Thinking Meat

Charles Johnson links to an MSNBC story on rapes and other atrocities committed by Arab immigrant youth in the Parisian ghettoes. He praises the story:

Normally politically correct to a fault, MSNBC/Newsweek today has a mostly unflinching look at the nightmarish life of young women in the Muslim ghettos of France: Sexism in the Cités.

I agree with Charles that it's nice of the MSNBC to at least acknowledge and report on the problem. Still, the reporters (as well as the French government) maintain a judgement-free, root-causes, it's-not-really-their-fault position that is just infuriating:

Built by socially progressive governments in the 1960s, [the cités have] since been taken over by a generation of mostly Arab immigrants—impoverished, cut off from their native lands and culture, ghettoized...

Such stories, then, are not just about urban crime and rough neighborhoods. They reflect a core issue of Muslim integration in Europe. Can the young men and women of the cites break out, or will they become ever more isolated, turning inward against themselves? Will they build their lives and relationships on egalitarian values, or on the worst of Islam and the Internet? Young men trapped in a world with no jobs and no future, and violently confused about sex, tend to make women the symbols and the victims of the frustrations around them.

“[The raped girls are] locked up in a world where their fathers have failed to break out of unemployment, where they have failed at finishing school or finding a job,” says a young woman activist with another group, Female Voices, Rebel Voices. Lacking hope or the opportunity for a better life, she adds, “all the men have left is their virility.” And some have savage ways of asserting it.

Those poor boys -- they lack jobs and are confused about whether rape is a bad thing! What do you expect them to do, anyway -- they lack hope! Seems like no atrocity on the planet can't be excused by a lack of "hope." Gang rapes, suicide bombings, mass murder -- for every worthless scumbag committing some new horror, you can always find some educated progressive to apologetically explain that what the man needed was hope.

At least MSNBC has dared to mention Islam and Arab traditions as part of the cause -- I'm sure they'll get plenty of angry letters about it, too.

The excuse-making reaches its apogee in this tsk-tsk-ain't-that-a-shame conclusion:

The problem is that to help the women of the cites in the long run, you have to help the men—not only to find jobs and education, but to learn to live in Western societies. And precious little has been done about that.

Wow, so these alleged men need more handouts from those mean old French: it's not enough to feed and house them for life, now the French have to find jobs for them and ways to integrate them into a western society, so that the "men" learn not to rape women. I mean, this is just beyond words, and talk about your inversion: normally, integration into a society happens after the newcomers learn the rules. (Never mind that the Arabs aren't interested in integration, and that the rule against raping women isn't exactly unique to the West. I believe it's dealt with pretty harshly in the Arab world, though of course the woman is often killed, too, do defend the so-called "honor" of the so-called "men" in her family.) But no, see, we can never actually blame the crime on the perpetrators, much less -- oh, I don't know -- imprison or deport them. No, no, their savagery is all the fault of those who have allowed them to live in France, and have provided all the necessities of life, at their own expense.

All that's missing is the requisite line about Israeli occupation.