"France" Is Wingnut For Mental Masturbation

I've been meaning to write a post about the rioting in France for a few days now. Mostly, it was because I was disgusted by the crap being written by the Islamophobic Right on the subject.

But thankfully, Lenin's Tomb has done the deed, in singularly spectacular style. Go read it.

One commenter puts it in a nutshell:

Having lived there most of my life, I agree with most of your analysis, which is much better informed than all this islamophobe rubbish you cite.
This is a nasty post-colonial mess that has little to do with Islam.

But it is important to stress how sadly popular these racist feelings are in France. The FN nearly got elected. Sarkozy's demagoguery has made him extremely powerful (and allows him to hide his neoliberal ideas): he is taking over Chirac and his allies. He has been able to spout his crap safely for long, but it has now exploded... what a mess.

Lets be clear on all this.

The riots are not because of France's "socialist nanny-state". For one thing, France has had a rightwing government, just as nasty and repressive as the one WingNut Daily et al would like to see in the USA, for five years now. Chiraq, Sarkozy, Villepin - they are all hardline rightwingers of the Margaret Thatcher/Norman Tebbit ilk.

The riots are not due to France's policy of "appeasement". France has had, for decades, one of the most repressively and formally racist sets of immigration and social integration policies in the civilised world. If those policies were implemented in the US (and many at WND would love that) the black Christians of the South would believe it was the 60's again.

The riots are not because the rioters are Moslems - the rioters' religion is accidental to their anger over poverty, segregation and totalitarian brutality. There is no "European Intifada". Again, I tell you that if Black (or yellow or purple with puce polkadotted) Christians had to live in the conditions that France has deliberately taken it's immigrant population into then they would riot too.

The nearest parallels are Brixton and Toxteth, UK, circa 1981 and Los Angeles, USA, circa 1992 rather than Fallujah circa 2005. These riots are the fault of rightwing institutionalised racism and rightwing economic policies and don't let them tell you otherwise.