Menace In Europe Part 3

Upon arriving in Britain, Phiroze's parents saved every penny they earned to send him to elite British schools, where he was bullied and beaten, as Zia was. This experience appears to be universal among British immigrants, although as Orwell made clear, this has long been a tradition among native Britons, too. Phiroze recalled that the ring-leader among his tormentors, curiously, was another Asian. He now supposes that the boy "was beating up a part of himself-the Asian, black, nonwhite part."

Although his experience of Britain has been in some ways similar, Phiroze, unlike Zia, p.r.o.nounces himself satisfied with the progress immigrants have made. "It seems not too difficult for blacks and Asians in Britain to advance in law, medicine, politics," he said. "I'm quite satisfied with the way Asians have been penetrating senior echelons in the past forty years. It would be greedy to want more MPs, more judges, more bishops. I think it's going quite nicely; I have no complaints."

The first Parsi was elected to the British Parliament in 1892. By 1922, there were three seated Parsis. Even now, there are no more than 5,000 Parsis in Britain, so this achievement can only be considered remarkable-particularly considering that only two Muslims have ever been elected to Parliament, and both of them only in the past five years. "Admittedly," said Phiroze of his sanguinity, "I'm such a sheltered, middle-cla.s.s public-school boy."

To have middle-cla.s.s parents changes neither Britain's racism nor its unemployment rate, but it appears to change a child's att.i.tudes toward those obstacles to success, and to spare him from a schizophrenogenic internal conflict about upholding his ethnic and religious ident.i.ty. Phiroze's parents, unlike Zia's, were not conflicted about their son's a.s.similation. "My parents came over thinking, 'We want Phiroze to be a good little European. We won't teach him our language, we'll send him to public school, we'll give him a taste for European art, culture, and literature'-which is exactly what happened; look around." He gestured toward the sculptures on his wall. "'And then he will become a kind of middle-cla.s.s, Jaguar-driving fellow-a very posh-sounding, well-spoken guy.'

"My parents wanted me to have almost nothing to do with their culture. They didn't show any interest in taking me back home. It seems to me fundamentally foolish to go to a new country and refuse to have anything much to do culturally with the people who live there. It's going to be a recipe for neurosis and disaster and intergenerational conflict. It's a terrible thing. I'm really glad my parents didn't put me through that experience."

"My heart goes out to them, really," he said of children whose parents resisted their a.s.similation. "It must be very painful to exist like that. You see the parents saying, 'We don't want you to marry a white girl, we don't want you to go to McDonald's, we don't want you to hang out on the corner with those smoking, glue-sniffing white boys. You'll stay at home, you'll marry a nice girl from our community, and you'll maintain a bloodline and a tradition that means that we will somehow be here even when we are not here.' And their kids hate it and they resent them, and most of their kids rebel, and hang out on the corner and smoke cigarettes and have white girlfriends, and sometimes- this was in the press recently-sometimes the fathers will kill the daughters." Just seconds before, he had said that he had "no complaints" about the way immigrants were adapting to British life. I asked him: Surely this was cause for complaint? "Yes. But this isn't just about integration-it's about crazy, mad, murderous parents as well, which is a separate issue."

I wasn't convinced. I'm not sure he was either. But I think it was the first time he'd given the question much thought.

If you are an immigrant in Britain, it seems, the education level of your parents will determine your likelihood not only of professional success but of s.e.xual success as well. Phiroze has never had a relations.h.i.+p with an Asian woman. All of his romantic partners have been upper-middle-cla.s.s white women. This is also true of his Asian friends, who come from similar backgrounds. "All my middle-cla.s.s Asian friends have married white girls. But their parents already had degrees, were already doctors. . . . All my friends are Indians, Parsis, Baha'is. The three Baha'is I know are superb achievers. Parsis are the world's most highly educated community-on average they have three degrees each. Every Parsi I know in this country is highly educated."

But no degree is protection against prejudice. His own practice, Phiroze remarked, would have grown twice as quickly had he advertised under the name Jack Stevens. "I wanted to succeed as an Asian. I wanted to raise the esteem profile of my group. There are Asians in medical practice in Britain, but they tend to be seen as eccentric doctors who trained abroad, in places like Calcutta and Bangalore and Madras. Many of them still have very strong Indian accents and many of them are disrespected by their white colleagues." He himself has a public-school accent, just as his parents intended. "I wanted to succeed as someone of that genetic stock and skin coloring, while maintaining standards of excellence that would be the equal or better of any white man here.

"And no, I don't feel like a white man and I never shall."

WHY AMERICA SUCCEEDS WHERE BRITAIN FAILS.

Why is it that Banglades.h.i.+ and Pakistani immigrants to America tend to be less alienated, economically marginalized, and emotionally anguished than those in Britain, and why do they show less inclination to antisocial behavior, including Islamist violence?

American immigration policy certainly accounts for this to a degree. The United States gives immigrants with high levels of educational and professional achievements priority in the immigration queue. In the United States, immigrants from Bangladesh and Pakistan are on average far better educated than those in Britain, which deliberately encouraged unskilled laborers to emigrate. Nonetheless, many rural refugees and economic migrants from the Indian Subcontinent have come to America-uneducated, unskilled, and unprepared for modernity-and have succeeded nonetheless.

