A firestorm in France

France was set ablaze after a Paris police officer shot a teenager who did not comply with clear orders to stop his car.

According to NPR and NYT, Nahel Merzouk, 17, a French citizen of Algerian-Moroccan descent, was driving a Mercedes with Polish license plates, speeding in a bus lane in the morning rush hour. Two officers on motorcycles chased his car and tried to stop Nahel, who “didn’t stop until he was cut off by a traffic jam, the prosecutor said.” The officers told him to stop the engine. “You are going to get a bullet in the head,” a voice is heard in a video recording of the incident. Instead of obeying the police order, Nahel moved the car forward. A single shot is heard. Nahel died at the scene.

The tragedy shocked the country.

Pascal Prache, a top French prosecutor, said that Nahel “was too young to drive unaccompanied” and that he “had been known to the police for not complying with traffic stops and had been summoned to juvenile court in September for such an incident.” The officer who acknowledged firing his gun said he “did so for a number of reasons, from the desire to stop the vehicle to fears that the car might hit him or someone else.” When the officer was handed a preliminary charge of voluntary homicide, France was already on fire.

Riots—often violent—gripped major French cities. Scenes of chaos and fires became common, as businesses, shops, and cars were set ablaze. For at least six days, mayhem persisted, until things calmed down a bit after over 45,000 police officers were deployed throughout the nation to curb the violence.

More than 4,000 arrests were made in three days, and notably, about 30 percent of these were minors. Undoubtedly, not all of those arrested are North African immigrants or refugees, but a significant number of them were. They were driven by a sense of injustice and by claims the French system is racist against them as North Africans—ideas fueled by social media.

The death of Nahel is absolutely tragic, and it could have been prevented. He could have complied with police orders, and the officers could have used other means—instead of shooting him—after he fled the scene. Killing him was unquestionably wrong, but this tragedy—as horrific as it is—reflects a deeper problem in France and the West in general.

That problem is the fanciful dream of cultural assimilation.

France over the years has welcomed millions of North African immigrants, offering them a better quality of life, an education, financial assistance, and a great future—all of which they couldn’t have obtained in their home countries, or they wouldn’t have immigrated in the first place. This set of incentives is an essential part of the French culture and society. This is precisely why immigrating to France has been an ultimate goal for the vast majority of North Africans.

But these incentives are not the only part of the French life, and immigrants come to France with their own cultural norms, habits, and dispositions. While they leave their original homes, their homes (in the form of cultural values) don’t leave them.

And cultures are not all the same. While many immigrants may indeed cherish and adopt French values and cultural patterns, a significant number of them don’t. They love to benefit from the system and its resources but hate to adopt its cultural values and adapt to its rules and requirements. They become legal French citizens but are hardly French in any cultural sense.

In particular, many North Africans look down at Western cultures, as they have often been fed notions of religious and cultural superiority over the West. The rationale goes: take their wealth but don’t assume their values. To some, the Muslim culture prevalent in North Africa is superior to what they erroneously view as the “Christian” West. Even if North Africans were basically nominal Muslims, the sense of superiority and entitlement is often huge. Ironically, this sense is amplified and fueled by circulated claims against the system as being racist against minorities.

The death of Nahel is tragic and the French justice system is taking the tragedy with full seriousness, but it might help if France would wake up from her fanciful dreams that all cultures are equal.