Ophelia's Journal.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 1:33 pm Post subject:

Baba Cool's story.

As he was doing his shopping in Tours one day, he heard a woman scream. He turned around, and saw an elderly lady facing two young men. He came closer in case she needed help, and saw that she was berating the two young men for whatever they were supposed to have done, using ugly words meaning "Arab".
My colleague saw that it wouldn't come to blows, and walked away. He was feeling embarrassed, but after all-- racist elderly lady, these things happen.

Ten minutes later, he needed to buy some bread and walked into the local baker's shop, where the same two young men were stealing cakes.
My colleague ran away.

The petty thief is of no consequence, but what was interesting to me was how painful witnessing the scene had been to him.
He said several times "J'étais bien emmerdé". "I was in deep shit" does not quite translate it.
As I was listening to him, my respect for Baba Cool was increasing by the minute. Here was a soixante-huitard who had seen something which blatantly contradicted his neat vision of life, the values of who is a victim and who is a victimizer, and was able, not only to admit it to himself, but also to talk about it.

The second social sciences teacher started spluttering and complaining, but since this was Baba Cool, she didn't give him the full moralizing treatment.
After all, his credentials are impeccable: in May, 1968, he was on the barricades fighting the riot police. If you do the maths, he must have quite young then, so I suppose his parents took him.

I think in his place, another socialist at the baker's shop would not have allowed himself to notice what was happening, or if he had, he would have forgotten immediately.
The fact that he had faced the unthinkable, that a somebody who was a member of a group who had been victimized could do the things the group as a whole was unfairly criticized for made me understand once more what was wrong with the other socialists: life is easy for them I think, they have decided, once and for all, who are the good guys, and this suffers no exceptions.

This is called "angélisme", a better word than the translation "naïve optimism".

In the story at the baker's this philosophy does no harm, but when held by a lot of people it helps to further confuse issues, and in the example I'll give later it prevents new problems from being recognized and addressed.

Ophelia · Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 3:26 pm Post subject:

As we are struggling on the path towards less discrimination and more tolerance, new problems appear that add up to an already tense situation.

About 5 years ago, a colleague of mine who teaches English in Thionville, a small town in the East of France, told me of a strange thing that had happened at his junior high school.
One afternoon he heard screams and screeching (doesn't translate the word "hululement") coming from another classroom. He and other colleagues stepped into the corridor, and found out that the problem was coming from a history class of thirteen-year-olds.

The curriculum for that class, among other things, has a part about the main monotheists religions. All had gone well for Christianity and Islam but on that day they were going to study judaism, and the Muslim students, about 30 % of the class, would not hear about it and were refusing to take notes (refusing to write is very unusual in French schools, when students don't want to work they usually think copying things from the board is an easy part of the lesson).

The headmaster was called, and he stood in the classroom the whole lesson so that the teacher could teach, and to force the students to take notes as usual.

On leaving school that day, the Muslim students set fire to their history notebooks.

Obviously, something was very wrong.

When I tried to enquire, I got the usual closed doors, and once more the official view was that there was no problem.

Even on the internet, I only found three partial explanations, after a lot of searching.

Ophelia · Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 1:30 pm Post subject:

Because I can be obstinate, I found three sites which mentioned the problem my friend had stumbled upon for history teachers.
Two of them were texts written by history teachers -- the second time the Holocaust is studied is in the twelfth grade after the study of World War II.

The first teacher was personally implicated in his pupils' reactions to the teaching of the Holocaust because he is a Jew.

He explained that the Muslim pupils' refusal to study anything having to do with the Jews was due to their identification with Palestiniens in the current Israel/ Palestine conflict.

It's an identification without knowledge of the history of Palestine or even a vague idea of where the two countries are situated on the map.
This teacher, who never sounded bitter in his relating of what he saw in his school, said that he spent a lot of time, from the beginning of the school year, explaining that the conflict mentioned above was political, not religious, and that the Jewish community in France for example was a different entity from the Israelis. He had to keep returning to all those differences because sometimes, when the pupils had understood, they would go back to their prejudices, and he'd have to remind them of what he had said before.

