With the press rehashing everything they can think of about 9/11, allow me to once again recount something that has very much not become part of The Narrative because it is close to unthinkable. Here's an article I wrote for UPI on the evening of 9/11:
Bush had called for laxer airport security
by Steve Sailer
UPI, September 11, 2001
LOS ANGELES, Sep. 11 -- Ironically, in an attempt to appeal to the growing number of Arab-American and Muslim voters, exactly eleven months ago George W. Bush called for weakening airport security procedures aimed at deterring hijackers.
On Oct. 11, 2000, during the second presidential debate, the Republican candidate attacked two anti-terrorist policies that had long irritated Arab citizens of the U.S.
At present [i.e., the evening of 9/11], of course, there is no definite evidence that Arabs or Muslims were involved in today's terrorist assaults. Many incorrectly assumed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that Middle Easterners were involved. Nor is there direct evidence that Bush's attack on airline safety procedures made the four simultaneous hijackings easier to pull off.
Bush said during the nationally televised debate, "Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what's called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that." Then-Governor Bush went on, "My friend, Sen. Spence Abraham [the Arab-American Republic Senator from Michigan], is pushing a law to make sure that, you know, Arab-Americans are treated with respect. So racial profiling isn't just an issue at the local police forces. It's an issue throughout our society. And as we become a diverse society, we're going to have to deal with it more and more."
Bush's plug for Senator Abraham was intended to help Abraham in close re-election battle, which he ultimately lost. (Abraham is now the Bush Administration's Secretary of Energy.) More important personally to Bush was the swing state of Michigan's 18 electoral votes, which Al Gore eventually won narrowly. Arab-Americans, centered in Dearborn and Flint, make up about four percent of the population of Michigan, the most of any state.
In the debate, Bush conflated two separate policies that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans felt discriminate against them: the heightened suspicions faced by Middle Eastern-looking travelers at airport security checkpoints and the government's use of "secret evidence" in immigration hearings of suspected terrorists. Yet, despite Bush's confusion, Arab-Americans appreciated his gesture. Four days after the debate, the Arab-American Political Action Committee endorsed Bush.
The day after Bush's remarks, 17 American sailors died in a terrorist attack in the Arab nation of Yemen. The bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, however, did not stop Vice President Al Gore from echoing Bush's calls to end these two anti-terrorist techniques in a meeting with Arab-American leaders on October 14, 2000.
According to a spokesperson for a leading Arab-American organization, people of Arab descent are stopped and searched at airports more often than many other ethnic groups. Some refer to this as Flying While Arab or Flying While Muslim. These terms are intended as plays on the popular phrase "Driving While Black," which is widely used to criticize police departments for stopping more black than white motorists.
This year, both Bush and his Attorney General John Ashcroft have called for an end to racial profiling.
The Federal Aviation Administration provides airline and airport personnel with the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening system to help them identify suspicious travelers. It relies on a secret profile of the characteristics of typical hijackers and terrorists.
Bush's Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said that "the security procedures are not based on the race, ethnicity, religion or gender of passengers" Yet, the system is widely believed to use other information - such as whether the traveler is going to or coming from the Middle East - that tends to "disparately impact" Arab and Muslims.
None of the ethnic rights groups, however, has offered any data to dispute the widespread assumption that in the three decades since the Palestine Liberation Organization invented skyjacking, a disproportionate number of hijackers and plane bombers have had Middle Eastern ties.
Nonetheless, the Bush Administration publicly agrees with the civil rights organizations that even a nonracial airport profiling system that had merely a disparate impact on Arabs and Muslims would be objectionable. Secretary Mineta said, "We also want to assure that in practice, the system does not disproportionately select members of any particular minority group." Of course, if Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately more likely to hijack airliners, and the profiling system does not end up disproportionately targeting them, then system wouldn't work very well at preventing hijackings.
To ensure that no disparate impact is occurring, the Bush Administration carried out in June a three-week study, first planned by the Clinton Administration, of whether or not profiling at the Detroit airport disparately impacts Arabs.
The results of the study have not been released. Nor is it known whether the secret profiles have been relaxed - they are kept secret in order to keep hijackers guessing.
However, on June 6th Attorney General Ashcroft told Congress, "We want the right training, we want the right kind of discipline, we want the right kind of detection measures and the right kind of remediation measures, because racial profiling doesn't belong in the federal government's operational arsenal."