About 38 percent of Banglades.h.i.+ men are unemployed in Britain; fewer than 10 percent are unemployed in the United States. British unemployment rates are generally higher than American ones. This, too, accounts for some of the difference. But even when figures are adjusted to reflect general rates of unemployment, Pakistanis and Banglades.h.i.+s are much more likely to be jobless in Britain than America.

A key reason for the difference is Britain's cla.s.s structure, a stubborn relic of the feudal era. Few manage to escape from Britain's undercla.s.s: Young people of all races from lower-cla.s.s backgrounds are extremely unlikely to enter higher education. According to the 2003 Education and Child Poverty Report, educational success in Britain is more determined by social cla.s.s than in any other country in the developed world.18 Unlike America or other European countries, Britain never experienced an outright revolutionary a.s.sault on its feudal social hierarchy. America's founding fathers declared t.i.tles illegal. This did not, of course, eliminate inequality, but at least this declaration enshrined the ideal of cla.s.slessness. No social group in Britain has had its privileges forcibly removed. In Britain, you tend to stay where you are born-or in the case of immigrants, you stay as you arrived.

The United States, moreover, has always been a country of settlers. The idea that an immigrant may arrive penniless on Ellis Island and become, through his thrift and industry, a millionaire is a central and defining trope of American national mythology. Even when it is not true, it is widely believed to be true, which doubtless gives hope and comfort to immigrants who are in fact destined to pack supermarket shelves at minimum wage for the rest of their days. (The propagation of this myth, it is interesting to note, owes much to a particular set of immigrants-American Jews in Hollywood-for whom it has been particularly true. 19) Immigration in Britain is a more recent phenomenon. Although foreigners have come for centuries from its Celtic periphery and from Europe, only recently has Britain experienced ma.s.s immigration from vastly different cultures.17 A much longer historic tradition of relying on immigrant labor makes American employers less likely than their British counterparts to discriminate against immigrants. Moreover, the American legal system punishes discrimination more vigorously than the British one. British laws prohibiting job discrimination were put in place in 1976, some twelve years after the U.S. Civil Rights Act and more than a century after Reconstruction. These laws have resulted in only a few convictions, and compensation to victims has been extremely modest. In the United States, plaintiffs in race-discrimination cases regularly receive handsome legal redress. Britain has no official affirmative action policy. Furthermore, the cost of hiring and firing is higher in Britain than in the United States: British law, for example, requires employers to compensate employees made redundant after two years of service. Such labor market rigidities heighten employers' unwillingness to take a chance on employees they view as unreliable, reinforcing any tendency to discrimination. 20 But most important is something less easy to quantify: Immigrants to America have always wanted to become American.

Not long ago, I discussed the difference between immigrants to the New and Old Worlds in an exchange of letters with the Brazilian poet Nelson Ascher. His response perfectly captures my sense of this: Can it perhaps be that American a.s.similationist traditions and American s.e.xual practices are two sides of the same coin on which E Pluribus Unum is written? Choosing America usually implied accepting Rilke's dictum "You must change your life,"

didn't it? It used to be a decision to become someone else, even to change names: a break with the old countries. It seems most Muslims who went to Europe didn't really want to become something else, nor did the Europeans want them to become Europeans: That wasn't written on their mutual social contract. If America is the land of second and third opportunities, where people can reinvent themselves professionally and in other ways many times over throughout their lives, intermarriage and divorce are so many other possibilities in this process. You move to another state, change professions, remarry, convert to another faith, leave the Democrats and start voting Republican, trade the New York Times, say, for the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, make or lose money. That's not how things happen in Europe, is it? My dad was born Ferenc Ascher, but for almost 50 years now he has been Francisco. People came to Brazil in order to forget, to erase the past, to get out of history (we have geography, no history). Thus, possibly, many Muslims who opt for the U.S. do it because they are tired of being Muslims and want to keep in the long run, at best, only some culinary habits. Not so in Europe. Half a century ago the Europeans might have convinced their recently arrived Muslims to do the same, but that simply wasn't the European way, not since the times when the newly arrived barbarians converted to Christianity in order to become Europeans. Western Europe didn't really want to incorporate the 1 percent of Jews who dressed in the same way as they did, spoke their languages, looked like them and were proud to be Britons, Frenchmen, Germans. How can it cope with 10 percent of Muslims who do not even want to a.s.similate anymore? Sometimes I think that maybe contemporary Europe has a problem on its hands.

It is tempting to imagine Zadie's relentlessly funny London, a pluralistic society of Indians, Pakistanis, and Afro-Caribbeans, as a.n.a.logous to New York at the turn of the century, with its immigrant culture of Jews, Irish, and Italians. But the a.n.a.logy is not correct. In the United States, men are encouraged to believe that money and power might come to them at any point in their lives. Not so in Britain, where the idea of upward economic mobility, the ideal of the self-made man, has been subordinated to ancestral hierarchies and the leveling principle of social justice. No wonder certain immigrants- poor, frustrated, socially and s.e.xually alienated, seeing little hope that this will change-are angry. This may not be the source of Islamic radicalism, as Zia imagines, but it's definitely not the cure for it either.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR US?.

