What's really happening in France? Riots unveil deep ethnic tensions

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France is still on high alert. Last night, just three blocks from my hotel in Marseille, riot police deployed two military-style armored personnel carriers. It was such a dramatic display, it really looked like they were expecting a civil war.

Last week’s riots have died down. But in France, that still means more than 100 cars torched in an evening.

But I’d like to show you something that I thought was very interesting.

As you may know, there is a wonderful French tradition of sitting for hours outside chic cafes, sipping coffee, eating croissants and watching people walk by.

But in Marseille, I saw two different versions of that. In the ethnically French areas (where tourists go), it’s men and women, sometime dressed casually, sometimes dressed up. Just like the French have done for centuries. I think sitting outside cafes was the 19th century version of Tinder — a way young men and women met each other.

That tradition is still alive.

But just a block away in Marseille, where the Muslim neighbourhoods start, there are other outdoor cafes, where people sit for hours sipping coffee and tea. They have hummus or shawarma instead of croissants and crepes. But — once you see it, you can’t un-see it — there are very few women there, if any. I saw some cafes with dozens and dozens of customers, all of them men. Muslim men, from Algeria, Tunisia, or other former French colonies. And the few women who were there were wearing Islamic-style clothing, even in the sweltering heat.

These coffee shop men weren’t the teenagers who have been rioting the past week. They’re typically middle-aged men, catching up with their friends, talking over the news of the day. So, obviously, they were talking about the riots in France. And when I approached them, and told them in my broken French that I was a journalist from Canada, a lot of them were happy to talk to me.

We’ve put together about half a dozen of those interviews in a special edition of the Ezra Levant Show. That’s the TV-style show I do every weeknight on Rebel News. Normally it’s behind a paywall, only for subscribers. But this trip was crowdfunded by many viewers, so we’re making it available on our special www.FranceOnFire.com website, too. Click here to watch it now.

As you might expect, there were a range of answers to my questions. There are some Muslims in France who are very integrated into society, speak French fluently, and are part of the larger economy and culture. You can see some of those people — they say they love France, they’re French first, and they say that any racism towards Muslim immigrants is just from certain individuals, and that France itself is not inherently racist.

But others took a sharply different point of view. As you can see in my show tonight, one man — who by all outward appearances looked integrated and assimilated, showed his rage, saying that what is happening in France now is a kind of revenge for 132 years of French colonialism in North Africa.

Identity and belonging are tough issues. Here in Toronto, during the World Cup, you can see every ethnic group fly the flag of their home countries — Italy, France, Brazil, etc. That doesn’t mean they’re disloyal to Canada, or not full Canadian citizens. But being a true citizen of France is much deeper than just cheering for the French national soccer team. It’s about subscribing to core French values like Liberty, Equality and Fraternity and a strong history of secularism. Even France’s atrocious president, Emmanuel Macron, has given forceful speeches stating that being French means committing to continually fight for those values, and to put the French Republic first.

As you can see in my interviews, many of the men at those cafes have no intention of doing that. They don’t use the word “riot”; they say “revolt”. No wonder the police rolled out armored vehicles.

What do you think? Do you think ethnic identity and Islamic law are the stumbling block here? And do you think that we could face the same issues, in Canada, the US, UK and Australia?

Watch the video and let me know what you think. (Please forgive me for my awful spoken French. I know it’s painful to listen to, but all the men I interviewed seem to understand me well enough to answer!)

If you want to see the rest of the work we did, we’re compiling it all at www.FranceOnFire.com. If you appreciate our citizen journalism, you can also chip in to help cover our costs using the donation form on this page.

And if you like this TV-style show, where I do a monologue and then interview guests, please feel free to subscribe, by clicking here. It’s just $8/month and I do a new show every weeknight!)