Besides airport profiling, Arab-American activists long demanded the repeal of the "secret evidence" section of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act. To prevent terrorist gangs from murdering U.S. government secret informants, this law allows the government to provide evidence from unidentified moles in the immigration hearings of foreigners suspected of terrorist links. The government has deported or detained a number of Arabs hoping to immigrate to the U.S. due to testimony by witnesses they were never allowed to confront.
Although Abraham's bill repealing the use of secret evidence died in 2000, during his confirmation hearing, Ashcroft endorsed the ban on secret evidence. He told Congress in June that the Bush Administration has not used secret evidence.
As the practice has come under increasing attack, the number of Arab immigrants detained on secret evidence has dropped sharply. Hussein Ibish of the American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee told UPI in June, "Two years ago there were 25 in prison," he said. "Now we're down to only one."
Four years later, we found out how this had played out:
It was not until 2005 that Michael Tuohey surfaced. He was the veteran U.S. Air ticket agent in Portland, ME who checked in Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 19 9/11 terrorists, and a companion on the first leg of their trip that ended in the World Trade Center. Tuohey was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey:
Michael Tuohey was going to work like he had for 37 years, but little did he know that this day would change his life forever. On September 11, 2001, Tuohey, a ticket agent for U.S. Airways, checked in terrorist Mohammed Atta for a flight that started a chain of events that would change history.
Tuohey was working the U.S. Airways first-class check-in desk when two men, Atta and his companion Abdul Azziz-Alomari, approached his counter. From all outward appearances, the men seemed to be normal businessmen, but Tuohey felt something was wrong.
"I got an instant chill when I looked at [Atta]. I got this grip in my stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a political correct slap...I thought, 'My God, Michael, these are just a couple of Arab businessmen.'"
Tuohey also told David Hench of the Portland Press Herald:
Then his eyes locked on Atta.
"It just sent chills through you. You see his picture in the paper (now). You see more life in that picture than there is in flesh and blood," Tuohey said.
Then Tuohey went through an internal debate that still haunts him."I said to myself, 'If this guy doesn't look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.' Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it's not nice to say things like this," he said.
"You've checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you've never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed."
It wasn't just Atta's demeanor that caught Tuohey's attention."When I looked at their tickets, they had first-class, one-way tickets - $2,500 tickets. Very unusual," he said. "I guess they're not coming back. Maybe this is the end of their trip."
Indeed, they weren't coming back.
It's fascinating how all of this has disappeared down the Memory Hole. If you search in Google News for
"Arab-Americans are racially profiled" Bush
you find nada, zip, zilch articles quoting what George W. Bush said about air travel security in front of tens of millions of viewers during a Presidential debate eleven months before 9/11.
Posts
40 comments:
It goes to show you the individual can still make a concrete, positive impact on society. Too bad this check-in guy missed his chance.
I'm confused. I thought the key player in the airport security breakdown was Jamie Gorelick, in the DOJ during Clinton's term. Is there some rational way to decide the causation issue as between her and Bush?
A good reminder that political correctness almost literally killed 3000 people.
Since black flashmobs are 'youths', I suppose we should call Arab terrorists 'one-way travelers'.
"It goes to show you the individual can still make a concrete, positive impact on society. Too bad this check-in guy missed his chance."
Pocosis or pocomania--politically correct induced mentality--can be as stupid as bigotry. If bigotry can make you see enemies where they aint(every 'muzzie' is a terrorist), pocosis(or pocomania or pocotry)can make you blind to real problems.
Something in your mind slaps you, needles you, shames you, etc. It says you're a 'racist' if you dare see and say the truth. This is Sailer Strategy's biggest stumbling obstacle. Even peole who see or sense the truth have been implanted or seeded with a mental program that makes them do harm to themselves(like the auto-victims or self-victims in M. Night Shylaman's THE HAPPENING; it might be called selfophobia or autophobia, or the exreme irrational fear of one's own feelings, thoughts, and judgement.). It's not really conscience because it's not about individual moral reasoning about reality; it's more a fear, disgust, or hate for oneself if one were to have what has been branded as 'hateful', 'racist', 'xenphobic',or 'homophobic' thought--no matter how much aligned with reality.