Within days of the September 11 attacks, British prime minister Tony Blair pledged to stand "shoulder to shoulder" with the United States. He has done so. Britain has committed far more troops and resources to Afghanistan and Iraq than any other allied power. At every turn, Blair defends the United States both literally and rhetorically.

According to a 2004 Harris poll, Americans view Britain as our closest ally. The admirably defiant British response to the London Underground bombings suggested to many that this affection was not misplaced. "If these murderous b.a.s.t.a.r.ds go on for a thousand years," wrote the Mirror tabloid, "the people of our islands will never be cowed." 21 The London News Review addressed the terrorists directly: "What the f.u.c.k do you think you're doing?" they asked. "This is London. . . . Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work. . . . So you can pack up your bombs, put them in your a.r.s.eholes, and get the f.u.c.k out of our city." 22 It is tempting, after displays of resolve like this, to believe Britain to be immune to the enmity borne toward America by the rest of Europe. Tempting, but wrong. Two influential segments of the British population, its intellectuals and its Muslim immigrants, loathe the United States with a vitriol that must be appreciated when a.s.sessing the solidity of the Anglo-American alliance and its future. This problem is only likely to grow. Indeed, it is perfectly conceivable that Britain could, like France, become a quasi-hostile power within one election.

This is what al Qaeda hopes. It is what they were striving to achieve by setting off bombs in London. The authors of Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers-an Islamist strategy doc.u.ment published on the Internet prior to the bombing in 2004 of Madrid's Atocha train station-theorized that a well-timed terrorist attack could precipitate a British withdrawal from the Gulf. Tony Blair and his supporters strenuously denied that Britain's presence in Iraq precipitated the terrorist attacks, noting that al Qaeda emerged long before the Iraq War. Indeed, it is quite possible that the bombings would have occurred even had Britain refused to send troops: On September 27, 2005, French counterterrorism police arrested nine Islamic militants planning a similar attack on the Paris subway system, and France, of course, opposed the war in Iraq.

Nonetheless, it's absurd to think that al Qaeda does not number among its aims British withdrawal from the Gulf, just as it numbers among its aims the restoration of the caliphate, the global imposition of Islamic law, the veiling of women, the destruction of Judaism and Hinduism, and the beheading of blasphemers, among other ambitious objectives. With Britain standing in the way of all these aims, the attack on London was what historians would call an overdetermined event. It is puzzling that Blair feels the need to deny this. It is equally puzzling that critics of the war see in this obvious connection an argument in favor of British withdrawal from Iraq, rather than against it. They haven't asked me, but if they did, I would give them this advice: When in doubt about the proper orientation of your moral compa.s.s, point it away from the people who want to behead you. If al Qaeda is disturbed by the presence of British troops in Iraq, this is a sign that the troops are where they should be.

Al Qaeda's strategy for changing Britain's regime and precipitating its flight from the Gulf remains viable, as has already been established in Spain. A few more bombings in London, particularly if they involve chemical, radioactive, or biological weapons, might do the trick. While the United States could weather the loss of Spain from the coalition, the loss of Britain would be a political and military disaster. British troops const.i.tute more than half of the non-American multinational force there and are by many accounts (and for obvious historic reasons) more gifted military administrators than we are.

While it is consoling to think that the British would never appease terrorists, this has not, historically, been the case. The IRA is thriving. Its bombers have been amnestied. Its political wing, Sinn Fein, has been integrated into mainstream politics. There is a great tradition of courage and defiance in British history, but there is also a significant tradition of appeas.e.m.e.nt-indeed, the British invented the term-and the recent swelling of British anti-Americanism is not an encouraging sign.

THE ANTI-AMERICANISM OF BRITISH INTELLECTUALS.

Britain's intellectual elites, in particular, are gripped by an anti-Americanism unremitting in its petty prejudice, sheer ravening ignorance, awesome self-contentment, and utter lack of critical acuity. In 2002, for example, the British playwright Harold Pinter, having survived an operation for cancer, remarked, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare-the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence: The most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world. . . . The US administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary.23 Pinter recently won the n.o.bel Prize for literature despite having written nothing worth reading since 1959. The subtle Swedish sense of humor, I am told, is quite difficult for outsiders to grasp, and this would seem to be a case in point.

In a 2003 opinion piece in the Telegraph subtly headlined "I Loathe America," the novelist Margaret Drabble offered these sentiments: My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fas.h.i.+onable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world. . . . There, I have said it. I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect, but I can't keep it down any longer. I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn't even win. 24 The reelection of George Bush erased any remaining restraint among British journalists. Americans, wrote Brian Reade of the Mirror, are "self-righteous, gun-totin', military lovin', sister marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-pa.s.sport ownin' red-necks, who believe G.o.d gave America the biggest d.i.c.k in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land 'free and strong.'"25 Please pause to admire the man's exquisite command of the cliche.

