PARIS -- The horrendous atrocities of the Paris attacks unveil, once again, a country deeply divided. While France is grieving, French authorities are trying to piece together what made possible such brazen attacks and to ease the anxieties of its people. After that, it will be time to reflect upon the deep-rooted factors causing the catastrophic events in the last year.
As at least five of the eight assailants were French, we need to answer some hard questions. Why is France creating monsters that continue attacking their compatriots at such an alarming rate? Since the beginning of 2015, France has experienced six terror attacks or attempts linked to radical Islam, more than any Western country. What could be possibly wrong in our French society that would lead French young men to blow themselves up and commit vicious acts of violence against their own country? Is it possible that French society is creating a specific kind of resentment that can help fuel a radicalization of homegrown terrorists?
Exactly 10 years ago, French youths from ethnic minorities burned cars, fought police and shook the authorities at their highest levels for a whole month following the deaths of two young men, of Arab and African descent, electrocuted while fleeing from white policemen. These riots shocked France and stunned the world.
Mainstream French society has been divorcing -- emotionally, racially and territorially -- from the other France, the France of Muslims and descendants of former French colonies.
For the first time, the rage of the French postcolonial minorities detonated in the face of a country that had been trying desperately to keep a lid on it. The tragic loss of two innocent teenagers was the spark that spread fire to a powder keg of poverty, ghettoization, unemployment, scapegoating and massive discrimination. In a sense, these events were the violent J'accuse brandished by a whole generation against the French society and elites that never recognized them.
The plight of the French ethnic minorities and the domination they'd experienced was exposed to the world. Foreigners and tourists alike could feel there was a fire behind the majestic façades of Paris. In a sense, the birth, by violence, of this multicultural and multiethnic France seemed to herald an era where longstanding issues of discriminations and structural racism would be finally addressed.
But nothing has changed, and not much was done to evaluate and address the root of these attacks. It was a lost decade. Popular suburbs, where the majority of French Muslims live, were allowed to drift even more away from mainstream French society, as fewer and fewer white people live there. White parents refrain from sending their children to schools attended by the children of the banlieues -- that is, disadvantaged suburbs inhabited by minorities. Schools from impoverished neighborhoods are now almost entirely populated by black and Arab children, to the point that some mothers of Moroccan descent living in such an area in Montpellier complained to the mayor about the lack of a "child with blond hair."
The far right, the Front National Party, which is blatantly anti-Muslim, has never been so high in the polls.
Discrimination has become more entrenched. According to a 2009 study from the Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), financed by the Open Society Institute, French blacks and Arabs are six to eight times more likely than whites to have their identities checked by police. The unemployment rate among youths from impoverished suburbs throughout France is two and half times greater than the national average, according to the Observatoire des inégalités, France's national agency on equality.
According to a recent article in The New Yorker called "The Other Paris," it is forbidden to collect ethnic statistics in France. But from estimates, a whopping 60 percent of French inmates are thought to be Muslims, while Muslims represent less than 10 percent of the population. At the same time, French elites (i.e. academics, parliamentary, journalists, diplomats, etc.) are still overwhelmingly white. There is no need for ethnic statistics for that.
The cold-blooded assassination of the Charlie Hebdo journalists, two police officers and Jewish customers by self-proclaimed jihadists was another missed occasion for the French to address the root of such violence. Once again, the world was struck by the brazen acts of French enraged and pauperized youths from African descent, whose resentment made them easy prey for religious extremists and brainwashers. The Charlie Hebdo attackers are paragons of monstrous children of the 2005 riots and of France's "territorial apartheid," famously coined by the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls following the attacks.
French blacks and Arabs are six to eight times more likely than whites to have their identities checked by police.
These tragic events triggered a dramatic soul shrinking in France, instead of a soul searching. An intense conservative backlash took place, centered on the scapegoating of French Muslims, already held in suspicion by too many French secularists. These attacks were construed into a matter of division, rather than unity, with one single camp designated to embody the good -- "Je suis Charlie." Anyone who held a different view was held as being somewhat against the French Republic, while the feelings of Muslims who were hurt by the caricatures were completely disrespected.
In that context, politicians, intellectuals and officials felt more comfortable uttering blatant racist declarations, such as the right wing representative Nadine Morano, who declared a month ago that France belongs to the white race. The French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut routinely accuses French Muslims of being responsible for everything wrong in France. Michel Houellebecq, France's bestselling author, openly declares himself an Islamophobe.
Looming large over the coming regional and presidential elections, the far right, the Front National Party, which is blatantly anti-Muslim, has never been so high in the polls, pushing the right to adopt its incendiary rhetoric. According to a 2012 Institut français d'opinion publique (IFOP) survey, 43 percent of French see Islam as being a threat.
French society needs to stop the Muslim bashing that stokes resentment and instead listen to the legitimate grievances of its Muslim community.
Mainstream French society has been divorcing -- emotionally, racially and territorially -- from the other France, the France of Muslims and descendants of former French colonies. The 2005 riots and the attacks this year are the episodes, only more and more tragic, of the same tale of the two Frances.
The heartbroken events of Nov. 13 could be, in a sense, a chance for the country to show a real unity and break the pattern of finger pointing. All French were targets of these indiscriminate attacks. The victims were white, blacks, Arabs, Muslims and Jews, alike. One of the suicide bombers exploded himself in Saint-Denis, a town with a heavily Muslim population. The black French Muslim soccer player, Lassana Diarra, while he was playing in the match Friday night, lost a cousin in the carnage.
French society needs to display moral resources and tap into its reservoir of love in order to rise to real unity and repair bonds between its two constitutive parts. French society needs to stop the Muslim bashing that stokes resentment and instead listen to the legitimate grievances of its Muslim community. Otherwise, the vital fight against radicalization cannot be won. We have no other choice than to heal together. As a society, it has become a matter of life and death. The Paris attacks are a wake-up call that France cannot afford to miss. Otherwise, homegrown monsters will keep coming for us.
