Page - 134 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Souley Hassane | Mainstream Media vs. Ethnic Minority Media 134 competitiveness in society. They criminalize the poor and accuse them of willful dependency. The renaissance of the state is seen as a struggle against permissiveness and entails the reconstruction of political authoritarianism. These people praise an America at war with Iraq and are indignant at France’s refusal to interfere in an unjustified war. To sum up, there is a coherence exhibited by these phrases and actions connecting these media-hyped state- ments to a specific worldview. In his Rappel à l’ordre, Daniel Lindenberg writes (Lindenberg 2002, p. 12): The impulse to counteraction is now expanding in broad daylight in different areas: that of May 1968, that of mass culture, that of the rights of mankind, that of anti-racism, and most recently that of Islam. So many untouchable totems are now being toppled one after the other by an iconoclastic verve which is progressively losing its sense of guilt. Progressively, because we are speaking of a mechanism; each procedure favors the freeing-up of the next, all the while making opinions acceptable which were formerly judged intolerable. Therefore, the assault on the events of May ’68 makes all the easier the attacks against schools and the university, and make the expression of ‘anti-youth’ points of view banalities. In the same way, the trial of anti-racism allows xenophobic discourse to become everyday as well, going beyond its traditional limits, as the recent wave of Islamophobia shows. In total, the destruction is weighty: open reflection itself is suddenly paralyzed in the face of passions hereto considered inadmissible. France, then, takes on the colors of American neo-conservatism without the elements of religious revival. Is this only due to the ‘negative influence’ of the neo-conservative United States? Can all of this be accounted for by American mercantile, ultra-religious, political neo-conservatism? It is necessary to con- sider the ideological heritage of France’s colonial past in this context. Colonial archives on the Muslim policy of colonial France reveal that the current con- cepts are to be found at the center of the colonial machine. In colonial litera- ture, the Muslim and the ‘Negro’ are associated with barbarism and non- civilization in caricatured, stereotyped and, in particular, racist terms. In re- reading colonial archives, one finds ‘un-thinkables’ which currently express the shift to the right in French thought. When Georges Frêche speaks of “sub- human”, Pascal Sevran of the “black prick”, and Fogiel of the “odors of blacks”, there is a direct link to the colonial theories on the ‘noble savage’. In much the same way, the link between Islam and fanaticism and violence has its ideological roots in the dark night of colonialism. The connection to American neo-conservatives complements an ideological conception nurtured in part by