FRANCE: The French riots have lifted the lid on deep anti-immigrant passions, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris
Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing interior minister, has defended Alain Finkielkraut, the French philosopher whose interview with an Israeli newspaper created a scandal here. Mr Finkielkraut said the black and Arab youths who rioted for three weeks last month engaged in "an ethno-religious revolt" rooted in hatred of the West.
"Mr Finkielkraut is an intellectual who is a credit to French intelligence, and if there are so many people criticising him, maybe it's because he got it right," Mr Sarkozy said this week.
Both Mr Finkielkraut and Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, a historian of the former Soviet Union and an officer of the Académie Française, came to grief over interviews with foreign media about the riots.
"These people come straight from their villages in Africa," Mrs Carrère d'Encausse told a Russian TV station . "Everyone asks why African children are in the streets and not at school, why their parents don't buy an apartment. It's clear why: a lot of these Africans are polygamous.
"In an apartment there are three or four wives and 25 children. They're so packed in that they're no longer apartments but God knows what!" And she defended Mr Sarkozy, whose blunt vocabulary was widely seen as one cause of the riots.
Mr Finkielkraut was also less guarded speaking to foreign journalists. "The things he is saying to us in the course of our conversation, he repeatedly emphasises, are not things he can say in France any more," Dror Mishani and Aurelia Smotriez wrote in Haaretz, under the title: "You the Israelis, you understand me."
The satirical puppet show Les Guignols de l'Info now portrays the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen as forlorn at having lost his monopoly on racist rhetoric. Since the riots, mainstream politicians have suggested reversing the naturalisation of disorderly citizens and punishing parents of delinquent teenagers.
The Haaretz journalists noted that Mr Finkielkraut's comments came, not from a member of the National Front, "but a philosopher formerly considered one of the most eminent spokesmen of the French left, one of the generation of philosophers who emerged at the time of the May 1968 student revolt".
In one of his most criticised statements, Mr Finkielkraut said: "Actually, the national [ football] team today is black-black-black, which arouses ridicule throughout Europe."
He called the riots "an anti-republican pogrom" and added: "I don't think any Jew would ever do a thing like this . . . When an Arab torches a school, it's rebellion. When a white guy does it, it's fascism."
Mr Finkielkraut's Polish grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz. His father was deported from France to Auschwitz but survived.
"This country deserves our hatred," he said. "What it did to my parents was much more violent than what it did to Africans. What did it do to Africans? It did only good. It put my father in hell for five years . . . And today, this hatred that the blacks have is even greater than that of the Arabs."
Mr Finkielkraut predicted that the riots will worsen discrimi-
nation. "And certainly there are French racists. French people who don't like Arabs and blacks. And they'll like them even less now, when they know how much they're hated by them."
The philosopher said the accents of children of French immigrants made it impossible to hire them, and accused them of "butchering" the French language. "The question isn't what is the best model of integration, but just what sort of integration can be achieved with people who hate you," he added.
The Movement Against Racism and Anti-Semitism and for Peace dropped its lawsuit against Mr Finkielkraut for incitement to hatred after he told Europe 1 radio: "I present apologies to those whom this character that I am has hurt . . . The lesson is that I must no longer give interviews, in particular to newspapers where I don't control the outcome or the translation."
Charges of racism surfaced again in recent days when Francois Grosdidier, a right-wing UMP deputy with a background on the extreme right, said in the National Assembly: "In my town, in one out of two weddings the town hall resounds with you-yous [ a reference to ululation by north African Arab women at weddings]."
Mr Grosdidier earlier led a petition by 152 deputies and 49 senators to prosecute seven rap music groups accused of propagating anti-French and anti-white feeling.