OPINION: France - Will It Be Intolerant of Intolerance?

It's over a week that France has literally been burning. The killing of a 17-year-old boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent by a policeman at a traffic stop in a Paris suburb is being used as an excuse by a determined immigrant minority to set ablaze the country that has offered them shelter, leaving in its wake troubling questions about the future of France, and the resulting deep sense of insecurity among large sections of its original population of whites - hapless victims of senseless orgy of violence.

From Paris to Marseille and Lille to Lyon, rampaging mobs have gone berserk. They have raided police stations, ransacked shopping malls, looted buildings and commercial establishments, vandalised public property, set ablaze countless automobiles and hurled explosives at authorities. The current destruction spree being witnessed in France isn't merely born out of outrage against what some would term as a 'cold-blood' murder of a young man by a heartless racist policeman. It's a part of a war against the liberal values France represents.

Here are the facts. Nahel, the victim of alleged police brutality, was the only child of Mounia. She and Nahel's father divorced when he was a toddler and she brought him up on her own. Most of the accounts of this mayhem in the global media, have painted Nahel as an innocent vulnerable kid, and the police man who shot him dead, an ogre.

Contrary to the manufactured perception, Nahel was a difficult child. He went to the Collège Jean Perrin, a technical school, had discipline problems, often skipped class. Notwithstanding claims by Nahel's family that he did not have a criminal record, he did have his share of run-ins with the law, according to available information, gleaned from responsible French and English media.

Just 17, Nahel had over a dozen cases against him, including minor drug-related offences, and driving without a licence and on false plates. The most recent was last weekend, when he had refused to stop for a police check. He was due to appear before a juvenile court in September. These are verifiable facts. He obviously had an impressive criminal record for someone, still in the touching distance of adulthood.

Surely Nahel wasn't one of those subdued youths, weighed down by unfortunate circumstances, but a habitual impulsive offender, sans any respect for law or fear of the system. According to reliable media reports, on Tuesday (June 27) morning, Nahel was at the wheel of a high-performance Mercedes A-class AMG, driving through Nanterre, with two friends. None knows from where had got hold of the car, which had Polish number plates.

An unmissable canary yellow, the car was reportedly spotted at about 7.55 am by two police motorcyclists as it was speeding along a bus lane. They gave chase, putting on their flashing lights, and banging on the driver's window when Nahel stopped at a traffic light. He drove off while the signal was still red!

The two motorcyclists continued the chase, and at 8.16 am radioed colleagues to warn them of the situation. A few moments later, the Mercedes was forced to stop after getting stuck in a traffic jam and the two officers dismounted, drew their guns and came alongside the car.

Moments later, a 38-year-old policeman, fired once at the teenager, hitting him in the chest. Why the policeman fired is a matter of dispute: his lawyer, Laurent-Franck Lienard, claimed in a long television interview that his client had been leaning on the bonnet of the car when it suddenly lurched forward. Unable to spring out of the way, because of a wall running along the pavement just one and half feet behind him, he then fired his gun. Lienard maintained that the officer had aimed at Nahel's leg, but the barrel was pushed up by the vehicle's forward motion.

The next day, the officer who fired the fatal shot was charged with voluntary homicide and remanded in custody. His name was leaked and his wife and son were soon receiving death threats. The sad episode should have rested here, but didn't.

The unfortunate death was weaponised to ignite the long-simmering hate, a large section of Muslims immigrants harbour against the pluralistic ethos of the country of their adoption. The resultant mayhem cannot be dismissed as acts of hooligans or vandals rejoicing at unleashing anarchy, there's surely an ideological underpinning to it. There's a method in the madness.

There have been frequent outbreaks of violence in France by a religious militant minority on one pretext or the other. The events of the last few days - large-scale rioting, destruction of public property and anger towards law enforcement - bring back painful memories of 2005.

Back then, two young men, Zyed Benna,17, and Bouna Traoré, 15, also of African origin, were electrocuted after seeking refuge in an electricity substation in Clichysous-Bois, a suburb east of Paris, to escape police they thought were pursuing them. Three weeks of rioting followed. At least 10,000 vehicles were burnt, and 233 public buildings and 74 private ones were damaged in 300 different districts.

The global left- Jehadi eco- system has neatly set the narrative on predictable lines - putting France, its original white inhabitants and its democratic system in the dock. There are accusations of systemic racism against people of North African descent, by not just law enforcement but also more broadly the, French society.

What riles Muslim immigrants in France? Lack of jobs and opportunities? Restrictions on practising Islam? Discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and colour? Continuing persecution by a white dominated system? It's possible that all these issues do exist in varying degrees in a multicultural society what France has become over decades. If through some magic wand, the French establishment was to fix all these issues to the satisfaction of warring immigrants, would social tensions disappear and the country become an epitome of harmony?

On 7 January 2015, two French Muslim terrorists and brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Armed with rifles and other weapons, they murdered 12 people and injured 11 others. Why did they do it? At that time, the French President Emmanuel Macron had hit the nail on the head when he said that "Islamists have created a parallel culture in France that rejects French values, customs and laws."

The crisis being faced by France, has its mirror images in other parts of the world as well. Why did Osama bin Laden and associates bring down World Trade Center in New York on 9/11, ......? Laden and most of his associates were highly educated and came from privileged backgrounds. Why did Kashmiri Muslims target the Hindus, a harmless microscopic minority, which was no threat to overwhelming Muslim population? Why did Muslims of Indian subcontinent unleash a bloodbath (starting with great Kolkata killings in 1946), culminating in the creation of Pakistan, when the leadership of the country was with textbook secularists' such as Gandhiji and Pandit Nehru? The list is just indicative of a phenomenon, and not exhaustive.

The immigrants in France aren't so much bothered about how fairly or unfairly the system treats them. These are comparatively minor irritants. What they find difficult to live with are the French values of individual freedom, liberty, and fraternity. These ideas, at the heart of French identity, are alien to the immigrants, fed on the regular diet of hate for non- believers, or kafirs. They hate the France not for what it does to them, but what it stands for, and represents.

France is surely heading for difficult times. The belligerence of the immigrants, their rejection of French plural culture, is bound to create a reaction among those who value their civilisational ethos, evolved over centuries. President Macron's reaction to Nahel's death - "We have an adolescent who has been killed. It is inexplicable. It is inexcusable," have evoked a strong reaction from his opponents. They have accused him of fanning the flames by blaming the policeman. They have demanded the president restore order - as have police unions, who say they are at war with "savage hordes" and "vermin".

During the last two decades, almost seven million people, or just over one in ten of France's population, were born - outside the country and to non-French parents - according to a recent study by the National Statistics Agency. Millions more have foreign ancestry; those, like Nahel, with roots in north Africa form the largest group.

What France is facing today is, "the paradox of tolerance", postulated by a philosopher, Karl Popper in 1945. It states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually ceased or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance. Will France continue to be tolerant, and allow those who are inherently intolerant, to destroy its liberal system? Or will it be intolerant of those who have no respect for values such as tolerance, and save its core ideas of liberty, individual freedom and fraternity?

(Mr. Balbir Punj is a Former Member of Parliament and a Columnist. He can be reached at: [email protected])

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