“Our passports may say that we are French, but we don’t feel French because we are never accepted here,” said Faoud, standing at a corner store in Les Izards, Mr. Merah’s dilapidated neighborhood. “No one can excuse what he did, but he is a product of French society, of the feeling that he had no hope, and nothing to lose.”
“It was not Al Qaeda that created Mohammed Merah,” he said. “It was France.”
The issue of France’s failure to fully integrate immigrants and provide them with a sense of belonging and opportunity has been notably absent from the country’s presidential campaign, even as some candidates have intensified their calls to limit immigration and to root out homegrown terrorism.
-- Wojtek http://wsokol.blogspot.com/