A part of their minds may still insist, 'but it's really true'. But they cannot face this truth cuz doing so would mean they are 'odious', 'rabid', and 'virulent'. And so they take out their frustration on OTHER people who don't share their inner frustration. Suppose a white liberal is secretly worried about racial realities. He wants to maintain his 'progressive' credentials, but reality undermines his beliefs. If he were to accept the truth, he would be something akin to a devil worshipper in the Middle Ages. So, he exorcises himself by striking out at 'racist' people who aren't as saintly-and-suffering as he is. So, instead of facing the reality as it really is, he fumes and spouts off like Keith Olbermann or Lawrence O'Donnell, as if all that 'anti-racist' rants at the 'evil right' is gonna fix the problem. But by doing so, they can make themselves believe that the problem is not with blacks or with illegal aliens but with 'white racism' that drove blacks and others to be lazy, criminal, violent, etc.
It's like a sexually repressed person who cannot acknowledge his natural 'satanic' lust attacking other people of being tempted by the devil.
The signs were all there as to who Bush was, and a lot of us, myself included missed them at the time.
First decade of the 20th century was relatively peaceful but then all heck broke out in the second decade.
Since the first decade of the 21st century was so crazy, maybe the second decade will be calm.
A good reminder that political correctness almost literally killed 3000 people.
In addition to his standard label of "political correctness makes you stupid", Steve needs to add another label which would be something like "political correctness can also get you brutally murdered".
Well, of course, assuming that that's not too straightforward of an assessment for Komment Kontrol's tastes...
Since the first decade of the 21st century was so crazy, maybe the second decade will be calm.
Oh, trust me, you ain't seen nothin' yet...
and with Libya, Egypt etc, we can expect lots more 9-11s especially since muslim immigration has actually INCREASED after 9-11.
you see if they come here, they'll love freedom and us...
I live in Brooklyn and the number of burka clad women has SKYROCKTED in the past few years, according to a source of mine, we parlay green cards for help 'fighting terrorism' .. isn't it great, some Afghani tells us some BS we give his tribe a dozen greencards!
First decade of the 20th century was relatively peaceful but then all heck broke out in the second decade.
Since the first decade of the 21st century was so crazy, maybe the second decade will be calm.
thought.. maybe the last decade was the peaceful one....
"The problem with political-correct-mindset or pocosis is it can lead to real bigotry, which is what happened in the US."
[citation needed]
This is linked to and riffed on by Ex-Army HERE.
You know, Steve, Ex-Army links to you a LOT, and has you on his blogroll. You really ought to put HIS BLOG on yours, maybe under "Humor."
It's true, you can judge books by their covers. Real science confirms you can tell a lot just by looking at someone's face, Roissy and others in the hbd/reactionary/game sphere have reported on it.
Speaking of airport security profiling, how does Malcolm Gladwell reconcile his "Blink" theory with disparate impact and outcome laws?
How is Malcolm paid tens of thousands of dollars to spread his message of hate?
It wasn't just the forbidding of racial profiling, first by Clinton, and then Bush, in airport security. The FBI had Zacharias Moussaiou in custody, had good evidence he was part of a hijacking ring (the flight school where he trained had against orders, an employee call the FBI about him). The employee btw was later fired. However higher ups wanted Mousaaiou simply deported, and the Gorelick wall between the CIA and FBI did not allow the CIA to tell the FBI that the French considered Moussaiou an AQ terrorist, with personal connections to bin Laden.
Regardless, we had an appointment with bin Laden's crew. We were too PC to either intern/imprison all Muslims here (if wanted a very abject posture abroad) or start zapping lots of Muslims abroad ala Obama-Bush with Predator Drones. Not just PC but weakness gets you killed. There is no way to tell which is a "Good Muslim" who would not engage in jihad, and a guy like say the Times Square bomber who as the son of the Pakistan Air Force chief, married, two kids, mortgage thought it would be a good idea to blow up Times Square.
So you need to either imprison/deport all Muslims in the US, or make payback so certain and terrible no mass attack will be planned. The real lesson of 9/11 is that peace and security as it always has is based on strength and deterrence, not clap-happy nostrums. Its expensive. It costs.
Malcolm Gladwell reconcile his "Blink" theory
short version:: it only works when its not racist.
i complained about norman mineta and GW bush on this exact topic. if you go back 10 years on this blog (not even sure if you can), you'll see my posts where i criticized bush and mineta for acting like total morons.
mineta's reasoning was that 99% of the japanese people in the US who were put in camps in 1942 were totally innocuous, therefore, americans have no business profiling anybody ever again, for any reason, even to avoid getting killed.
well, the point of these policies is to catch the 1%. to prevent major problems at the inconvenience of a few hundred thousand. and in the case of muslims, it's certainly more than 1% of them who might not be innocuous. it makes all the sense in the world to watch them more closely.
as usual, everything GW bush did was wrong.
