In all the talk about the French Intifada, much of the LSM* tries to minimize the religious influence on the rioters, residents of the banlieues. They have an interest in supporting the various orthodoxies of the liberal elites, mutli-culturism and political correctness especially, which frowns upon mentioning characteristics of victims that do not directly support their victimhood. This is not news. On the other hand, there has been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere of the influence of Islamic radicalism on the rioters, with various bloggers insisting the riots arise from poverty, poor prospects, non-assimilation, relatively overt French racism, criminality, etc, while others point out that the rioters are parroting the language of other Islamic "victims", notably the Palestinians, as well as the language of Islamic victimization and exceptionalism, and wonder how much they are being influenced, perhaps manipulated, by the Islamic fascists. All of these aspects play a role but I believe the discussions, while important and interesting, will ultimately prove to be academic.
Humans are fundamentally tribal beings. Bill Whittle wrote an important essay on tribes last September which I will not recap here; if you haven't read it, you should do so, but I refer to it because Bill essentially takes for granted that we are all members of the American tribe; all the sheep and sheep dogs he describes belong to the large, vari-colored, multi-religioned American tribe. The great beauty of the American model, of the melting pot (which has been endangered by PC and multi-cultural nonsense but not yet destroyed), is that anyone can become a member of the American tribe. It is a vastly inclusive tribe with wide parameters and is designed to enlarge one's sense of who belongs to one's tribe; America is the quintessential "Super-Tribe".
In one of my first posts, Contrasts, Edges, and Differences, I described how our brains are essentially hard wired to make tribal distinctions:
The type of binary distinction I am writing about is, in some ways, hard wired into our systems. Our nervous system, on the most fundamental level, is most sensitive to contrasts and edges, the distinction between one object and another, between the object and the background. We have cells in the visual cortex which fire primarily when they "see" an edge. Our visual cortex is organized in such a way as to enhance edges. While one always has to be careful to avoid reductionism, contrasts and edges are fundamental organizers for the nervous system, and later, for the mind. The first awareness of an infant concerns the distinction between self and other.... The child’s sense of individuality, self, emerges from the undifferentiated mother/child and the child’s first stirrings of self-hood are loudly announced by the youngster’s "NO!" The self is heralded by negation of the other. Later, the child learns to encompass other important people in their sense of community (father, siblings, relatives). By the time the child is entering elementary school, he or she has begun to include others who share their various tribal affiliations as part of their group. I am a member of my family, my extended family, my religious group, my school, my state, my country. Our tribal affiliations are more fluid the farther they are from the family. The beauty of America has always been to enlarge the sense of tribal affiliation to include larger and larger groups. If we are all Americans, we all have the opportunity to take part in our community and become part of our culture. In so far as we can see ourselves as Americans, as all part of the same tribe, then discrimination or victimization is done by individuals to individuals, not by society towards groups.
Political Correctness seeks to exchange the larger tribe, with many sheep and a few sheep dogs, as Bill Whittle puts it, for tribes of victims and oppressors. It is a framework that attacks the very idea of an American ethos and while it seems to be losing some of its grip on the nation's psyche, the LSM continues to use it as their model with which to frame the news, including the news from France; however, hiding facts doesn't change them. (For a more compete treatment of Political Correctness and how it distorts one's ability to accurately assess reality, see my series on PC & Defects in Reality Testing.) Furthermore, the French have managed to hide the facts from themselves by virtue of their tribal religion of politically correct socialism-lite; they have treated domestic Islam as if it isn't important.
(In the same fashion they treat their traditional Catholicism as unimportant, favoring a religion of secularism to one that relies on a Deity. It is worth noting that those countries that have attempted to use the multi-cultural approach to aggrandize Islam, like England, are in no better shape when it comes to their Muslim inhabitants, many of whom find the English tribe unappealing and denigrate the secularized establishment as weak and decadent.)
Here then is the French conundrum, and why the French have such limited space in which to operate. The French model offers French tribal affiliation only to those who are white and ethnically French. Since they have never even been offered the option of assimilation, plus the relatively stagnant economy does not allow for growth to enlarge the sphere of tribal affiliation (the French economy is a zero-sum game where the entrenched forces can only lose if they open up; this is, therefore, unlikely to happen), the rioters have had no other tribe beyond their street gangs. The Islamic radicals are perfectly situated to offer these "youths", who have no other opportunities to become part of anything greater than themselves, membership in a powerful, wealthy tribe that sees itself as embodying greatness. Given the option of membership in the devalued tribe of "ignored, hated, black underclass with no prospects" or joining over 1 billion Muslims whose right and fate is to rule the world, most of the rioters will see it as a no-brainer.
*LSM = LameStreamMedia
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