Impressive! Contrary to the self-perception of most French Catholics, the problem with the contemporary dominant French Catholic (“laïc”) culture is, if anything, its lack of refinement. French racism is articulated often in the most vulgar of ways without any palliatives or euphemisms. In this, the French are unlike their peers in the American and British settings, where racism is often couched in more socially acceptable language that hides behind it the very same racist vulgarity. The vulgarity of French Catholic racism, however, is most similar to that of Israeli Jewish racism, which also often has no truck with circumlocutions and other linguistic cosmetics. ...This France is the France that accuses its Muslim population of refusing to assimilate to its ways, but never questions why it thinks it should not assimilate to their ways — since French Muslims too are as much part of France and its culture as French Catholics are and since France is no longer the exclusive property of French Catholics to do with as they please. Perhaps French Catholics (should we just call them Gaulois?) could learn some tolerance from French Muslims. After all, it is French Muslims who have endured and continue to the best of their abilities to tolerate the decades-long racism and intolerance of French Catholics. Could French Catholics in turn learn to tolerate the tolerance of French Muslims? Shocking as this last idea may be to French Catholic and sectarian racists (who are of course “laïcs”), these same people never thought it shocking when as a colonial minority they sought to force the majority of the colonized to assimilate to their ways — whatever their ways are of course. One is never sure if French Muslims are expected to adopt the torture and murderous methods of French Catholics and their “laïc” intolerance as part of their assimilation process. If indeed this is what is required, then the only three successfully assimilated French Muslims are none other than Cherif and Saïd Kouachi, the brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo, and Amedy Coulibaly, who attacked the Jewish supermarket.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 21:26:00 +0000
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