Europe’s MSM admits the truth: the Muslims don’t want integration

An article in Der Spiegel, which I think can be considered a respectable representative of Europe’s mainstream media, starts off on the note of the conventional wisdom, before heading in a radically different direction. The article, “What’s wrong with Europe?”, says:

Clichy-sous-Bois serves as evidence that the French route of soft integration has failed miserably. Of what use is education when there are no jobs?

This echoes what President Chirac has said, as quoted in an article at breitbart.com:

President Jacques Chirac, in private comments more conciliatory than his warnings Sunday that rioters would be caught and punished, acknowledged that France has failed to integrate the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants in poor suburbs who have been taking part in the violence, according to Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, who met Monday with the French leader.

She said Chirac “deplored the fact that in these neighborhoods there is a ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin” and recognized “the incapacity of French society to fully accept them.”

That’s the MSM wisdom of Europe (and of America as it looks on): Oh, those poor immigrants and Muslims, they want so much to be included, both socially and economically, in their adopted country, but we selfish Europeans have failed to exert enough efforts to make that happen, and so this disaster has occurred, and this means we have to try so much harder in the future.

But then, back at Der Spiegel, the article shifts into an analysis of French and European society which is identical to that in Paul Belien’s incisive article in The Brussels Journal weblog that I quoted yesterday: far from rioting over the failure of integration, the Muslims are rioting to establish quasi-sovereign control over their own neightborhoods. Der Spiegel writes:

The ideal of the French republic—the nation as a community of the willing, of citizens who enjoy equal rights, regardless of their ethnic origins or religious beliefs—is giving way to a volatile co-existence among communities that want to retain their identities and live according to their own rules….

“The logic behind this unrest,” says one police officer, “is secession.” If he’s right, it would be a nightmare scenario of entire neighborhoods and communities separating themselves from the state and essentially declaring their independence, creating zones with their own laws, areas to which the authorities no longer have access unless they wish to be perceived as hostile intruders. [Emphasis added.]

Der Spiegel shifts back for a moment to the conventional wisdom, that the Muslims want to be included as full Frenchmen; but then, in the same paragraph, it contradicts that idea and asserts once again that the Muslims reject France:

France’s Muslims feel marginalized, as do millions of other immigrants from former colonies throughout Europe, many of whom are unemployed. They live in suburban ghettos, unable to afford better neighborhoods. Now, with the ghettos turning in to battlefields, the notion that immigrants will voluntarily assimilate is proving questionable. [Emphasis added.]

The article then turns to the Netherlands, where, as in France, it is clear that integration has failed because the Muslims don’t want it:

Is this integration? Sixty percent of the Netherlands’ 1 million Muslims see themselves as Moroccans or Turks first, are often proud of their norms and values and seek comfort in their own communities. This creates parallel worlds so disparate that immigrant children speak of “the Dutch” as enemies. Their siblings attend Koran schools and more and more Muslim women now wear head scarves in public. Interactions between Muslims and the native Dutch are becoming increasingly abrasive, especially in public places like Amsterdam’s shopping streets. [Emphasis added.]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 07, 2005 11:45 PM | Send