Having done this for a whole year, and because his pupils had interacted with a teacher who was a Jew, he found that the history lesson about the Holocaust at the end of the year was accepted.

Of course the influence he had was only in his classes, and he noted that anti-Jewish insults (sometimes even if no Jewish pupil was present, as there are not many of them) an anti-semitic grafitti at school were on the increase.

He explained that some of his colleagues (my interpretation is that this would refer to the leftist teachers) were in denial about the increase of anti-semitism.
He described one scene that I can visualize very easily. In a corridor, he would try to attract the attention of a colleague to this problem and she, with her back to a wall containing anti-semitic graffiti in large characters, would answer indignantly "Our students ARE NOT anti-semitic!"
The reasoning being: I am anti-racist, I love my students, and therefore....

When the history teacher pointed at the graffiti she would say "That's nothing. They just repeat what they hear, they don't mean it".

Or, in my words: my students are victims. How can they victimize others?

Anyway, this was a positive example of a teacher who had solved the problem of the history class, at least in his own classroom.

However, his experience can't be used by other teachers: his success is due to the unique combination of his personality and his being jewish.

Non-jewish teachers would not be in a position to speak about being jewish on a regular basis.
Moreover, the history curriculum is absolutely packed, with an exam at the end of the year, and the emphasis he gave to the jewish issue must have meant not mentioning at all some other aspects of the curriculum.
It was worth it of course, but his choice is an andividual one.

Ophelia · Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 3:07 pm Post subject:

The second teacher who wrote about teaching the Holocaust also had a good, personal approach to it.
One of the key elements was inviting an elderly Jewish lady who had been deported to a concentration camp to come and talk to the students.
This lady had an exceptional personality and could interact with the muslim students, and all idea of resentment or prejudice disappeared.
they talked to her, they listened and they were moved.

This again was a very interesting initiative, but just as the likelihood of a class of mainly Muslim students having a dedicated Jewish history teacher in France is extremely slim (the Jewish population is about 600,000), the number of people like this lady who would be available to visit a class is very small and dwindling-- the survivors of the Holocaust are in their eighties, and most of them emigrated to Israel or the US after the war-- our present Jewish population came from North Africa in the 1950's and 1960's, often from Algeria, like the grandfathers of our Muslim students.
(Do they know, and would they care if they knew?)

So, in most cases when the problem cannot be solved due to such initiatives, history teachers have stopped teaching the Holocaust when their Muslim students don't accept the lesson, knowing that they will get no support from their hierarchy who know about the problem but are happy to pretend it doesn't exist.

Ophelia · Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2008 8:14 am Post subject:

The third document I found was a collective text which the writers presented as a group study without saying who they were in a way that I found clear.
However, long practice has enabled me to recognize the sort of language used by Ministry of Education inspectors, and I understood this to be a rather informal locally-based study group, probably an Inspector and some history teachers.

It made a few interesting remarks in the description of the situation and concluded (surprise!) that there was no cause for alarm:

1- because the number of schools in the country which are concerned is extremely limited.

As a percentage of schools in the nation, this is true of course: there are only about 6 million Muslims in France, and the number of schools in which 30 or 40 % percent of classes are made up of Muslim students is necessarily very small.
However, in those schools it is far from being a small problem, as the refusal to study the Holocaust happens every year in more or less every class.

2- (and here the study group had something interesting to say) they thought the reaction was not simply anti-semitism, but a reaction to the fact that the history of the Jews was studied several times (well twice, and now with the new Sarkozy initiative, three times), whereas the history of the Arabs was not studied in our curriculum-- it is studied, but in Middle Ages history only.

So, they had identified what was the heart of the matter, and come to the wrong conclusion ("Nothing to worry about").

