Archaeologists work in the city center of Saint-Denis on a site protected by grids. Helping the heat, the eight women archaeologists on the site wore tank tops revealing their shoulders and arms. What did they not dare! Quickly, men insulted them, on the indecency of their outfits, their suggestive postures, squatting, leaning forward, but also on this profession which is not made for women and on the blasphemy they committed by exhuming skeletons. A festival of old-fashioned machismo!
Seine-Saint-Denis is often singled out for its aggressive communitarianism. You just have to go there, day or night, to find that it is difficult to move about in the streets unveiled or, worse, in a skirt without receiving stares, even comments from men or even women, who make you feel that you are not up to the standards of the neighborhood. The proportion of veiled women is impressive. It is a fact, measurable by all. However, the PS town hall of Saint-Denis reacted by firmly refuting any fundamentalism or Islamism among passers-by haranguing bare shoulders. Better: the response of the town hall was limited to sticking posters reminding that street harassment is a crime. The posters were torn down. On the other hand, the town hall advised the archaeologists to file a complaint, which none, of course, dared to do for fear of reprisals or of being referred to racism or Islamophobia.
What is extraordinary in this case is, as always, the willful blindness. By insulting these women archaeologists, these few inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis say that they are here in an area dictated by their rules and customs. What is serious in the reaction of the town hall is to abandon the majority of the inhabitants to a noisy and aggressive minority. What is serious is to let a population, under the pretext that it was born elsewhere or here, but of Muslim obedience, be taken hostage by a sectarian minority which, by imposing its law, terrifies its community and paralyzes the public authorities, which prefer good conscience to justice.
Different setting, same terrible story. During the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, in the streets of downtown Toulouse, a 19-year-old passerby and her companion were allegedly attacked by four minors they had just met, reports The Midi Dispatch. The young woman would have been severely slashed in the face by blows from broken bottles during the altercation. The reason for such an outburst of violence? The clothing of the victim deemed “not correct” by one of the attackers. Transported to the hospital, she received around fifty stitches and will be “undoubtedly disfigured for life”, notes the regional daily.
It is impossible to make a nation, or even to live simply by following the laws of the Republic which ensure you to move freely in its streets, dressed as you wish, to exercise the profession which you want, when politicians hypnotized by opportunism, obsessed with the inexorable rise of the RN, to which they contribute every day, choose to deny reality. As they denied it with a force that bordered on madness during the recent riots, seeing in it not an assumed separatism, but a social revolt which suited them electorally. Misery of the absence of landmarks, of the loss of political spine, of radical one-upmanship without social purpose.
The German example
Meanwhile, in Germany, regularly taken as an example for the successful integration of the millions of refugees welcomed by Angela Merkel – who destabilized the whole of Europe – and the demonstration that the rise of the far right is not linked to immigration, the model is visibly crumbling. The AfD climbs to all floors. According to the polls, it far exceeds the Greens, and is neck and neck with the Socialists of the SPD. Integration has never been easy, neither in Germany nor elsewhere; today she drinks the cup. In Berlin, two swimming pools had to close temporarily following incidents involving young bathers with an immigrant background and pool staff. Unlike France, Germany has not put on blinkers. It is a left-liberal daily, Der Tagesspiegel, who published a letter from employees of the Columbiabad swimming pool where they point to the “intolerable scale” of the problems caused by “young people from Arab families, sometimes Chechens” who target women and homosexuals. The German Association of Lifeguards drives the point home by speaking of the responsibility of “machos who have immigrated”.
Germany is right to confront reality. We must face a culture that brutally separates men and women, creates an unbearable hierarchy by reducing the female body to the flesh, by criminalizing homosexuality. Living together means nothing more than living by following the same rules, playing the same score in the public space, agreeing to put away your original cultural dross incompatible with the liberal democracies that fought to obtain freedom and equality for all.
* Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity