Intifada on the Elysées
Over the past fifteen days, the world has been awakened to a reality regarding the state of modern Europe that the leaders of the EU and the United States have wished to gloss over for some time now; the very heart of the matter is the future of Europe. I’m certain we’ve all seen the headlines referring to angry French teens and angry immigrants and urban poor’ It is a telling state of denial. When asked French officials will confirm, most of these rioters are French by birth, but are the children or grandchildren of African and Arab immigrants. The word that is missing in the headlines, and that comes in later paragraphs in news stories, is: Muslim. Hence, the frequent rioters’ cry: Allahu Akbar. God is great. Not that you’ll hear that on CNN.
Al-Andalus is being reborn in the immigrant neighborhoods and seething anti-Western environments being facilitated by the welfare systems of France. France will suffer an Al-Andalus style meltdown over the next twenty years, if it refuses to assert its French nature. For once, the cultural imperative of the French might be something worthy of a Western state.
For those of you who are privy only to the U.S. media or BBC portrayals of events, I’ll provide some background that has been sorely lacking in online news reporting, and in the American media. These riots began in Clichy-sous-Bois, when a concerned citizen noticed a group of muslim youths committing a property crime against an automobile; for those of you who have never been to the Parisian suburbs, these crimes are not uncommon, just under-reported because of the abject terror the few remaining French live in due to their hostile and unrepentantly anti-assimilation neighbors.
French Arabs were outraged at the very idea of French police entering their neighborhoods, never mind that they were called to end a crime in progress– not that this is unusal. Clichy-sous-Bois is not unlike a hundred other European muslim communities, virtually dominated by criminal gangs and unpatrolled by police who fear for their own saftey. They could not, however, disregard a civilian complaint– teenage boys (including Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traore, 15 who later died while police attempted to apprehend them) were stealing parts off parked cars. As Amir Taheri described it in the New York Post: “A brief chase took place in the street, and two of the youths, who were not actually chased by the police, sought refuge in a cordoned-off area housing a power pylon. Both were electrocuted. Once news of their deaths was out, Clichy was all up in arms. With cries of ‘God is great,’ bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.â€
Arabs in Clichy-sous-Bois seem to believe their criminal proclivities have precedence over French civil law, and the French have never done anything to dissuade them of the notion, like enforcing the law. Recriminations are widespread among the French law enforcement community, as no one wants to ‘own up’ to the process of having lost these communities to criminals. Islamic fundamentalists operate openly within the French penal system. Eerily similar situations are developing in American prisons. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, in September 2003, some 5.5 percent of the federal inmate population (172,785 on Oct. 6, 2003) was Muslim, compared to about 1.3% of the general population.
France isn’t alone in this– in a rare moment of lucidity, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, recently observed “One of the greatest dishonesties of European policy and intellectual discourse has been that multicultural issues can only be discussed in one direction — the ‘accepting society.’ Whoever calls on the immigrants themselves to integrate better is seen as a nationalist monster who lacks ‘openness.’”
What does the muslim community offer in reply to these growing concerns? A message of hope and concilliation?
Consider the statement of a German radical Islamists that was recounted in Tony Blakely’s “The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?”: “Germany is an Islamic country. Islam is in the home, in schools. Germans will be outnumbered. We [Muslims] will say what we want. We’ll live how we want. It’s outrageous that Germans demand we speak their language. Our children will have our language, our laws, our culture.”
More recently, in response to the situation in France, the Arab community has been equally as clear; Dyab Abou Jahjah, the leader of the Brussels-based Arab European League says: “We reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don’t believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I’m in my country, not the country of the Westerners.” The course of conflict is nearly certain when framed in these terms that are little more than jihadist. Authorities found a factory for homemade bombs in Evry, a town south of Paris. Rioters have fired upon police multiple times, despite the French refusing to use firearms against rioters.
Historically speaking, France has served as a warning-canary for Western civilization; its repugnan embrace of the French Revolution inaugurating an era of violent political libertinism. The Paris Revolution of 1848 sparking revolution throughout Europe; French inadequacy during World War II plunging Europe into Nazi servitude; France’s inability to hold Algeria signaling an end to effective colonialism; French capitulation to terrorism in Algeria emboldening the foes of Western civilization to carry on the jihadist campaign that threatens Western Civilization to this day.
Tonight, as the French pray for calm to return to their cities and suburbs, and tomorrow as they assess the damage, keep in mind that the free world isn’t free by the exertations of theory. It is, as John Stewart Mill opined in the 19th century:
” War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
[Author's note: parts of these arguements aught to be rightly attributed as being inspired by many authors and contributors to the news flow out of Paris. Among those who's ideas I admit I admire and respect on these matters are Tony Blakely who's recent book presciently predicted incidents like the rioting in France and the London bus bombings before they occured. Thomas Sowell, as usual, provides a stinging critique to those who would attribute this to 'underlying economic factors'. Bill Murchiso's directness is one of the few honest critiques I have seen in the print media. French television is doing yeoman's work in covering the situation as well. Christopher Dickey of Newsweek provided an unexpected breath of fresh air concerning these events as well, though I disagree with his conclusions.]