The Guardian features a column in which readers write to ask questions about curious everyday phenomena. Why, for example, does water drain counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere? When a reader wrote to ask, "Is there a reliable way of telling the difference between Americans and Canadians? I don't want to take an instant dislike to the wrong person," the comment pa.s.sed without remark. It is a useful thought exercise to imagine any of these words written about blacks, Jews, or in fact any other nationality or ethnic group: it would be unthinkable. Had the editors of the Guardian published the same question about Indians and Pakistanis, they would have been the targets of fatwas and firebombs.

Salman Rushdie, a man well acquainted with fatwas and firebombs since the publication of The Satanic Verses, reproachfully reported the new climate in London: "Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. ('Americans only care about their own dead.') American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues."26 Before spending years cowering in a cupboard following the death sentence p.r.o.nounced upon him by the Ayatollahs, Rushdie himself was rather a l.u.s.ty critic of the United States. As Dr. Johnson remarked, however, the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Less than a month after the bombing in London, British MP George Galloway toured the Arab world. "Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners-Jerusalem and Baghdad," he told audiences there. "The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it. . . . It's not the Muslims who are the terrorists. The biggest terrorists are Bush, and Blair, and Berlusconi, and Aznar, but it is definitely not a clash of civilizations. George Bush doesn't have any civilization, he doesn't represent any civilization. We believe in the Prophets, peace be upon them. He believes in the profits, and how to get a piece of them."27 Stirring words, those, although rather hard to reconcile with the conclusions of the final Volcker Report on the oil-for-food scandal. The committee's investigators were persuaded that Galloway received some 18 million barrels of oil allocations and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash payments from the former Iraqi regime.28 Given Galloway's notorious litigiousness (peace be upon you, George!), I should mention that he denies these charges and that I have not seen the evidence against him with my own eyes. That said, were I an Arab parent, I would not let that man anywhere near my daughters.

Opinions such as Pinter's and Galloway's inevitably filter into the mainstream. A February 2003 poll commissioned by Britain's Channel 4 discovered that Britons viewed the United States, not Iraq or North Korea, as the nation that posed the greatest threat to world peace. The British teachers' union has pa.s.sed referendums condemning America, so we may a.s.sume anti-Americanism is taught in British schools. Americans in Britain have reported vulgar hara.s.sment on buses, in the streets. The expression of unqualified hatred for America has become socially acceptable.

This anti-Americanism is not a new phenomenon. Like anti-Americanism throughout Europe, it antedates the invasion of Iraq and the presumptively clumsy diplomacy of the Bush administration. The sentiment has historically come in waves. Edward Wakefield, in the 1830s, described Americans as [a] people who, though they continually increase in number, make no progress in the art of living; who, in respect to wealth, knowledge, skill, taste and whatever belongs to civilization, have degenerated from their ancestors . . . who delight in a forced equality, not equality before the law only, but equality against nature and truth; an equality which, to keep the balance always even, rewards the mean rather than the great, and gives more honour to the vile than the n.o.ble. . . . We mean, in two words, a people who become rotten before they are ripe.29 More recently, there were ma.s.sive protests against Ronald Reagan's deployment of Pers.h.i.+ng II missiles in Europe, and before that, against the Vietnam War. Even after the Second World War, hostile sentiment toward Americans was widespread.

But this recent outbreak has a new demographic element. Traditionally, Britain's anti-American elites have been vocal, but they have generally been marginalized as chattering donkeys: They have never been able to exert sufficient influence to unravel the Anglo-American alliance. There are now, however, some 1.6 million Muslim immigrants in Britain, and more wors.h.i.+ppers at Britain's mosques each week than at the Church of England. These immigrants form a highly visible and powerful anti-American vanguard and voting bloc, and their sentiments are particularly hostile toward America.

Anti-Americanism is a key and inextricable tenet of political Islamism, as is anti-Semitism-just as anti-Semitism was crucial, not incidental, to n.a.z.i ideology. The problem of Islamic radicalism in Britain and the anti-Americanism to which it gives rise will not be solved anytime soon: its historical roots are far too deep. Through the unlikely alliance of the Muslim Right and the British Left, anti-Americanism has escaped its circ.u.mscribed a.s.sociation with privileged, self-enamored sophisticates, permeated Britain's undercla.s.s, and become inextricably conflated with a raw strain of racial and religious resentment.

This is a particularly unfortunate development. It would be naive to a.s.sume it can have no consequences for the Anglo-American relations.h.i.+p.

CHAPTER 4.

THE HOPE OF Ma.r.s.eILLE.

ICI VERS L'AN 600 AVANT JC DES MARINS GRECS ONT ABORDE,

VENANT DE PHOCEE, CITE GRECQUE D'ASIE MINEURE. ILS FON-

DERONT Ma.r.s.eILLE, D'OU RAYONNA EN OCCIDENT LA CIVILISATION18

-INSCRIPTION AT Ma.r.s.eILLE'S VIEUX PORT.

COMPARED WITH THOSE OF OTHER European countries, French policy has in one way been a success. It has been a full ten years since the last wave of Islamic terrorism on French soil, a circ.u.mstance in large measure owed to the sheer ruthlessness of French ant.i.terrorism prosecutors and investigators, who are Europe's most draconian. Terrorist suspects detained in France disappear for years without trial; they are interrogated under circ.u.mstances that make Guantanamo seem like Disney World, and when they are put away, they are put away for good. So far, these policies have worked.

But in other respects, France has no more successfully a.s.similated its immigrants than Britain or the Netherlands. When the suburbs of Paris went up in flames in November 2005, no one who knew those neighborhoods was surprised. The proximate cause of the riots was the electrocution of two teenagers of North African extraction who had clambered into a power substation to hide from the police. But these areas-populated chiefly by North African immigrants and their descendents-had long been on the verge of complete anarchy; it did not take much to push them over the edge. Even before the riots broke out, an average Sat.u.r.day night's entertainment in the suburbs of Paris involved immolating 100-odd cars and an unveiled woman or two for good measure. No one in his right mind would enter those neighborhoods if he didn't have to, at least not without an armored tank. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a great many clucking French editorialists p.r.o.nounced themselves scandalized by the state of American race relations. To those of us familiar with the state of French suburbs, their animadversions really did seem a bit rich.

Although recently the riots have been dominating global headlines, France's failure to a.s.similate its immigrants has given rise to a related crisis of equally serious dimensions. In late 2000, the commencement of the second Palestinian Intifada ignited the most extensive outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in France since the Holocaust. It continues to this day. The crimes have been perpetrated almost entirely by the beurs-Arab immigrants. The political alliances forged between Jewish and Arab leaders during the rise of the right-wing National Front have broken down. Both the most recent riots and these events suggest that the French have coped no more successfully with large-scale Muslim immigration than the British or the Dutch.

France's model of immigration, the so-called republican model, rests upon the demand that immigrants become culturally, intellectually, and politically a.s.similated. Like a.s.similation by the Borg, this process is complete: immigrants are asked to abandon their native cultures and adopt a distinct set of mental habits, values, and shared historic memories. Taken as a whole, these habits, values, and memories-not shared religion, race, or blood-are held to be the essence of France, the glue that binds French citizens together.1 The core values of France, inherited from the French Revolution, are based on the idea of individual rights. For official France, it is the citizen who is recognized, never the ethnic group to which he belongs. When the French Revolution emanc.i.p.ated Protestants and Jews, it emanc.i.p.ated them as individual citizens, not as groups defined by their religious members.h.i.+p. Related to the republican model is the doctrine of laicite, a strict form of secularism that derives historically from the bitter rejection of France's authoritarian Catholicism. By this doctrine, all reference to religion must be excluded from the public sphere. In theory, laicite guarantees equality before the law for all French citizens, and militates against anti-Semitism.

In theory, I stress.

The republican model of immigration has until recently allowed France to a.s.similate, successfully and completely, wave upon wave of Celtic, Germanic, Latin, and Slavic immigrants. The process is characterized by the state's refusal legally to recognize cultural and ethnic minorities, the official denial of the very idea of cultural ident.i.ty. Similar principles were applied as well in the former French colonies, often to peculiar effect: I have spoken to Cameroonians who recall opening their first history text as children and reading with bewilderment the book's opening lines: Nos ancetres, les gallois . . .

Integration in France implies a contract between the immigrant and the nation. The immigrant agrees to respect the universalist values of the republic, and the republic in turn guarantees his children full integration and social standing. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, is an excellent case in point: In one generation, Sarkozy-who is of Jewish extraction-has come to dominate French political life. He has done so by being more French, more committed to republican values, even sounding more French than any of his adversaries. He has held multiple cabinet positions and been head of his party, the conservative UMP (Union for a Popular Movement). He was the leading candidate for the presidency in 2007 until recently, when he called the suburban rioters "sc.u.m" and proposed cleaning out their neighborhoods with a Karcher-an industrial-strength waterhose. (It is possible, apparently, for a politician to sound a bit too French.) The American and Anglo-Saxon models of immigration rest on significantly different principles and traditions. Britain and the United States emerged as federations of smaller states, and in both societies there is a looser and more pragmatic relations.h.i.+p between citizens and the center, a greater devolution of authority to local governance. In consequence, Britain does not merely tolerate immigrants speaking their own languages and wors.h.i.+pping their own G.o.ds, it encourages them. London's Muslim Welfare House, for example, subsidized by a grant from the British government, offers Koranic study and lessons in Arabic. The United States enforces multiculturalism with affirmative action programs backed by the full weight of the law. At every level of society, Americans are exhorted to celebrate diversity.

The French government vigorously rejects this kind of cultural separatism, which it terms "communitarianism." The word connotes the intrusion of unseemly religious or ethnic particularism into the public sphere, a refusal to be a.s.similated. The French hold-correctly-that Britain's extreme communitarianism contributes to a climate in which British Muslims do not consider themselves Muslim Britons. The debate over the veil is emblematic. The French government has banned students from wearing the veil in the cla.s.sroom. In Britain, the issue is viewed as a matter for schools to resolve individually and independently of the government. In the United States, the Justice Department has intervened to protect the right of students to wear the veil.