And the thing is that, yes, in our school system we should be able to explain that every pupil must study what is on the curriculum, regardless of whether he agrees with the current leaders of Israel or any other country. Except that we don't have a leg to stand on as regards our Arab students, since we don't teach the history of colonization or decolonization, much less the Algerian war itself or what has happened to the Harkis who had fought in the French Army.

Even supposing the government saw the errors of their ways and changed the curriculum (which they're not about to do, having refused to recognize the problem), we would still be in a bind, unless they put a lot of thought and effort into this. How do you teach young, angry immigrants about all the horrible things they had suspected all along, and those they don't know about, in the context of obvious racial discrimination in the work place?

And still, that's not all.
In Februry 2005, Jacques Chirac's government had one of their brainwaves a law was passed in parliament stipulating that we would now teach colonization in history classes, but ONLY the positive sides (or what they regarded to be positive).

Naturally, whoever had thought of this clever idea would not be the one who would stand in the classroom and have to do the actual teaching.

The national organization of French history teachers protested, signed petitions saying they would not do it -- in this they were supported by some of their Inspectors.

We are in a democracy. Parliament can decide what goes on the curriculum, but not which aspects get treated.
This is not Communist China, we're not in the business of teaching the "good" or "bad " side of any historical event.
For example, studying twentieth century Russia is not reduced to showing the horrible deeds perpetrated by Stalin and the Communist Party. You start with the living conditions of the peasants and the workers and how this led to the Revolution, then who gained and who lost by the Revolution, and you do this again with the fall of communism.

All this makes me very angry.
With the problem of attitude of the Muslim students about the Holocaust, we had a chance of acknowledging a new problem as it was emerging and try to deal with it.
Instead, we've been denying it , pushing everything under the rug once more, AND adding a potential new source of friction with the teaching-the-positive-aspects-of-colonization episode.
All this is not known to the general public at this stage. Even as an insider in Education, I have had a lot of trouble finding out about it.

Later on, when there are acts of violence that make it to the news, people will wonder, and ...you've got it, we'll be told it is due to economic deprivation.

Ophelia · Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2008 4:10 pm Post subject:

During the last few years, acts of violence committed by North African immigrants in which Jews were sometimes tortured and killed could no longer be denied by the authorities.

I found an article about schools in La Croix that followed another familiar pattern: once the Education Ministry admitted that there were racist insults and acts of violence against jews in our schools, it was because they were in the business of "proving" that those acts had diminished by 20 %.

Oh, and how come things that never existed have, once more, diminished by dint of statistics? How did they get last year's figures?

The journalist in La Croix (Catholic paper) does admit in the end that the good figures are probably partly due to the fact that:

a- Many Jewish families, though poor, have put their children in private schools to protect them from bullying.

b- Emmigration of Jewish families from France to Israel, which had almost stopped because of the violence there, has started again.

I'm trying to find out what the press wrote-- if Jewish cemetaries had been desecrated by skinheads it would be all over the newspapers, but this is one of the embarrassing topics.

So far, I've found an interesting article published in France by the Herald Tribune, so in English. I really recommend it.

Later: It seems that the article was actually first published in the New York Times under the title: Jews in France Feel Sting as Anti-Semitism Surges Among Children of Immigrants

By CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: March 26, 2006

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/23/news/paris.php

The journalist of the IHT is right when he mentions that the North Africans who emigrated to France were already prejudiced against the Jews before they left the Maghreb. One of the reasons was...the French and the Décret Crémieux, which was passed in 1870.

This is a Jew writing a visiting guide to Paris:

Ophelia · Posted: Tue Mar 04, 2008 7:58 pm Post subject:

French current issues, in English.

Ophelia · Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2008 4:33 am Post subject: Discrimination at work.

Discrimination at work is the main complaint the descendents of immigrants have about life in France.

I read a very interesting study on the net from the Observatoire des Discriminations, written by Professor Amadieu from Paris-I University, published in 2005.

