This is a terrific report from France by Mark Lilla, writing in New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/mar/05/france-on-fire/In it he talks of the intellectual and institutional omerta that has prevented liberals from addressing the problems that radical Islam has presented French society over the last few years. Here's an extract:
"The evidence has been there for anyone who cared to look for it, in books like those of Kepel and the growing literature of memoirs written by former teachers in the quartiers who gave up because they could not control their classes or enforce the principle of laicity. In 2004, for example, the Chirac government received a report it had commissioned on the presence of religious “signs and belonging” in the schools, which was promptly buried because its results were so disturbing. This Obin Report was based on on-site visits government inspectors made to over sixty middle and high schools across France, concentrating on disfavored quartiers.
The extent to which life in many of them had been, to employ Kepel’s term, “halalized” shocked them. The report recounts stories of girls being under constant surveillance by self-appointed older brothers who mete out corporal punishment with fists and belts if they deem modesty to have been violated. Wearing skirts or dresses is impossible in many places, also for female teachers. There is an obsession with purity, as students and their parents demand separate swimming hours or refuse to let their children go on school trips where the sexes might mix. If they do go, some refuse to enter cathedrals or churches.
There are fathers who won’t shake hands with female teachers, or let their wives speak alone to male teachers. There are cases of children refusing to sing, or dance, or learn an instrument, or draw a face, or use a mathematical symbol that resembles a cross. The question of dress and social mixing has led to the abandonment of gym classes in many places. Children also feel emboldened to refuse to read authors or books that they find religiously unacceptable: Rousseau, Molière, Madame Bovary. Certain subjects are taboo: evolution, sex ed, the Shoah. As one father told a teacher, “I forbid you to mention Jesus to my son.”
In general the report conveys a sense of enormous religious pressure in certain places. During Ramadan, the more “pious” students harass less observant Muslims, and scared kids have been found eating food on the sly in the bathrooms. One child attempted suicide due to the harassment.
The situation of Jewish students is far worse and a great number have transferred to private schools (though also because they, too, have become more observant). In 1996 a principal in Lyons had to arrange the departure of the last two Jewish students in his school because he could not assure their safety. As the report says, “there is a stupefying and cruel reality: in France, Jewish children, and Jewish children alone, cannot be educated in all of our schools.”
There is little way of knowing how widespread these phenomena are, though since the massacres teachers in the quartiers have gone to the press to unburden themselves. And the instinctive response of many journalists and scholars every time stories like these are told—that they are totally unrepresentative, that even if true they are stigmatizing and play into the hands of the National Front—simply isn’t adequate. The deeper question the Obin Report raised was whether the French educational establishment had a coherent response to offer when these incidents do occur. The inspectors note in the report that administrators minimized the problems teachers reported and gave little support, though they themselves had little guidance from above. This is what Najat Vallaud-Belkacem meant when she criticized the tendency not to “make waves.” After Chirac received the Obin Report it took a year of nagging for his government education minister to release it, to little effect. Since the massacres, however, it is being widely discussed.
If anything plays into the hands of the National Front, it is this resistance to reality. The famous bon mot of Charles Péguy, a hero of French republicanism, applies: “One must always say what one sees. But especially—and this is the hard part—one must always see what one sees.” And what have average French voters seen recently? Since 2012 they have seen some of their own citizens, born and raised and educated in France, gun down Jews (including children) and soldiers and journalists, praising Allah as they do. They have seen hundreds more leave to fight in Iraq and Syria, in the same spirit. They are aware of teenagers posting pro-ISIS material on social networking pages. They saw that during the demonstrations against the most recent war in Gaza people chanted “death to the Jews” and others spray-painted graffiti with the same message. And they have read reports about a survey showing that 16 percent of the French, and 27 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-four, have a very favorable or somewhat favorable view of ISIS (compared to 7 percent in Britain and 2 percent in Germany).
There are things they find harder to see. The sense in the poor and crime-ridden quartiers of abandonment by “the French”; the humiliating struggle to find decently paying permanent jobs; the tireless work of teachers and community workers to keep order and maintain the dignity of their neighborhoods; the successful integration of the majority of Muslims and their attachment to France. These, too, need to be publicized. But it is a major mistake to think that average French voters will see these things better if their eyes are turned away from another part of social reality—particularly the religious pressure I have described—or if they are called racists for discussing it."
