy grows, and in the public sector to build the infrastructure for and regulate the burgeoning private economy.

Until then, there will be cycles of riots followed by further despair.

I don't have the time to reply properly to your comments, as they deserve. Running out the door.

But affirmative action did not "work". Sure, a lot of black people got jobs, but resentment increased (both races), and is yet increasing. It increased feelings of entitlement among blacks, and resentment among whites, Asians and others who were qualified but rejected and less qualified blacks admitted or hired.

In the long run, affirmative action (in the sense of hiring unqualified or less qualified people solely because of race) is a very bad idea.

If by affirmative action, job training and education leading to employment is made available to the undereducated and unemployed, this is a very good thing. But to have different standards for members of different races or ethnic groups is just buying trouble. And France already has trouble enough.

Hey! Just about all conservative and conservative-libertaian women are cute. Eight to eighty, I have made that determination.

nothing here on dutch tv and radio, the dutch blogs also don't have anything. even the controversial german paper bild has nothing.
Sorry.

"But affirmative action did not 'work'".

In America in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was race riot after race riot, and exploding violent crime, with thousands dead.

Then Nixon's Affirmative Action plan, especially in government hiring, took effect and the situation stabilized. What changed beside that to explain the end of the riots?

Those who were excluded, had the sense that the doors were being forced open for them, and enough of them chose the path of the new hope that the militants were unable to make further headway.

"A French-born Palestinian might be mistaken for a Beur, but he's Palestinian."

A french born 'palestinian' is actually a Jordanian or Egyptian or any arab flotsam and jetsam that was attracted to Israel by its economy and/or UN largesse.

The First Palestinian State
by Emanuel A. Winston
Dec 10, '03 / 15 Kislev 5764

E-mail This Print Homepage

Oh. You didn’t know there was a First Palestinian State?

It’s not necessary to go back to 1964 when, with Egypt’s help, the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) was formed - with the sole intent of engaging in terror for the purpose of conquering the Jewish State, with the assistance of all the Arab/Muslim nations. Those goals of the PLO have not changed.(1) Yasser Arafat was elected Chairman of the PLO in 1969.

Arafat and his terrorists ended up in the Kingdom of Jordan after a series of unsuccessful wars by the Arab/Muslim nations against Israel. There, they arrogantly walked the streets of Amman well-armed and with supreme confidence. They intimidated the people of Jordan. Between 1967 and 1971, the PLO challenged King Hussein for political control of Jordan. Hussein made 26 agreements to keep the Peace. Arafat signed them all and broke them all. The last straw would be when Arafat put out a kill order for King Hussein’s brother, who commanded the Jordanian Army and, particularly, the special Bedouin troops who had clashed numerous times with Arafat’s thugs. This was not going to be Arafat’s State by coup d’etat, but it was a lesson in his MO (Modus Operandi).

Hussein’s Army was called up and a memorable slaughter of Arafat’s followers took place, an event the Arab Palestinians called "Black September".(2) The major conflict began in September 1970, but took 17 months until Arafat’s terrorists fled, mostly into Lebanon. However, many crossed the Jordan and were rescued by Israeli settling pioneers on the west side of the Jordan River.

In Lebanon, the Arab Palestinians were greeted with open arms by their so-called brother Arabs. It was a case of mistaken identity, which the Lebanese did not know then was a one-sided hudna (time of false peace, rest and re-arming for Arafat’s terrorists). To this day, the Lebanese people bitterly regret opening their borders to Arafat’s Arab Palestinians.

Then, it began. Arafat first established the parameters of a terror state much as they started to do in Jordan before Black September. Wherever they gained critical mass in numbers and arms, that area of the city or country became theirs. Every street corner was an Arab Palestinian ‘checkpoint’ to collect pass-through money, but also, frequently, to rape women passengers, steal cars and extort whatever they wanted. As in Jordan, Arafat’s Arab Muslim Palestinian gunman acted as conquerors, threatening everyone, looting and taxing through terror.

As Arafat expanded his control over Christian and Muslim Lebanese, they too became part of the conflict that became a 12-year Civil War, killing 100,000 Christian and Muslim Lebanese.

Lebanon had once been called the Paris of the Middle East, the Garden of Eden spot for vacationing Arabs, with a Banking Center for the Arab world - but all that was destroyed. The Christians and Muslims had worked out a ‘peaceful, political accommodation’ to run Lebanon and, particularly, Beirut. Arafat had stirred them up, so now they were bitter enemies, attacking each other and fighting Arafat’s Palestinian Mini-State of Terror. The killings went on day and night, with whole villages massacred, with a retaliatory massacre soon after. Arafat turned the various Arab refugee camps into his bases of operation. Weapons and explosives were stored in apartment building, hospitals and schools, using the civilians as human shields.

As confusion and terror reigned, Arafat continued to expand his mini-State of Palestine with the presumption that one day all of Lebanon would be a Palestinian State.

Read More....http://www.israelnn.com/article.php3?id=3069