It is hard to understand the almost gleeful response of the German Bush-Blogs to the riots in Paris. Politically Incorrect sees these as some sort of retribution for France's failure to join the US-led Iraq invasion; Fakten und Fiktionen indulges in anti-Muslim hate and blames the "Socialists" in France for unrest, and FairyKing rejoices in the failure of multiculturalism. Now their hero Nicholas Sarkozy is under pressure for his inflammatory comments.
Meanwhile the Reality-based German blog community is trying to follow the developments while looking into the root causes. Der Spindoktor looks at the media coverage and the role that blogs are playing in France. Bazblog warns that the situation could spread to Germany, while Quirinus says it already has spread to Bremen.
UPDATE: The New York Times quotes officials in Germany that things are just fine and Germany has nothing to fear from the Paris Riots:
From my point of view, we don't have to fear this in Germany," Norbert Seitz, director of the German Forum for Crime Prevention, a private information center, said in an interview. The main reason, he said, was the effort of Germany's state and local governments and the police to create youth services and build relations with immigrant groups.
Wolfgang Schäuble, a conservative member of Parliament slated to be Germany's interior minister, concurred. "The conditions in France are different from the ones we have," he said. "We don't have these gigantic high-rise projects that they have on the edges of French cities."
[...]"It's not that there aren't problems," said Oguz Ucuncu, the secretary general of the Islamic Community of Milli Görus, one of Germany's main Turkish organizations. "But here you don't have the sort of depressing environment you have in France, where they is no prospect of getting out."
As a reality-check, I recommend that everyone see the film Gegen die Wand (Head-on).
Thanks for supporting the German economy, David!
I am sure some of the readers and writers of the German Bush Blog will go to the next bookshop and buy a dictionary to look up the word "gleeful," which is included in the trackback you have sent to them... ;-)
Posted by: Martin | November 08, 2005 at 10:27 AM