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Piwin -> RE: Raise a Glass to France! (May 8 2017 15:16:13)
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Ricardo,
tldr: yes it's blown out of proportion.
well I can only speak for what I've seen in France (and obviously even there it's just my own subjective opinion).
But the idea that some would put forward, that people voted FN (that is still classified as extreme right by any neutral institution, even if those of that political tendency would have us think otherwise) because of immigration is way overblown, if not even just a myth. One needs merely look at a map and compare where people voted FN and where the immigrants are. And there's no real correlation at the obvious exception of Calais. What emerges is that the areas where the FN got the highest results are those where unemployment is high, the French rust belt basically. It's like Leopold Sedar Senghor wrote: "racists are just people who are angry at the wrong thing".
Now regarding immigration per say, obviously you can discard the ideas spread by the likes of Foxnews according to which there are "no-go zones". The first time they talked about no-gone zones were during the urban riots about a decade ago. I lived in one of those areas and remember laughing at how it was being described as a war zone. A pretty similar reaction than what the Swedish had recently when Trump announced they were apparently under attack when they clearly weren't aware of anything happening...since nothing was happening! It's quite simple, there's simply no area, neighbourhood or district in France where the crime rates come anywhere near what they are in the worst areas of the US.
That's obviously not to say that there aren't areas that are less safe than others since there obviously are. And anyone who tries to create a correlation between crime in those areas and indicators like race or religion are merely doing so based on subjective perception. Why? Because it's illegal in France to compile any statistics based on race or religion. So you simply can't have the data to support a claim that there is more crime or whatever else in areas that are predominantly (add whatever race or religion you want). That data simply doesn't exist.
I have one friend who is a Berber Christian who told me he had been threatened several times by his Muslim neighbours but that's the only case I know of.
A few years ago, Foxnews relayed a video by a Jewish Israeli allegedly showing how unsafe it was for him to walk around Paris for an hour, how Muslim youths were threatening him etc. etc.. We'll pass on the ties this guy has to an organisation promoting the return of all Jews to Israel, so clearly he had some motivation for his video. After that video, a French Jewish journalist went around for 6 months in Paris and in the rest of France, including in some of the sketchiest neighbourhoods, wearing a kippa. He came back with Nothing bad at all, no threats, no one spitting on him, just hours of footage of Muslim women saying "shalom, is that how you say it?" to which he'd replied "yeah thanks, salam!" or youths wearing hoodies (OMG HOODIES!!) inviting to sit for a cup of tea. Of course this never made it on Foxnews.
Observers in the US tend to map on to Europe the free speech issues they're having in some of their universities, but that simply does not apply in France. Different history, different culture and different laws. As someone said above, there has been an effort by the FN to "normalise" itself, to distance itself from its past. This has been done not by changing any of their policies, which are still very much the same as they've always been, but by trying to soften some of their language. In a way, they did exactly what the intelligent design campaign did in the states. It's still creationism, but we'll change the words and see if we can make that constitutional. And now that they have this brand new vocabulary, their approach has been basically to depict any conflicting opinion as an attempt to bully them into silence. They don't want free speech, they have it. It's enshrined in the Constitution. What they want is for people to just shrug when they're acting like a dick instead of saying "hey, you're acting like a dick". So the alleged bullying they're suffering from is really just a political ploy to try and shift the moral standard down a degree so that their ideas seem socially acceptable when they're really not. It's also a way to divert the discussion away from the actual programme they're proposing and bring it only on this non-existent free speech issue. Le Pen showed what this is about during the debate last Thursday. She spent all her time attacking her opponent and complaining about how she was being misrepresented instead of actually talking about her programme. And the reason is simple: her programme is as extreme right as it always was.
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