Aziz Poonawalla agrees that France is in political trouble, and he’s hardly a right-winger.
Certainly the idea that France will be Saudi Arabia on the Mediterranean by 2020 is hyperbole – but the idea that the scores of unassimilated and angry Muslims living in France are simply going to go away is equally unlikely. The anti-Semitic violence of recent years is only the tip of a much larger social and political problem. Coupled with the ossified French labor market, a corrupt and isolated bureaucratic chattering class, France has all the signs of a nation with endemic problems that no amount of anti-American posturing will fix.
The idea that France has scores and scores of unassimilated muslims ready suicide bomb the Eiffel Tower and Arc De Triomphe is a pure fallacy. While there are many problems with assimilation they are not unique to France, the evidence being used to examine this problem is self-serving at best.
From these four articles, we see four key things:
1) France did not have a large portion of its Muslim community support the 9-11 attacks
2) France has created a muslim council to help bring the issues of muslims into the political mainstream
3) There are active Muslim groups in France setting up their own systems to create a “european-islamic” identity (Institute for Human Services)
4) Mosque subsidies are being considered to help bring in line extremists and to offset foreign governments from meddling in affairs. The Turkish model of mosque subsidies has worked fairly well in tempering radical Islam.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2959389.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1596012.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2593623.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2670399.stm
But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good fairytale?
Just as I am opposed to the immigration policy of the United States (which is mainly rationalized on grounds of the perceived entitlement to cheap labor on demand for the American business lobby), I am also opposed to the immigration policies of European nations, including France. Their immigration policies only serve to enlarge the short-term pool of unemployment for the possible long-term outcome of a larger workforce that will be able to finance their welfare state even with a declining birth rate. In both cases, immigration is an instrument that suppresses the upward mobility of standard of living.
I would much rather see greater non-military foreign policy involvement by the Western nations to develop the economic infrastructures of the Third World within their borders. Sacrificing our own standards of living under the belief that we can be the refugee camp for the world is a short-sighted and foolhardy ethic.