Who gets to be "French"? Two views of "French-ness".
The question arose afresh in the wake of the Toulouse killings. No one doubted that the perpetrator was 23-year-old Mohammed Merah, a native son of Algerian descent. But was Mr. Merah French?
Impossible, declared four members of Parliament belonging to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right party. In a joint statement, they insisted that Mr. Merah “had nothing French about him but his identity papers.”
Nonsense, retorted the left-wing journal Libération: “Merah is certainly a monster, but he was a French monster.” A childhood friend of Mr. Merah provided a poignant elaboration: “Our passports may say that we are French, but we don’t feel French because we were never accepted here. 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. It was France.”
These opposing approaches to what it means to be French — one rooted in an uncompromising ideal of assimilation, the other grounded in the messy realities of multiculturalism — struck a chord with me. While researching a book on the politics of diversity with my wife, Shareen Blair Brysac, I encountered not only the exclusionary attitude prevailing in metropolitan Paris, but also the more tolerant worldview epitomized by the port city of Marseille — a worldview that the rest of France would be well served to embrace.
To exclusionists, the test of French-ness is straightforward: have you relinquished any other identity you might have had? As articulated by President Sarkozy in 2011: “If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you are not welcome in France.
Hence the contrast one experiences in Marseille, France’s second largest city. Its 840,000 inhabitants include an estimated 240,000 Muslims (more than any other European city). Yet it is famously welcoming. Here, as we were told by Jean Roatta, a politician representing the port’s upscale central district, “you’re Marseillais before you are French.” In the fall of 2005, as ethnically charged riots consumed Parisian suburbs and spread to scores of other cities and towns, peace prevailed in Marseille.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/opinion/who-gets-to-be-french.html?_r=2
Interesting that France (and many other countries) is struggling with what it means to be a citizen. It always seems to come down to a trade-off (or some compromise) between an expectation of assimilation versus a tolerance of multiculturalism.
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that would be like criticizing the shipbuilder for the USS Cole having a big hole in the side 
