More and more, there are attacks in the media on France. Many in the media hate its secularist model. Real problems in France - problems common to many European capitlaist states - are used as the justification for media attacks on the entire French model, especially its secularist aspects. The new francophobia suggests that these problems are unque to France, and y omission excuses the multiple sins of other states - including Canada.
The new francophobia
Fri, 2015-12-11 18:51
#1
swallow
The new francophobia
Fri, 2015-12-11 18:54
#2
swallow
[url=http://rabble.ca/comment/1545966#comment-1545966]Alternet: France is becoming an "apartheid state"[/url]
A typical example of anglo left francophobia, magnifying real issues in France into a suggesiton that it is much like occupied Palestine - whereas "we" in North America are excused in favour of throwing the imperial gaze on the French "other."
Fri, 2015-12-11 22:32
#3
Which is rather odd, given the state of race relations in the US and the propensity to shoot unarmed young black men...
There are very serious problems in France right now. Politicians both on the supposed "left", the right and the far right are taking advantage of a real terrorist attack to declaire a state of emergency and clamp down on civil liberties and do things like place peaceful environmental activists under house arrest and search (and sometimes ransack) mosques, which are about the last place the current crew of Daesh wannabees would hang out at.
People who are not wealthy are being denied abode in many major urban centres - throughout the Western world at least, and doubtless far beyond. There is nothing specifically "French" about formerly working-class neighbourhoods becoming gentrified. A difference with the US writers' experience is that France never experienced postwar "white flight" and the same degree of suburban sprawl as is the case in the US, but class and racial spatial exclusion are not the monopoly of any particular country.
The francophobe caricatures deny the efforts of many people in France - and in Belgium for that matter - to fight social and racial exclusion, and the system that fosters those ills.