Most news organizations cover riots, terrorist attacks, and natural or manmade disasters more as boon for ratings than tragic events. Now they’re covering the presidency of Donald J. Trump … as both.
But one can hardly blame them. After all, his Barnum & Bailey-esque antics are such that even his news conferences are like high-wire acts – without safety nets. Not to mention his unscripted utterances, which evoke all the perversely entertaining pathos of high-speed car chases. Only this explains the media covering everything from his snarky tweets to signings of executive orders as if they were unfolding train wrecks.
Unfortunately, this means that other newsworthy stories get short shrift, especially if they are overseas.
Which brings me to the roving riots that erupted around Paris in recent weeks. Their eerie resemblance to riots in Ferguson and Baltimore in recent years should have compelled far more coverage.
But the media’s fatal attraction to Trump is such that you’d be forgiven if you have no clue what sparked them or caused them to spread.
Protesters have attacked a police station on the southern outskirts of Paris amid anger over the alleged rape of a young black man by French police. …
High unemployment and racial tension blight several struggling neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Paris – commonly called the ‘banlieues’. Police have been accused of heavy-handed methods in areas with large immigrant populations.
(BBC, February 13, 2017)
Of course, I hasten to note that some of us cannot read about this act of police brutality in Paris without recalling this one in Brooklyn:
Thousands of demonstrators, many waving toilet plungers or Haitian flags, marched through Flatbush, Brooklyn, to the 70th Precinct yesterday, protesting the torture there of a Haitian immigrant and assailing the Giuliani administration’s record on police brutality.
The loud but peaceful protest, the most vocal show of anger yet over the beating of Abner Louima – which officials said included a sexual assault with a plunger handle – began in front of the nightclub where he was taken into police custody a week ago.
(New York Times, August 17, 1997)
Besides the triggering acts of police brutality, however, my allusion to riots in America is relevant in two other important respects:
- The root causes were the same for the riots here and over there.
- French authorities have proved no better at redressing those causes than their American counterparts.
More to the point, just as blacks in America were rioting in 2015 for the same reasons they rioted in 1965, blacks in France are rioting in 2017 for the same reasons they rioted in 2005.
I began sounding alarms about the root causes of the riots over there in “World Beware: French Riots Affect Us All,” November 8, 2005. Alas, I’ve had cause to continue sounding them – as this extended but instructive excerpt from “Now Stockholm Is Burning,” May 23, 2013, attests.
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In 2005, as displaced, disaffected and disillusioned immigrants were on their twelfth consecutive night of rioting, which began in Paris then spread all over France, I felt moved to write “World Beware: French Riots Affects Us All,” November 8, 2005.
In it I warned that the same social, political, economic, and racial grievances that underpinned those riots were simmering in practically every other major city in Western Europe; even though the trigger that ignites them might differ from city to city. …
Which only leaves me to reiterate the prescription I offered in “Now London Is Burning” August 9, 2011:
Notwithstanding the alleged police brutality that triggers them, the reason riots continue to erupt in London is that political leaders fail to heed the categorical imperative to address the chronic unemployment, racial/religious discrimination, and social alienation that are the long-simmering sparks that give rise to these periodic combustions.
It should come as no surprise to learn that Tottenham is a very impoverished neighborhood with the highest unemployment rate in London. Unfortunately, that Prime Minister David Cameron has rushed back from vacation and recalled Parliament – not to address these root causes, but to spearhead efforts to put out the fires – suggest that it’s only a matter of time before the next eruption.
Until the next one then: Because, instead of taking my prescription, the countries of Western Europe are merely segregating and marginalizing North-African immigrants today, the way the United States segregated and marginalized blacks in the first half of the last century. The latter led inexorably to the riots that erupted all over the country during the 1960s.
Meanwhile, don’t get me started on the hypocrisy afoot. After all, these are the same self-righteous Europeans who never missed an opportunity to condemn the United States for the root causes of its endemic racial strife.
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That excerpt is particularly noteworthy given this:
Just two days after President Trump provoked widespread consternation by seeming to imply, incorrectly, that immigrants had perpetrated a recent spate of violence in Sweden, riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in the northern suburbs of the country’s capital, Stockholm.
The neighborhood, Rinkeby, was the scene of riots in 2010 and 2013, too. And in most ways, what happened Monday night was reminiscent of those earlier bouts of anger.
(Washington Post, February 21, 2017)
There seems little doubt that these immigrants seized the worldwide media attention Trump’s fake claims generated to dramatize their perennial plight. Unfortunately, in the eyes of his supporters, they only vindicated his irresponsible and incendiary ignorance.
Mind you, France and Sweden have invested billions to no avail in, respectively, welfare and assimilation programs for immigrants. Except that nothing is more foreboding in this regard than disaffected and disillusioned youth still rioting in cities all over the United Sates. After all, no country has invested more in welfare and assimilation programs to prevent such riots.
This explains why these programs seem tantamount to the proverbial giving of fish instead of teaching to fish. In the meantime, the root causes that breed alienation and resentment continue to grow in minority and immigrant communities that remain segregated and unassimilated (Exhibit A: Chicago South Side a.k.a. Chiraq).
Incidentally, this is why Germany should beware. Because chances are that, in due course, many of the Syrian migrants it is trying to assimilate today will become just as disaffected and disillusioned as the African migrants who have been rioting all over France since 2005.
Having said all that, no issues defy solutions quite like those relating to matters of race and religion. And I’ll be damned if I know how any government can eradicate the bigotry that fuels those matters and inflames the root causes of alienation in minority and immigrant communities. This in turn makes them perennial tinderboxes; hence the vicious cycle of discrimination and riots.
Related commentaries:
World beware
Now Stockholm is burning…
Baltimore to Ferguson…
Police shooting trigger riots…
Chiraq…