Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

I described the article as long and comprehensive, Angela, and you've picked up on some of the other themes that run through the suburbs with your response. The situation is complex - thus my original conclusion as to why stopping or shifting a soccer match is likely to prove useless - as a closer look at the mentions of American and English-language cultures provides.

The section I cited on the Ilan Halimi incident and the link made to Abu Ghraib and Iraq in justification seems to me to be a clear case of reaction against American foreign policy, especially in light of the fact that France was neither involved nor sanctioned either the Iraq War nor the events at that prison.

Earlier in the piece, though, the author explains that embracing US culture and first names is part of what provides an identity for young people in the suburbs:

...so many kids in the banlieue are called Steeve, Marky, Jenyfer, Britney or even Kevin. They don‘t always get the spelling right, but the sentiment is straightforward: we are not like other French people; we refuse to be like them.

On the one hand America is rejected, used as an excuse for torture. On the other it is something embraced in rebellion of a country that doesn't feel like home.

The author also describes a situation where a radical suburban youth leader refuses to speak to him. He writes of the incident:

For several weeks I tried to arrange a meeting with him. I was told by an intermediary that ‘Kémi will speak soon. But he doesn’t want to speak to the white press you represent. His time will come later. This will be when the white press is no more.’

I was then told that they knew who I was and it might be wise to leave them alone. Or stay out of Bagneux.

Yet earlier in the piece - and in a different suburban area - the journalist is welcomed by the locals:

They were pleased to hear that I was English. ‘We hate the French press,’ said Charles, who is thin and tall and of Congolese origin. ‘They just think we're animals.’

One suburb welcomes the foreign press, one rejects it.

This complexity, mixed with the anti-Semitism and Palestinian solidarity (the two are not necessarily related, I think), anti-Sarkozy sentiment and ghetto-like living arrangements - among many other things - mean that easy solutions will not be found. As well, while we speak of "the suburbs" it seems clear that not all suburbs are alike. Some are just angry; some are militant; some are Islamist and want nothing to do with a secular France; and some seem ready to change entirely if we could get the young people within a job.

I would think there would be a place for your suggestion of stopping other governments from abusing their people in the best of solutions but there is so much to be addressed and will require so much work at home that this might not be the best place to start - though there seems no reason the foreign and domestic streams cannot be worked concurrently.

Also, in relation to your question:

Where are you in France, Dylan? Doing a Sorbonne stinque?

We live in Villeurbanne, a city on the edge of Lyon in the east of France. It's about an hour from the Swiss border, two hours by train to Paris and a little bit less to Marseille and the sea (where we do visit family from time-to-time, Michael de Angelos). We've lived in Villeurbanne for a bit more than a year now; we previously spent a couple of years living in Lyon after spending a few before that flying backwards and forwards between Adelaide and France (and the Basque country, too) each summer. I don't feel French yet, but neither will we be heading back to Australia any time soon.

Anthony: "My understanding is that about a fifth of the French population is Muslim and a large part of that one fifth are either directly from or descendants of the Algerian rump who supported French rule but had to flee after defeat."

One of the problems with France's laïcité laws is that the government is prevented from asking the citizens what religion they are or their ethnicity. As a result, estimates vary significantly and statistical methodologies employed range from rough guesses to telephone polling to the assessment of surnames to 'guess' a person's religion.

In 2000 the US State Department estimated that the Islamic population was about 10% of the total French population, putting the total Islamic population at somewhere around 6.5 million. L'Express reported in 2003 that the 6 million figure was a huge overestimation and pegged the real number at about 3.7 million persons.

Polling in 2007 put it at only 3% and up to 6% in the suburbs but this strikes me as very low. Consider, for example, that in our city there are 8 Catholic churches and 14 moques or Muslim prayer centres even though this poll suggests that there are 21 times more Catholics than Muslims in the average French city.

Mark Steyn's book America Alone reported that France had the biggest proportion of Muslims in Europe - perhaps he was excluding Albania - but noted also that 1 in 3 babies born in France today are to Muslim parents suggesting that whatever the ratio is it is growing. In short, we don't know how many ethnic-Algerians, ethnic-North African or Muslim (or Catholic or Jewish) people live in France.

That said, I'm inclined to believe that what you describe as a "disaffected potential fifth column" does exist and does draw strength from immigrant youth. This article is very long but is comprehensive and explains well what the situation in the suburbs is like, including this:

In January 2006 a twenty-three-year-old mobile phone salesman named Ilan Halimi was kidnapped in central Paris and driven out to Darfour City in Bagneux. Halimi, who was Jewish, had been invited out for a drink by a young Iranian woman named Yalda,whom he had met while selling phones. It turned out that it was her mission to trap him and lure him away from safety...

Three weeks later, Ilan was found naked and tied to a tree near the RER station of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois. He died on the way to hospital. His body had been mutilated and burned. Since being kidnapped, he had been imprisoned in a flat in Bagneux, starved and tortured. Residents of the block had heard his screams and the laughter of those torturing him, but had done nothing...

At the same time, out in the banlieue itself, the murder took on a skewed new meaning: the word was that what had begun as a heist and kidnap to extort a ransom from ‘rich Jews’ had become a form of revenge for crimes in Iraq and, in particular, the scenes from Abu Ghraib. Bizarrely, in the view of some, this made the torturers martyrs, soldiers in what is being called the Long War against the white Western powers. An ever-present slogan in the banlieue is ‘Nique la France!’ (Fuck France!). The kids of Bagneux accordingly gloried in their own ‘intifada’. They openly identified with the Palestinians, whom they saw as prisoners in their own land, like the dispossessed of the banlieue.

I don't know if we can conclude that French anti-Americanism, where it exists, flows from the migrant and Muslim community. However, the references to Abu Ghraib, Iraq and allusions to a 'Long War' suggest that reactions to American foreign policy shape, in part, the sometimes violent reactions by angry, young, male migrants towards their nominal countrymen.