When Arab immigrants in France insist on sending their daughters to school in a veil-or when they torch synagogues, for that matter- the French government views these unwelcome events through this ideological prism. The malefactors, they sense uneasily, are not taking a s.h.i.+ne to republicanism.

Ma.r.s.eILLE: THE EXCEPTIONAL CITY.

Ma.r.s.eille, France's second-largest and oldest city, was initially not exempt from the wave of anti-Semitic violence. In September 2001, the Gan Pardes School in Ma.r.s.eille was set alight. The words "Death to the Jews" and "Bin Laden will conquer" were spray-painted on the walls. Over the next year, Jewish cemeteries were defaced and swastikas painted on Jewish homes. During demonstrations in support of the Palestinians, marchers shouted, "All Arabs are Palestinians. We are all suicide bombers."

On March 31, 2002, a series of coordinated anti-Semitic attacks throughout France drew comparisons to Kristallnacht: Masked a.s.sailants smashed cars into a Lyon synagogue and set it on fire; a shotgun was fired into a kosher butcher shop in Toulouse; arsonists attempted to burn down a synagogue in Strasbourg. A Jewish couple was a.s.saulted in a small village of the Rhone. In Ma.r.s.eille, the Or Aviv Synagogue in the quiet northern neighborhood of Les Caillols was reduced to ashes by arsonists and the Torah scrolls charred.

To the bewilderment of French Jews, the Palestinian Intifada has attenuated, but the so-called French Intifada has not-except in one city. The violence in Paris, Lyon, Strasbourg, and other major French cities has continued, and in some places worsened. In these cities, anti-Semitism appears to be uncontainable. But in Ma.r.s.eille, the animus has fizzled out. The city reacted with revulsion to the burning of the Or Aviv Synagogue. Citywide protests against anti-Semitism were immediately organized; Arabs partic.i.p.ated in the demonstrations. The leaders of Ma.r.s.eille's Islamic community firmly condemned the attack. By contrast, after similar violence in Toulouse, Muslim community leaders offered not one single gesture of solidarity.19 Ma.r.s.eille is not now free of anti-Semitism, by any means; this, after all, is the political base of the National Front, whose campaigns are driven by a furious anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiment. But by comparison with the rest of France, Ma.r.s.eille has been calm. Until recently, there have been no burned cars and urban riots, as in Strasbourg, Paris, and Lyon. Even in the latest, ma.s.sive outbreak of rioting, which quickly spread to every major city in France, Ma.r.s.eille was scarcely disturbed-a gang of kids tried to break into a supermarket; the police stopped them, and that was that.

In the rest of France, the violence against Jews appears to be organized. Some Jewish leaders believe it to be centrally planned and directed, perhaps by al Qaeda cells; they note that as on March 31, 2002, similar attacks often occur in separate cities on the same day, and find improbable the claim that this is mere coincidence. In Ma.r.s.eille, however, what violence there is seems to be spontaneous, disorganized, and largely committed by disaffected, economically disadvantaged juveniles who spend too much time watching al-Jazeera via satellite dish.

Ma.r.s.eille is a city of immigrants. Fully a quarter of Ma.r.s.eille's population is of North African origin, and demographers predict that Ma.r.s.eille will be the first city on the European continent with an Islamic majority. Its Jewish community is the third-largest in Europe. The most ethnically diverse city in France, then, has paradoxically been the most successful in containing this outbreak of ethnic violence.

When I went to Ma.r.s.eille to investigate this curious anomaly, my operating a.s.sumption was that Ma.r.s.eille's calm must be attributable to particularly vigorous police work. But I spoke to cabdrivers and waiters, to the police chief and his deputy, to street cops and officials at City Hall, to regional historians and archivists, to right-wing and left-wing community leaders. Everyone insisted that the efficacy of the police was only one part of the story, and everyone also agreed that Ma.r.s.eille's calm was no accident. There is something unique about the city that protects it from extreme cyclones of ethnic unrest.

Few social phenomena have monocausal explanations, and of course there is more than one reason for Ma.r.s.eille's comparative tranquillity. But one aspect of the answer is a surprising one: It is Ma.r.s.eille's approach to ethnic community politics, an approach that is unlike that of any other city in France.

Ma.r.s.eille's approach, in fact, challenges the core principles of the French republican ideal and the historic concept of what it means to be French. Ma.r.s.eille's success, in turn, suggests that if the exaggerated tolerance of Britain and the Netherlands has permitted Islamic radicalism to flourish, so too has its inverse.

