Paris-based Nicholas le Quesne, writing for Time magazine in 2001, throws France a bouquet and sticks it to post-09.11 America, while racking up mucho CSJ perspicuity points. All this in a mere 717-word froth, which we have skimmed off.

THE ENEMY WITHIN

The French Experience Shows How Integration Can
Defuse The Dissatisfaction That Can Lead To Terrorism

PARIS September 19, 2001 (Time) - For decades, Islam was invisible here. Its believers occupied the lowest rungs of the economic and social ladder, lived in peripheral housing projects and practised their faith in improvised prayer-halls. They were divided by country of origin and continued the customs of their native villages.

That situation began to change in the late 80's. By then, it had become obvious that the first-generation immigrants and their offspring would never return to their countries of origin — even though they and their families were living in poverty on the margins of French society. Exposed during their schooling to France's republican ideals of "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite", their children began to feel that they were victims of injustice. The stage was set for the defining phenomenon of the 90's: the "reconversion" of young second- and third-generation immigrants to a more radical Islam than that of their parents as an source of identity in a society from which they felt excluded.

The rise of this new, assertive young Islam in France is a sign of the increasing integration of France's Muslim population.

Huh? Hey, wait a minute, where's the integration?

The country is having to invent a way of living with what — for France — is a new religion. Increasingly, the country's mosques are attended by a cross-section of blacks, north Africans and even converted white French. The leading theorist of this new Euro-Islam is Tariq Ramadan [Denied entry into France in 1995-6; denied entry into the USA 2004.]. Ramadan proposes abandoning the classical Islamic theological distinction between the land of Islam and the land of unbelievers. In a globalized age, he maintains that Muslims can practise their religion satisfactorily in traditionally non-Muslim places like Europe and so need to develop their own religious authorities, diluting their links to the Middle East.

... During the next wave of terrorism to hit France, in the summer of 1995, the operatives were French. Eight bomb attacks left seven dead and over 130 injured. They were carried out by disaffected north African youths with a history of petty crime.

France quickly recognized the danger of this enemy within. Since the late 90's, the government has gone out of its way to integrate Islam into French life, rather than treating it as a menacing foreign influence. If France's Muslims see no opposition between being French and Muslim, they are less likely to be used by foreign troublemakers.

And happily the article ends here while you are still continent. Please click the headline, read the entire article, and report back if we missed it, but did Nick describe one single instance of successful integration in the French experience anywhere in this article? No, it looks like Nick has simply asserted as fact a pretty notion he likes.

We haven't read anything as critically provocative as this since Joe Conason flacked for the Clintons.

PFFT (What is this?): Back-asswardness 5 | Rayonnement français 0