“Turbulent days in Clichy”

Nicolas Sarkozy and
the rebels of the slums are the result of the same
situation: a country that, going to the extremes, turns
its actors into beggars or multimillionaires, rejects its
leaders, confronts its history and where Salman Rushdie lets
people issue death threat against him at the public
services of television. Sarkozy is the defender of
the “hard liners”, he wants to turn the country into an
anonymous society and uses the republican principles as a
cover for his personal ambitions. More than ideas, he’s
looking for fame, combat and money, just like his enemies
in the slums.
The causes of violence are already obvious (poor
integration, wrong urban policies, massive unemployment,
unreal transfer of the problems of the Middle East and
Africa, a high cost-based social policy that yields to the
free-of-charge religious policy, etc...) but the magnitude
of the violence is a new fact. The government did not pay
attention to the demonstrations of October 4 although
others were expected. However, they did not happen in the
Place de la Republic, Paris but in the slums where
everything that seems to represent the State causes a
burning atmosphere. Demonstrators actually shoot at the
police in different places...people throw stones, bolts,
petanque balls, as in Palestine...Apart from the organized
plot that Sarkozy denounces, it’s about a convergence of
passions and anger whose combination provokes coherent
results, the product of the mutation of racism and anti-
racism.
Nowadays, anti-racism does not know what to do.
The “natives of the Republic” would like to put
colonization, slavery and Shoah at the same level but not
with the purpose of appreciating the dramas their
ancestors suffered and giving a relative character to the
Shoah with the objective of succeeding there where
Faurisson’s too small minority of negationists failed. The
Dieudonnés, the Thierry Meyssans use the same fallacies to
feed the hate that has become the non plus ultra of the
radical opposition...This and the radicalization of the
ghettos have been caused by the disengagement of the
State. This is not about defending rights, equality and
mutual respect, but about justifying the expression of a
violence caused by the Machiavellian perfidy of the guilty
Jew, American and, by extension, white citizen of a
democracy. That movement can not be compared with the
events of May 68 for a man like Daniel Cohn-Bendit could
not fit in it for being a Jew. Besides, the events of May
68 took place because the boys wanted to have access to
the girls rooms and vice versa. What’s happening with the
rebels of our slums is the contrary. They reject such a
mess, they want the girls to wear veils and be
inaccessible to those they considered to be strangers. God
is on the other side. Today, preachers –in this case, the
imams- support the rebels.