"IN Ma.r.s.eILLE WE GET ALONG"

I arrived in Ma.r.s.eille on a sweltering summer afternoon. From the train station I could see Ma.r.s.eille's roseate castle glowing against the sunbaked Provencal hills. It was siesta time, and too hot to move quickly. I walked slowly down the hill to the Canebiere, the tree-lined street that leads to the old port. The cafes were filled with dark-skinned men, their faces lined from the sun; they were recent immigrants, to judge from the sartorial clues. They wore clothes few native Europeans would wear-b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rts with short sleeves, dress slacks pressed with unfas.h.i.+onable care. Some had missing teeth and some had gold teeth; many had mustaches. They were sitting quietly with their hands folded, marking time, or filling in racing forms while drinking their coffee and chatting in Arabic. There were few women in the cafes, although there were many on the streets, dark-skinned and sloe-eyed. Some were veiled, but most were wearing skimpy tank tops and low-rise jeans. They were, after all, in France, and it was the revealing dress of the women, above all, that made Ma.r.s.eille feel more like a European city than an Oriental one.

I found a hotel on the Canebiere, run by a family of Maghrebis, then took a taxi to the industrial northern neighborhood where I was to meet Zvi Ammar, the president of the Jewish Consistory of Ma.r.s.eille. "It's true that in Ma.r.s.eille we get along," my cabdriver told me. "I'm a Jew, my neighbors, they're Arabs, we understand each other fine. . . . It's not like the rest of France; we're cosmopolitan here, everyone understands everyone else." But when I asked him why, he couldn't tell me. "I'm not very political. I don't know. It's just the way it is. We have the suns.h.i.+ne here, the port." The suns.h.i.+ne and the port: Everyone mentioned that. But if suns.h.i.+ne and ports were a recipe for peace, Lebanon would be a paradise.

Zvi Ammar was born and raised on the island of Djerba, Tunisia, but betrayed the influence of the French educational system the moment he opened his mouth. The clue was his love of the schema. He approached the problem of anti-Semitism in France by breaking it into subsets; he labeled and defined those subsets, then presented his conclusions in a well-rehea.r.s.ed lecture. "For four years," he told me, "the Jewish community of France has suffered from acts of an anti-Semitic character. These acts have two forms: There are acts against the dead, and there are acts against the living. Acts against the dead are committed by the extreme right. Neo-n.a.z.is attack cemeteries and blaspheme tombs, defacing them with swastikas, Celtic crosses, and references to Hitler. The forensic signature of a neo-n.a.z.i attack is the artwork. Their swastikas are carefully drawn and perfectly even."

We were interrupted by his mobile phone. Ammar is fluent in French, Hebrew, and Arabic, and during our conversation took calls in all three languages. After hurling rapid-fire Arabic down the phone for a few minutes, he hung up and returned to his exposition. "The attacks against the living are committed by Maghrebis-mostly youths. They now commit about ninety percent of the anti-Semitic crimes in France. When Maghrebis draw swastikas, they are careless. Their artwork is sloppy and childish."

The French intellectual system, I thought while listening to him, has a striking power to take over the souls of men and women whose native culture encourages forms of reflection as far from the French model as it is possible to get. When a man becomes French, when he is educated in the French manner, he begins to think like a Frenchman. The problem has three parts, the solution has four. State, expand, schematize, a.n.a.lyze, conclude. It has been so since Descartes.

It is interesting to imagine-but hard to demonstrate-the effect this system of thought must have on French political culture. It is clearly very useful for paper shuffling and the kind of a.n.a.lytic work done by the police. The same system, however, must make it very hard for anyone in a position of power or authority to think informally, or react spontaneously. This, perhaps, is one reason the French authorities are such sticklers for protocol. They need rules to tell them what to do. Without them they would be lost.

Ammar agreed that Ma.r.s.eille had been spared the worst of the four-year-long French Intifada. "We've been a bit luckier here," he said. One reason for this is that Ma.r.s.eille has benefited from vigorous police work. This is not unique to Ma.r.s.eille, but has been particularly effective in Ma.r.s.eille. The French government is so highly centralized that all law-enforcement initiatives are coordinated at the national level, not the city level. The government of President Jacques Chirac, under Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, took aggressive measures to combat anti-Semitism. Following the attack on Ma.r.s.eille's Or Aviv Synagogue, the government deployed riot troops to every place in Ma.r.s.eille where Jews congregated. Outside Ma.r.s.eille's synagogues, a heavy and visible police presence remains to this day. The police have worked in close coordination with the domestic intelligence services, which have ramped up their surveillance of mosques and Islamic radical cells. The government has set up a toll-free number for Ma.r.s.eille's Jews to call; they have asked Jews to use it to report even the smallest aggression, such as casual insults on the street, so that officials may better spot trends and deploy resources to emerging hot spots. The police have been instructed to treat complaints of hara.s.sment with the utmost seriousness.

Foreign intellectuals and journalists have been quick to charge French officials with pusillanimity in responding to domestic anti-Semitism, arguing that the government has chosen to appease France's large, left-leaning Muslim population rather than protect its numerically smaller Jewish const.i.tuency. The Jewish leaders with whom I spoke in Ma.r.s.eille dismissed this suggestion. They considered Chirac's response to domestic anti-Semitism appropriate and forceful.

