Quote Originally Posted by Malbec View Post
As Tazio has suggested the French have a long complex relationship with their Algerian and sub-Saharan African migrants. First, a bitter war of independence where the French were pretty brutal then widespread discrimination against Algerian migrants in France. Ever heard of banlieue? The dictionary will tell you its an innocent French word for suburb. The reality is that these are miserable apartment blocks on the outskirts of big cities where undesirables like Algerians, blacks and the poorest and worst of French society find themselves. Its nearly impossible for people there to climb out of poverty as those postcodes are blacklisted. Frequently CVs with those postcodes are simply binned before they're even reviewed for job applications. I would watch La Haine if you want to see what life there is like. As for the French police, their tendency to recourse to violence at the first opportunity is well known. Every time we fly there my wife, caucasian French, reminds me never to look the police in the eye and never EVER talk back regardless of the circumstances. Its easy to see how resentment and frustration boil over into anger and eventually violence. For the vast majority of those in the banlieue their outlets are the riots that hit those areas quite regularly. While I abhor terrorism I can however understand how these three, brought up and raised in the circumstances they were in chose a more organised and violent way of hitting back at the system. And of course it is never possible to prove institutional racism in a country where data collection regarding ethnic origin is simply not performed, hence institutional racism simply does not exist. The French state really is secular in every possible way for better or for worse.
What you describe sounds a lot like what you had said about Syria. Le Francois comme Assad? C'est une idee tres interessante... Now maybe those poor lads were freedom fighters. Just kidding.

Seriously, though, democracies work best when they have a certain degree of homogeneity, when you have a core of the society that stays on the same page, more or less. There might be class divisions and conflicting interests, but everybody plays by the rules. If you bring in a minority with a totally different culture, which is too large or resistant to integration, or both, that's a recipe for trouble. I'm not sure there's a ready made solution for the problems of the French, but then they are a resourceful people who have survived worse situations.