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A Grim Report

This is a depressing and disturbing article. And of course it’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not just France, obviously, it’s women all over the world, who have miserable coerced restricted cramped threatened lives. A thought we don’t like to dwell on, since there’s not a lot we can do about it. But a thought all the same.

Horror stories of what happened to girls who tried to fight their families circulated in the projects. Yildiz knew of girls who had been tricked by their parents into going on a vacation to Turkey or Algeria, only to find themselves being turned over to the families of their new husbands…The French press, with its need to reconcile political correctness and the reality of the new demographics, rarely raises one increasingly critical question: How many women in the country actually live in repressive conditions without access to the full rights guaranteed by the republic? If you ask the question at any of the tiny storefront agencies trying to help these women, you will hear a startling number: 70,000. The figure comes from the High Council of Integration, a government agency, and refers primarily to women in forced marriages.

And the French press doesn’t talk about it much? How very unfortunate…

Occasionally a murder case will make the news, but the grisly narratives of most of les femmes des quartiers slip under the radar of Le Monde and the serious talk shows. From time to time a memoir detailing a brutal gang rape in the cités may get published—Samira Bellil’s best-selling Dans l’Enfer des Tournantes is an example—but, for the most part, the life of the women of the cités remains a mystery, an unpopular cause largely ignored by politicians attempting to win the potentially immense Muslim vote. But it is these women who are on the fault line in Eurabia, a mere 30 minutes from the Louvre.Throughout Paris, women are caught in the maw of cultural relativism as the French hesitate to sound intolerant of another culture. “Given how these women are treated, why does no one make a fuss? There is the danger of being accused of racism.”

The article makes clear that a lot of this is also down to the French failure and refusal to integrate Muslim immigrants, and to the elitism of the culture as a whole, which is not interested in the plight of poor people and has no Oprah to draw attention to such subjects. All very depressing, as I said. Just thought I’d mention it.

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