First they used an interesting concept: if you do a study of discrimination on the basis of race your results are going to show just that, and I'm always much more interested in people who study what happens in a given field, and then make deductions.

Their conclusions are something which doesn't really surpise me: race is only one element in discrimination at work in France, and perhaps not even the most important one.
It all makes more sense if you consider that how employers choose to discriminate is not a vendetta against one particular group of people.

The people who were the basis of the study were 6 actors, who were given similar "qualifications" and were trained to answer in the same way in job interviews.

They were:

- a 33 year-old white man
- a fifty-year-old white man
- a black man from the Antilles
- a handicapped man in a wheelchair
- an obese man
- a woman of Arab origin.

The study group answered 258 similar job offers and wrote about 1400 letters and CVs.

From just the letters, they could confirm that your address matters: if you live in the suburbs that have a negative reputation, whatever your race, you're unlikely to get an answer.

Being a woman does not necessarily play against you, but the number of children is a pertinent factor: 1 or 2 children doesn't play against you, but 3 does.

From the letters and interviews, they confirmed that the two 33-year-old actors got the majority of the job offers-- this is no surpise as the profile of an ideal candidate, given that "qualifications" and "experience" were the same.

Once you were not the ideal candidate, every aggravating factor played against you, if you were Arab and from a suburb you had two handicaps.

The study showed that the candidate who was most sytematically rejected was not a coloured person but the fifty-year-old man who had no other handicap, and this by a wide margin.

Ophelia · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 11:37 am Post subject: Elections.

I've just returned from the polling station, we are voting for two tiers of local elections today (municipal and cantonal), and what I saw confirmed what I heard was happening in many areas of France: some of the lists were headed by candidates of Arab origin,which would have been unthinkable ten or twenty years ago.
So much for the pessimists and harbingers of doom!

After all, it's only been about 45 years since people arrived from the Maghreb, so things taking a little time is definitely not the same as things not improving.

The excellent book by Laurence and Vaisse I mentioned before, Integrating Islam, has reminded me of another such positive story:

The long saga about forbidding headscarves (as well as any other signs of religious belonging) in French schools , which had started in 1991, was about to come to a head in September 2004: this time, it was REALLY going to be forbidden. But a few weeks before school started, two French journalists were kidnapped by an Islamist group in Irak. The condition for their release was the withdrawal of the law about headscarves in French schools!
French Muslims were outraged at this meddling in our internal affairs, and the girls immediately decided to stop wearing the veil in protest.

The French delegation which went to Irak to discuss the release of the journalists included severy prominent members of the Muslim community, and (after several months) the reporters were freed.

Ophelia · Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2008 6:20 pm Post subject: Alain Finkielfraut

Among the various people on the national scene and who helps to create maximum confusion, I forgot to mentio Alain Finkielkraut.

He is a Jewish philosopher and writer, the son of a Polish man who was deported to Auschwitz and a disciple of Annah Ahrendt.

He also writes about current issues and takes part in radio talks.

He is a weird person. He is controversial -- and often quoted-- and provocative.

When I saw him at the C dans L'air programme on Channel 5, he was debating with three other intellectuals who are mild-mannered, reasonable people, and after a few minutes I could feel the tension he created and how he managed to antagonize everybody.

He is a university professor, and I felt sorry for his students.

While listening to him, I was so annoyed by the unpleasant-intellectual persona he seemed to cherish that I had no idea what he was saying, and he looked so much the part of the man who would increase tensions between Arabs and Jews that I thought he must be saying dreadful things.
And perhaps he was: the strange thing is, I still don't know.

Later I read a few quotes from him, and an essay by Renaud Camus who was developing one of his ideas, and I was surprised to find out that it was actually well-worth considering.
I'll need to think more about this, and again sift through things if I can, and see if there is something interesting beneath all the provacation.
He is an important player on the scene, and I can't dismiss him too soon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Finkielkraut


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