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul
not Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks.
I like the Turks. They took it, and they've kept it. They wanted it more. It was Constantinople now it's Istanbul. This place we now call "Turkey," it didn't used to be called Turkey. It used to be called Anatolia, or the Byzantine Empire.
You import enough Turks, you get Turkey. You import enough Mexicans, you get Mexico. You import enough Muslims, you get dar al-Islam.
@Whiskey
Shahzad wasn't your standard well adjusted muslim living in America.
He went to some crap school, his father was a Pakistan Air Force Vice Marshal, which means he's as scum as it gets (anyone involved in the Pakistani military is). He also defaulted on that mortgage you spoke of, prior to the attack.
Here's more info on him if you don't feel like looking for it yourself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Times_Square_car_bombing_attempt#Suspect:_Faisal_Shahzad
---
Anyways relevant to the article at hand I too wish that this PC bs wasn't driven into the employee at the airport. It could have saved a lot of grief, not only for America but for people around the world who now need to deal with the consequences of 9/11.
Obama sometimes makes one forgot what a fucking turd George the Lesser was.
Thank you for your fine blog, Steve, your incomparable memory, and your love for the truth.
The net allows you to, usually, find something about such things, if you search diligently enough & thanks to people like Steve.
This is not perfect but before the net we were in the situation of 1984 where such things just disappeared. For example WUWT recently had an article about the 1970's cooling scare, so regularly denounced as invention by warming alarmists. Somebody found an old newspaper with an article about somebody, now a warminst, prpmiting cooling. In those days once the next day's paper was publiched the story was gone.
Suppose they'd searched him. What would they have found? They might have made him throw the box cutter in the trash, but that's about it. He wasn't carrying a gun or bomb or anything. It is reasonable to have cops and security guards give more scrutiny to people who peg their suspicion meter, but it's not reasonable to have them be able to arrest people on nothing but suspicion. It seems to me that eve after some extra screening, they would have had to let him go get on his plane. What would you arrest him for? Creepiness?
Further, I'm skeptical that the screener's memory of this is
not massively affected by the later events. If this guy hadn't been involved in the attacks, would he still remember seeing him and being creeped out? How often have you heard people say "I always knew that guy was trouble" only after the trouble has become obvious? How can we tell whether this is a case like that?
This is a nice example of the way facts that don't fit one of the standard narratives pushed by the media tend to drop off the edge of the world and never be discussed again. I also remember hearing Bush enthuse over finishing the job in Iraq during one of the debates, but again, ive seldom heard anyone else recall that. It didn't fit the story.
This is a nice example of the way facts that don't fit one of the standard narratives pushed by the media tend to drop off the edge of the world and never be discussed again. I also remember hearing Bush enthuse over finishing the job in Iraq during one of the debates, but again, ive seldom heard anyone else recall that. It didn't fit the story.
George W. told us that the terrorists hated us for our freedoms. So he tried to make them like us again by systematically dismantling those freedoms - a program which Obama and his Homeland Security Chief, Nurse Diesel, have continued and expanded.
It was recently disclosed that the Obama administration now denies entry to our country to Canadians with a history of mental illness.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/09/08/f-border-mental-health-privacy.html
But they lifted the ban on entry to people with HIV. So, a sometimes suicidal old Canadian broad is a danger to Americans, but a 20-something African man with HIV is no danger at all.
The dismantling of our nation continues apace.
"Roissy and others in the hbd/reactionary/game sphere have reported on it."
Hbd/reactionary/game sphere? Is that like the nuclear physics/shoe shopping/fight club sphere? Or is it more like the booty knitting/Zoroastrian/ naked skydiving sphere?
"It goes to show you the individual can still make a concrete, positive impact on society. Too bad this check-in guy missed his chance."
I wouldn't judge David Hench. He has been trained to let an obvious terrorist onto a plane throughout his career.
The red meat Bush threw to Arab-Americans during the debate could have made the difference in Florida, which has a large Arab-American population, and that would have made the difference in the election.
-Risto
They might have made him throw the box cutter in the trash, but that's about
i used to carry a buck knife all the time, no problem. One time, flying i had two WWI french bayonets (really long like swords) and a hand grenade shell (also WWI) in my carry on bag... I told the check in guy, he shrugged, "no problem".
