No subject

integration of the Muslim minority population into wider French
society and of the alleged connections between members of that
population and the violence in Algeria for special attention,
emphasising how in both cases it was the "loyalty," or belonging, of
France's Muslims that, for the media, was most at stake.

There were fears that the instability in Algeria, pitting government
forces against radical Islamist groups and rapidly degenerating into a
"dirty war", would "spill over" into France, particularly following a
series of bomb attacks on the Paris metro in the mid 1990s. And there
was concern, too, that radical clerics, preaching in unregulated
mosques or spreading their ideas in France from abroad through the use
of new technologies, would gain influence over young Arab and Muslim
men disproportionately affected by discrimination, poor educational
achievement and unemployment, and often living in areas suffering from
high levels of poverty in the suburbs of the major French cities (the
so-called banlieues ).

While Deltombe's view seems to be that some of these concerns at least
might have been justified, he has sharp words about the conduct of the
French media in reporting them. Among the practices the author notes
from this period are the use of manipulated testimonies, such that
people giving interviews to television journalists were later unable
to recognise what they had said as a result of the way the material
had been framed, the headlining on national news of petty acts of
criminality that would ordinarily scarcely make the local newspapers,
thereby demonising an entire population, and the manipulation of the
news by ambitious politicians eager to gain votes from a French public
told that Islam was "a threat" and that Muslims constituted an
"inassimilable" population.

As a result, the book contains some depressing stories, taken from the
last decade or so, of television programmes purporting to be
"undercover accounts" of Islamist militant groups operating in "hidden
mosques" in France with the aim of "manipulating" and "indoctrinating"
young French Muslims, but containing information that was either
inflated or simply false.

It usefully analyses a notorious story from 2004 of a young French
women, allegedly brutalised by a group of youths of North African
origin on a Paris train, that was carried on France's evening
television news bulletins until it was realised that the woman
concerned had invented the story in the hope of getting on television:
when asked why she had claimed to be attacked by such men she replied,
"because it is always they who are accused on television."

And it contains an extended account of the extraordinary activities of
Charles Pasqua, French minister of the interior in the 1990s, whose
electoral appeal seems to have relied upon his being perceived as
being tough on French citizens of Muslim religion and upon his
Machiavellian control of television.

Finally, on reaching the end of this lengthy and enormously detailed
account of how Arabs and Muslims have been represented in the French
media over the past 30 years one has the impression that while there
has been evidence of low-level "islamophobia" in French society, as
reflected in the media, this has only become really apparent at times
of notable internal or external stress. Such stress has typically been
felt in the wake of events abroad presented as bearing on Islam, or of
domestic events used for electoral advantage or as lending themselves
to dramatic media coverage, such as the possibility in 1994--1995 that
violence in Algeria could spread to France, or the story of the young
women who in 2004 invented an attack by youths of Arab origin in order
to appear on television.

Much of the material that Deltombe reports is also of great
comparative interest, notably in the light of the London bombings last
July and the coverage given to these in the British media, which has
tended to focus on issues of minority integration, indoctrination and
threat in ways similar to this book's material from France.

By David Tresilian

--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>