1978:
1987:
1998:
2010:
On a related note, seeing that the majority of the French team is black brings to mind something I've always wondered about. A few years ago the neo-con press was going crazy about "Muslim" riots in France. The country takes no official count of national origins or racial makeup so we all took their word for it. We heard that the youngsters in these "Muslim" neighborhoods wore baggy pants, listened to rap music and shot each other over sneakers. When one kid from their neighborhood got killed by cops, they rioted. That doesn't sound like North Africans to me, but a certain other group we're familiar with in America.
The New York Times reported at the time "a majority of the youths committing the acts are Muslim, and of African or North African origin." For people more familiar with the French situation, is the ghetto problem predominately a black or North African one (or an even combination of both)? If it's mostly blacks who happen to have a Muslim background aping American hip-hop culture, it would make about as much sense to call this an Islamic problem as it would to refer to the Rodney King riots as a Baptist issue, though it wouldn't be surprising that that's the line neo-cons would take. Anecdotally, I spent one night in Paris and it looked like Chicago, not Algiers.
