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Thomas Guénolé: It is unfortunately likely. And it will be the same process of generalization: A portion of the young fundamentalist assassins come from the suburbs, so if you come from the suburbs, you are supposedly automatically predisposed to becoming a fundamentalist assassin.
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Yes. I sincerely believe that our security strategy—more mass surveillance, fewer civil liberties—is a mistake. Not only do the results of the NSA and the Patriot Act show that in terms of efficiency, those methods don't work, but by following that path, France is moving further away from an open society and towards a police state. It's a surrender of our fundamental values of freedom in the face of an enemy. It would be better to focus on dismantling the enemy's death machine by immediately setting up a coalition between the air force and ballistic capacities of NATO on one side, and the ground troops of the Arab League on the other side. That to me seems sensible and pragmatic.If Islamic State are deliberately creating a hostile environment against Muslims to create martyrs, is it fair to say that Islamophobes and "banlieue-phobics" are not only idiots but useful to Islamist terrorism?
All those who make sweeping generalizations that fundamentalism is a problem amongst all French Muslims are faithful performers of Islamic State's strategy. They should be aware of that.
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The condition of our suburbs is a problem in itself that needs a political answer. If the city centers have to fear jihadism in order to worry about the abject misery in which our suburban population has been sinking for decades—that is appalling. It says a great deal about the level of their empathy towards the poor populations in our country.Your book on banlieue youth was published ten years after the 2005 riots. How did it come about?
The starting point for my book was the demonstrations against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the summer of 2004, which gave rise to a flood of hate and fear speeches in the media against the "banlieue-youth" and the "banlieue-Islam".Hearing so much hate rallied against these communities made me sick. So I wrote an opinion piece, published by left wing newspaper Libération, attacking this new rhetoric that the "jihadis from the banlieue" were our new enemy. A few months later, I published a second article, showing how racist and Islamophobic clichés had built this new enemy. A few days later, I got a book deal.So are young Muslims now the enemy instead of the "suburban youths" of the 2000s?
I wouldn't say one has replaced the other, it's more about an accumulation. In addition to the hate and fear discourse about the "banlieue-youth," we now have an additional fear and hate discourse against Muslims.
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This focus on a radicalizing minority is disproportionate. The majority of young French Muslims are moving away from Islam. Compared with their parents' generation, religious practice is decreasing. Parallel to that however, we are witnessing a revival of religious fundamentalism within a minority of French Muslims.The co-existence of both phenomena is not a coincidence. We saw the same thing happen in France in the latter part of the 20th Century: Small groups of Christian fundamentalists emerged, while the majority of French people were going through a de-Christianization process.Although the media stigmatize the suburbs some well-known figures, like Omar Sy from The Untouchables and the rapper Joey Starr, are glorified. How do you explain this?
The problem with highlighting some isolated examples of great artistic or entrepreneurship success is that it reinforces the cliché. This notion that some of them are very nice is a complementary discourse to anti-banlieue-youth racism. Instead of only showing drug dealers and dynamic entrepreneurs, maybe we could just show suburban youth as they are—roughly speaking, half of them in real pain, the other half living from small jobs at the bottom of the social ladder. Incidentally, half of the young people who live in the banlieue are actually girls. We never see them either.
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One of the conclusions of my book is that there is an apartheid in France that is, in the strict sense, a coherent and structured system of economic, social, and cultural segregation. The apartheid is quite obvious, especially in the education system. And to say it more bluntly, every black person and every Arab person knows exactly what this is because they experience it everyday. The apartheid practiced in France might be sneaky and assumed, but it is still quite real.The intellectuals who put blame for our social problems on migrant communities from Arabic or Sub-Saharan origins are actually aiming at the wrong target. Yes, there is a problem with separatism in France, but it's not young Muslims. It's the elderly middle-classes who make sure only them and their offspring have a chance to blossom in our society.Follow Antoine on Twitter.