“When
the army is called in to protect some French citizens against others,
it’s the beginning of a civil war.”
In our
documentary released earlier this year, Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie, Max Blumenthal and I surveyed the
landscape of French society in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks,
interviewing representatives of French Muslim and Jewish communities,
political activists, academics and average French citizens. The
accounts we recorded told of long-exacerbating pressures on
inter-communal relations that are rapidly approaching a state of
low-level civil conflict. The minority citizens we spoke with were
seething under a system that has given rise to daily encounters with
discrimination and systematic exclusion from the public space.
In turn,
French reality has been punctuated by seemingly random, spectacularly
gruesome acts of violence carried out by individuals who come from
the most excluded sections of French society. They are at once
native-born citizens of France and the country’s ultimate
outsiders. The main perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the
atrocities this November were not a foreign presence which has
disturbed a peaceful status quo in French society, but the unwanted,
outcasted byproducts of the French Republic and its imperial legacy
in the Middle East.
Whether or
not we are willing to describe the situation in impoverished French
banlieues (suburbs) as outright apartheid, as Prime Minister Manuel
Valls did this year, the toxic combination of militaristic government
policies abroad and draconian, discriminatory policies at home have
unleashed an authoritarian mood among the general public. For French
Muslims and other minorities, the situation increasingly resembles
the plight blacks faced in apartheid South Africa and even that of
the Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation. Though
French minorities confront only a shadow of the disproportionate
violence that Israel has visited upon Palestinians, they have found
themselves in a permanent state of exclusion enforced by a regime of
increasingly brutal repression.
[...]
Houria
Bouteldja, a founder of the leftist minority party known as the
Indigenous Peoples of the Republic, claimed it was “the figure
of the Christian, white, European person” who the state
privileges with power and wealth in the society, who is legally
positioned above “the black, the Arab, the Muslim and the Roma”
person. It isn’t a visible form of apartheid, but a regime of
separation which is enacted through systemic, naturalized forms of
domination and violence. As her fellow party leader Youssouf
Boussouma described to us how the French authorities banned
demonstrations against Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, then meted
out harsh punishments to young Arab males who took to the streets,
“this government behaves toward certain sections of its
populations as if they really were citizens of an occupied country.”
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