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| Europe |
| Frogs to Princes: Paris to Washington, DC |
| 2006-10-04 |
| In Paris today, middle class wage earners are forced to move out of the city to find housing for a modest family of four: the Cachan refugees need comfortable lodgings for families of ten and, what’s more, it can’t be scattered here and there; they want a reconstituted village, no less. Movie stars like Emmanuelle Béart and Djamel Debouzze photo-op with them, volunteers bring them food and disposable diapers, NGOs and extremist housing rights associations are on the scene. The mayor who offered them the gym is caught in his own trap: either he gets the heartless authorities to pull them out, or he faces the wrath of parents of school children deprived of physical education and exposed to an increasingly unhealthy, tense, and now violent situation. Next checkpoint — passport control. Two policemen in glass cages, and two lines: one for Muslims, one for infidels. You think I’m kidding? Two lines. One, slow line for miscellaneous others. One fast track for a party of about twenty escorted by a high ranking border police officer and a female underling, both speaking Arabic, who usher them through the checkpoint with VIP attention. The police officer takes all the passports, calls the passengers to step forward one by one as he hands the passports to the agent on duty who expedites affairs with great speed and minimum attention. Some of the men remove their dark glasses. The women walk through in voluminous black hijab, unperturbed. The last in the line of the privileged few were a family composed of a little boy eating a cookie, his father in casual dress, and his mother, a slim woman, small as a girl, her face completely hidden behind a black veil, only her eyes visible. I wanted to see if she would be asked to lift the veil, but my law-abiding reflexes prevailed over legitimate journalistic curiosity. I assumed I would arouse suspicion if I lingered to gawk at the exotic spectacle. A great read. Pajamasmedia scored a coup when it named Nidra Poller as its Paris editor. |
| Posted by:mrp |