France, the cradle of....racism!

I've long harboured suspicions that considerable swathes of the French and their native poodles in other countries, most notably Lebanon, continue to harbour a deep seated racism for anyone non-white, non-european or Muslim. Most people think of France as a civilised, sophisticated place. A place where all sorts of 'international' organisations can meet and discuss in French (the language of diplomacy of course!) the weighty and brainy issues of humanity. It is considered the home of liberte, egalite, fraternite! When I think of France, I see it's seedy underbelly. Maybe because my stay was in the downright shoddy area of Gare du Nord when I visited Paris, my vision of it is a city swamped with immigrants mostly from Africa, eking out a living, downtrodden and poorly educated. They get sucked into this seething, corrupt environment, transforming into the shoddy, dodgy people we don't want to tussle with, those "racaille", according to Sarkozy. Qunfuz has written an excellent article about his experiences in France and I strongly recommend you read it.

An extract from the Qunfuz' blog:

I had a French girlfriend of Algerian origin, also white and not noticeably Arab, who was being harassed by an insane neighbour. She was scared, so we went to the police station to inform them of the situation. The police were polite and concerned. They wrote everything down. But when they asked my girlfriend’s name, their tone changed radically. They scrumpled up the report sheet, told us no offence had been committed, and advised us to get out immediately. That girlfriend remembered her old maths teacher ordering her to the back of the classroom with the rest of the Arabs and Africans because, as the teacher explained, “I’m employed by the French state to teach French children.”

Her father had escaped from the extreme poverty of his (French-occupied) Algerian childhood to France, where he spent a lifetime as a migrant labourer, suffering casual and brutal violence from foremen and police – and then inflicting some himself, in his impotence, on his own family. When they finally settled in an industrial town, he found work in a factory where he would train white teenagers to do his dangerous, lowest-of-the-low job, and then watch them promoted after a couple of months to brighter and better things.