While France's socialists and leftists, I was told, had been "in denial" about the problem, the current administration was not. All agreed that Lionel Jospin's Socialist government, which lost power to the conservative UMP party in 2002, had responded tepidly to the mounting crisis. They had been ideologically blinkered, Ammar reasoned. "They didn't believe we could speak of racism that came from the Maghreb community, which was itself victimized by racism. For the Left, this was an earthquake." The Left held France's Jews and Arabs to be natural cla.s.s and ideological allies. Until recently, this was not as absurd as it sounds: In response to the rise of the National Front in the 1980s, Jews and Arabs united to form the pressure group SOS Racisme. Although allegedly apolitical, its leaders were close to important politicians of the Socialist Party. "No one else in France," Ammar said, "had helped the Muslim community more than us, the Jews, through organizations like SOS Racisme-all the founding members of that organization were Jews. We were highly sensitive to their suffering."

The national, coordinated violence on the day of the torching of Ma.r.s.eille's Or Aviv Synagogue was a turning point, proof that the violence was not, as the Socialists believed, a transient problem or an expression of trivial juvenile delinquency. After this, the Chirac government moved swiftly and aggressively. Pierre Lellouche, a member of the National a.s.sembly and senior figure in Chirac's UMP, sponsored the Lellouche Law, which came into effect in February 2003. The law called for the doubling of punishments for crimes committed with a racist or anti-Semitic motive, and was approved with rare unanimity in both the National a.s.sembly and the Senate. French police delegations were sent to New York to study Mayor Rudy Giuliani's zero-tolerance policy. Sarkozy, then the interior minister, briefed police officials on the Lellouche Law. Referring to its double-punishment proviso, he announced that France would now adopt a double zero-tolerance policy toward anti-Semitic crime, a forceful if mathematically meaningless declaration. He formed a new police unit to investigate these incidents. Demonstrators were banned from displaying swastikas or other anti-Semitic symbols.

I was surprised that not one person in Ma.r.s.eille complained to me that Paris or the police were indifferent to attacks on Jews or that official policy was tainted by any kind of anti-Semitism, subtle or unsubtle. "France is not an anti-Semitic country," Ammar insisted. "An anti-Semitic country has anti-Semitic policies, like Vichy, with its anti-Semitic laws. Here it is the contrary. The contrary. We must speak the truth. You cannot say that because there are anti-Semitic acts, France is an anti-Semitic country." Ammar did note, however, that the judiciary had been slow to implement the Lellouche Law and to incarcerate offenders. This, he believed, was because the judiciary, reflecting the views of the French public at large, was not yet prepared to accept the gravity of France's problem. Others to whom I spoke in Ma.r.s.eille had a different perspective on the judiciary's apparent faineance: Officials within the police force and at City Hall held that the likely explanation was not indifference to the seriousness of the crimes; rather, most of the offenders have been juveniles, and the French legal system, in a long-standing tradition, is particularly protective of minors.

Ammar lunches regularly with members of Chirac's inner circle. Official France, Ammar believed, was shaken to the core by the rise in anti-Semitism. "We, the Jews, we're used as a kind of barometer. We may only be one percent of the population, but they know that if they are allowed to attack us, tomorrow they will go much, much further. A politician told me last week, 'You, the Jews, you're French here in France, it's your country, but if there's trouble tomorrow, you have Israel. Us? Where will we go? Nowhere. We don't know where to go.'" Even ministers widely seen as sympathetic to Arab grievances were profoundly alarmed by the anti-Semitic violence. Ammar told me of meeting Dominique de Villepin, who at the time was minister of the interior and was "responsible for security, boss of the French police," as Ammar put it. Villepin, he said, had remarked, "Monsieur Ammar, le pire n'est pas derriere nous. Il est devant nous." The worst is not behind us. It is ahead of us.

The government was doing all it could, Ammar believed. But the problem, he thought, was insoluble. The minds of Arab youths in France had been bathed in ravening hatred by broadcasts from the Middle East, from al-Jazeera and from al-Manar, the Hezbollah propaganda TV station. Ammar understands these Arabic broadcasts only too well. "The images, the music, the speeches-they are all designed to incite to the maximum, to make you want to go out in the street and find Jews to kill." In almost every Arab home, there is a satellite dish. "Sincerely, I am telling you: There are no solutions. I don't see how you can put a policeman behind every Jew: It's not possible."

Two months after our conversation, the French government banned al-Manar. "No one," said a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, "should doubt France's determination to combat all aspects of racism and anti-Semitism." Shortly thereafter, it granted al-Manar a reprieve, subject to its willingness to ascribe to France's code of media conduct. The tidal influx of anti-Semitic propaganda from other Arabic-language stations and from the Internet remains unstanched, and short of entirely abrogating freedom of speech in France, not much can be done about it.20 Ammar is right. It is not possible to put a policeman behind every Jew. Yet, as he agreed, France's new law-enforcement initiatives had been more successful in Ma.r.s.eille than the rest of France. So clearly, there are solutions. But why should police tactics that have failed in other French cities be more effective in Ma.r.s.eille?

Seeking an answer, I took this question to those I thought might know-Ma.r.s.eille's police.