France In Flames: Immigration, Not “Discrimination”, Is The Problem
For example, in the New York
Post (November 8, 2005), the neoconservative
columnist Ralph Peters
"French abuse of Arab and African minorities — mostly
Muslims — made it only a matter of time before the
prison-like ghettos exploded. If your skin is brown
or black in la belle France, you haven`t got a
chance at a decent life. Now the
wretched of the earth have exploded in rage…
Meanwhile, every American who believes in racial
equality and human dignity should sympathize with the
rioters, not with the effete bigots on the Seine."
But is France really so “racist”?
The most popular French novelist of the 19th century,
Alexandre Dumas père,
The Three Musketeers and
The Count of Monte Cristo, was
one-fourth black. But in France, it just didn`t come
To an extent that would surprise
many Americans misled by immigration-enthusiast
propaganda, France too sees itself as a
“Proposition Nation.” Its national self-image is
built not around race, but around mastering French
language and culture. Thus
Leopold Senghor, a black African who wrote
exquisite French poetry about "negritude",
served in the French cabinet way back in the 1950s,
before becoming the first president of
The French believe in the
assimilative power of their language so much that, for
175 years, they`ve taken criminals from around the
world, given them
new French names and taught them French, and molded
them into perhaps the finest fighting unit in the world:
That`s why the rioters, most of
whom were born in France to immigrants, speak French.
The French abominate
bilingual education as one of those awful American
But it`s not working with these
What evidence do the pundits have
to convict the French of discrimination? Essentially,
it`s the immigrant ethnicities`
lack of accomplishment.
You can sense the pundits are
thinking something like this:
Surely, if those
snotty French weren`t so mean to the Algerians and
Guineans, then the children of the immigrants would be
designing Airbuses and getting elected to the
Académie Française in the exact same proportions as
see, if the Muslims aren`t exactly the same as everybody
else, well, that would be a bad thing, and only bad
believe bad things might be true. And if anybody
called me a
bad person, I would just die.
Answer: because the problem lies
less with the French than with the Muslims and Africans.
Back in September, I was widely
pointing out that the low average IQs of the people
stuck in New Orleans meant that the post-hurricane
collapse of law and order there was entirely
predictable. Many people, especially intellectuals,
don`t like to think about IQ.
But it matters.
The brutal fact is that the
economic failings of France`s Muslim and African
immigrants stem in large measure from their low average
The French, being the ultimate
"Proposition Nation" with a deep-rooted
ideological contempt for multiculturalism, have
made it illegal to collect statistics by ethnicity.
But we can roughly estimate the IQ of France`s Muslims
studies assembled in the
landmark 2002 book
IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and
lists six studies of national average IQ in
Caucasian Muslim countries and four of Muslim immigrants
The average IQs by country range
from 78 in Qatar to 90 in Turkey, 83 in Egypt, 84 in
Iran. Two studies both show 87 in Iraq.
Perhaps most relevant for assessing
the French immigrants` IQs: two studies in the
Netherlands of Moroccan immigrants—many immigrants
in France come from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. They
averaged 84 and 85. Likewise, Turks in the Netherlands
scored 88 and 85.
The black Africans, who are
committing much of the arson, average even lower. Lynn
and Vanhanen tabulated
31 studies of national average IQ in black
countries. The highest recorded was 80.
It`s likely that black Africans in
France score higher than in Africa, due to better
nutrition, health, and education—just as
African-Americans average about 85, well above their
But the key point is this: the IQ
gap between the white majority in France and the Muslims
appears to be at least as large as the IQ difference
between whites and African-Americans—which causes
so many problems in this country.
Further, France is a particularly
difficult place for the not-so-bright.
Much as it would pain them to admit
it, the French are not the smartest people in the world.
Their national average IQ of 98 in Lynn and Vanhanen`s
book is no higher than America`s, and well below that of
several northeast Asian countries.
And below the 100 average in
the U.K., where this stuff was
But few countries have ever valued
raw brainpower more than the French do, with their
obsession with Cartesian rationality, abstraction, and
The French state has constructed a
society that is both hierarchical and
meritocratic, with much highly competitive testing
of students. Entry into the
French elites depends upon passing exams to first
get into the prestigious colleges, or
Then, to graduate from college in
France, you must pass a final exam in which you write an
abstruse but facile philosophical essay off the top of
your head in a few hours.
And the ability to intellectualize
at a high level of abstraction, even if you don`t know
what you are talking about, is an important status
marker for impressing the opposite sex while flirting in
cafes. Michael of the
2Blowhards culture blog explains:
"Part of Being French is enjoying philosophical
chitchat, the more fashionable the better. We may not
have much patience with it, but the French love the
spectacle of radical posturing. We tend to engage with
the substance of a radical position. For the French, the
attitudinizing is the point. It adds spice to life; it`s
sexy intellectual titillation… That strange, nonsensical
combo of rhapsodizing, fantasizing, and the stirring-up
of logical pirouettes? All the French do it—it`s like a
writes in the Washington Post (November
in Paris on the night of Chirac`s electoral victory over
the National Front leader,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2002. Although the campaign
had been dominated by immigration issues and race,
vigorous channel-surfing produced not a single black or
North African face on any of the post-election talk
shows. That doesn`t excuse the violence, but it does
help explain it."
But one reason for this might be
that, unlike Americans who will tolerate inane tripe
from their pundits and politicians, the French like
their political performers to be cerebral dazzlers. They
just don`t have much patience for
affirmative action celebrities.
The French admiration for brains
applies to private industry as well. The French don`t
work very hard, with a
35-hour workweek and a minimum of five weeks of
vacation annually. But they work smart, with a high
enough productivity per hour worked to afford a way of
life that remains widely envied.
The standard neocon response to immigration, clearly
seen for example in a derivative thinker like
Tamar Jacoby, is that mass immigration would be all
hunky-dory if it weren`t for those evil leftist
intellectuals (probably of French descent) who seduce
innocent immigrants into
identity politics, affirmative action, etc.
But France shows that you can follow all the convenient
neocon ideas and still have minority groups rioting in
course, the French won`t be allowed to discuss any
effective solutions for their problem—such as the
push-pull plan to encourage Muslim emigration I
outlined on Sunday.
respectable opinion is telling the French that they
affirmative action quotas on themselves. (Indeed,
that was the plan of supposed tough-guy Interior
Nicolas Sarkozy all along.)
And, of course, free speech—never France`s
strong point—will have to be replaced by
“anti-hate” laws to
suppress the inevitable native protests, especially
when affirmative action is seen to be failing.
Not for the first time on VDARE.COM, we see that
not strength. It`s weakness—the
subversion of hard-won liberal principles (quotas
are incompatible with
freedom of association and
equality before the law). And, back of that, it`s
rioting in the streets.
Moral: If you want to preserve the civilized world`s
traditional freedoms, don`t import large groups of
foreigners with radically different average IQs.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and