Maya - Hbd/reactionary/game sphere? Is that like the nuclear physics/shoe shopping/fight club sphere? Or is it more like the booty knitting/Zoroastrian/ naked skydiving sphere?
The common thread is that conventional wisdom grossly understimates the importance of biology/human nature. Your analogies are sillier than you think.
"The red meat Bush threw to Arab-Americans during the debate could have made the difference in Florida, which has a large Arab-American population, and that would have made the difference in the election."
Shiite!! One time that reaching out to non-whites worked for the GOP came to bite all of us in the ass.
"Real science confirms you can tell a lot just by looking at someone's face, Roissy and others in the hbd/reactionary/game sphere have reported on it."
So, what, they said the opposite?
Because the opposite of what Roissy said is a pretty good first approximation of the truth.
You know what's funny? The West is haunted by NAZISTERIA, or seeing Nazis everywhere even when they don't exist. In the Middle Ages, people saw the devil everywhere. It's as though people NEEDED to see the devil and fixate on him as the source of all evil.
Nazis really did exist at one time, but they've been gone for some time. But now, they've been Satanized and turned into a spiritual presence for white liberals. Their god is the Magic Negro--also nonexistent--, their faith is Holocaustianity, and their devil is the EVIL WHITE MAN or NAZI GHOST.
Take three European movies CRIMSON RIVER, TELL NO ONE, and GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO. Though Europe is being overrun by Muslim and African thugs, those movies say the great evil haunting Europe is the Evil White Man or crypto-Nazis.
CRIMSON RIVER, directed by the Jewish guy who made LA HAINE, says there is a mountaintop college of Aryan Nazis. You'd think given French demographic trends, that would be the least of their worries. But nope, it's the Nazis!!!
And in TELL NO ONE, the great evil is some ARISTOCRATIC REACTIONARY WHITE FAMILY, not Muslim and African criminal elements. Indeed, at one point, our white hero is saved by non-white thugs(who turn out to be swell guys, really)!!!
And GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO, which I could stomach for 30 minutes, is another nut movie.
In the Middle Ages, people didn't know what to do about disease, hunger, pestilence, etc. So, they needed to scapegoat all the evils on the devil, witches, heretics, and even Jews. (Even in the 19th century, some people invented the mythic evil Jew through stuff like PROTOCOLS OF ELDERS OF ZION.)
Now, it's the Nazis. Even though London recently burned thanks to black immigrant youths, the real evil is the Nazi ghost haunting Europe. Just as people in the Middle Ages hoped and prayed that things would improve if they burned witches, today's white folks hope and pray that problems with non-whites will be solved if we just root out the Nazi ghosts and their agents and burn them at the stake.
The sick soul of Europe is most evident in CACHE by Haneke. It's as if every white guy is guilty, even for what happened when he was a kid. And PIANO TEACHER says classical music is all about European mania for control and order; it too is a form of Nazism. And WHITE RIBBON says European Christian communities were breeding grounds for Nazis; Nazi spirit must still be around since European culture is still around.
He made a movie called SEVENTH CONTINENT where a white family kills itself. His message seems to be white people should commit suicide cuz the evil is really within them. For a secularist, he sure believes in his own brand of the Original Sin or Occidental Sin.
Since the first decade of the 21st century was so crazy, maybe the second decade will be calm.
Go read a book. The first decade of the 21st century was the most peaceful one in history.
The difference between Flight 93 and the others was one less thug hijacker. That was the difference between the hijackers hitting their target and being stopped short by the passengers.
Without their boxcutters, they probably would not have been able to take the planes.
If the would-be hijackers had been searched, their weapons confiscated and some detained so they had to take separate flights, the whole mission would likely have failed. Three men without weapons could not have taken and flown a plane. If one plane was taken, the other would-be hijackers would still have been on planes (in groups too small to be effective) or in detention by the time the plot became public knowledge. One plane hitting a building would have been much less damaging than 3. One plane stopped short is a tragedy, not a national disaster.
If the visa-overstayers had been turned over to INS when they were caught with boxcutters, the teams would have been disassembled during the probing phase of the attack planning.
If we had appropriately profiled and handled foreign-looking people through 2001 and clamped down on ones carrying contraband and violating our immigration laws, 9/11/01 would not have gone down in history.
Scrutineer- "The common thread is that conventional wisdom grossly understimates the importance of biology/human nature. Your analogies are sillier than you think."
The only common thread in the above is the reader who tries to blame "society", "conventional wisdom" and "flying sock monsters" for being an utter loser by laughably appealing to sound science... and failing to make a case. Rossy and his ilk's theories don't hold up in the face of biology and logic.
I assure you, there are people out there (and the majority of them are men!) to whom human biodiversity makes sense even though they can attract a sexual partner they want without having to pay. You see, some can form views that don't rely on having to justify one's own loserdom.
Here's a human nature phenomenon that I observed:
People who utterly fail in the mating department by being straight up undesirable tend to form bitter communities that make shallow attempts to claim intellectual/moral/religious higher ground and lash out at intervals. Case in point- feminazis and the game refugees.
To the Anon who commented on NAZISTERIA in Europe:
All I have is anecdotal evidence, but I think that the white guilt is not long for this world in continental Europe. I lived in France for several years, and had a pleasant time working with agreeable, cooperative, liberal-minded French folk, in a Muslim ghetto. Though my co-workers were socialist-leaning, environmentally conscious and mild mannered, they had a much easier time speaking out against what they saw as Arab racism, Arab entitlement, Arab crime and the negative aspects of the immigrant cultures both at work and around the dinner table than my liberal coworkers and friends in The States. Some group lobbied to replace history textbooks with those that downplay the achievements of the Roman Empire so the children wouldn't get an idea that colonization is a positive thing. I thought our principal (a former communist who lets foreign teachers stay at his family home for cultural enrichment) would blow up. He also flat out refused to entertain the charges of racism made by an Arab mother concerning the fight between her son and another boy that took place right in front of the principal. He told her off. I worked in 5 different schools, and it was similar everywhere. The faculty and staff acting all interested in other cultures and getting excited about an African film festival, but openly bitching about pork being gone from their local markets and consistently voting against the exclusion of pork as a lunch option for the kids. Overall, though the Arab ghetto where I worked in France is a peaceful, studious place in comparison to the black inner city ghetto where my current school is located, I got the impression that the French have had enough. I was asked by multiple people how The United States deals with the waves of immigrants and their descendants, and if "these people ever settle down and start acting normal." They are tired of explaining that Christmas is now a civil holiday for all of France because of the country's religious history much like the summers are off because of the country's agricultural history, and no, Ramadan isn't the same. They are disgusted by the way Muslim boys treat their numerous female relatives in class (each classroom had at least one extended family) and don't feel like tolerating it. Most people openly admit that they think Algeria was a lot better off as a part of France.
I think the rules and the general atmosphere will change drastically within a couple of decades.
To the Anon who commented on NAZISTERIA in Europe:
All I have is anecdotal evidence, but I think that the white guilt is not long for this world in continental Europe. I lived in France for several years, and had a pleasant time working with agreeable, cooperative, liberal-minded French folk, in a Muslim ghetto. Though my co-workers were socialist-leaning, environmentally conscious and mild mannered, they had a much easier time speaking out against what they saw as Arab racism, Arab entitlement, Arab crime and the negative aspects of the immigrant cultures both at work and around the dinner table than my liberal coworkers and friends in The States. Some group lobbied to replace history textbooks with those that downplay the achievements of the Roman Empire so the children wouldn't get an idea that colonization is a positive thing. I thought our principal (a former communist who lets foreign teachers stay at his family home for cultural enrichment) would blow up. He also flat out refused to entertain the charges of racism made by an Arab mother concerning the fight between her son and another boy that took place right in front of the principal. He told her off. I worked in 5 different schools, and it was similar everywhere. The faculty and staff acting all interested in other cultures and getting excited about an African film festival, but openly bitching about pork being gone from their local markets and consistently voting against the exclusion of pork as a lunch option for the kids. Overall, though the Arab ghetto where I worked in France is a peaceful, studious place in comparison to the black inner city ghetto where my current school is located, I got the impression that the French have had enough. I was asked by multiple people how The United States deals with the waves of immigrants and their descendants, and if "these people ever settle down and start acting normal." They are tired of explaining that Christmas is now a civil holiday for all of France because of the country's religious history much like the summers are off because of the country's agricultural history, and no, Ramadan isn't the same. They are disgusted by the way Muslim boys treat their numerous female relatives in class (each classroom had at least one extended family) and don't feel like tolerating it. Most people openly admit that they think Algeria was a lot better off as a part of France.
I think the rules and the general atmosphere will change drastically within a couple of decades.
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