Why France is Burning

The Daily Mail and melaniephillips.com ^ | 11/07/05 | Melanie Phillips

[mojito]

Night after night, France has been under attack by its Arab Muslim minority with the French authorities having totally lost control of the streets.

What started as an ugly localised disturbance in Clichy-sous-Bois — a grotty Paris suburb — after two Muslim youths were accidentally electrocuted has spiralled into an unprecedented national crisis. Extreme violent disorder has spread to cities such as Toulouse, Lille, Nantes, the cathedral town of Evreux in Normandy and even to the centre of Paris.

Thousands of cars have been set on fire and hundreds of people arrested across France. The rioters have torched post offices and fire stations, schools and synagogues, buses and warehouses, fired upon police, and doused a handicapped woman with petrol and set her alight.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-minded Interior Minister, has been blamed for inflaming the situation by his uncompromising language. French policy in general has been blamed for herding poor Arabs into suburban ghettoes where they have been left to fester in high unemployment and poverty.

The disturbances are thus being portrayed as race riots caused by official discrimination and insensitivity. But this is a gross misreading of the situation. It is far more profound and intractable. What we are seeing is, in effect, a French intifada: an uprising by French Muslims against the state.

When the police tried to take back the streets, they were driven out with the demand that they leave what the protesters called the ‘occupied territories’. And far from the claim that the disturbances have been caused by French policy of segregating Muslims into ghettoes, this is a war being waged for separate development.

Some Muslims have even called for the introduction of the ancient Ottoman ‘millet’ system of autonomous development for different communities.

The director of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, has previously suggested that France should be regarded as a ‘house of covenant’, by which he appears to mean that France should enter into an agreement with its Muslims to grant them autonomy within the state.

His response to the current violence is not to take steps to bring his own community under control but to suggest instead that the French government shows ‘respect’ and sends ‘a message of peace’.

But M. Sarkozy and the police are determined to take back the streets. The Muslims are equally determined to keep territory they feel they have conquered from the French state with which they feel no identification.

This crisis, however, did not start with the electrocution tragedy in Clichy-sous-Bois. It has been going on for decades. The scale of it is astonishing. Nine thousand police cars have been torched or stoned since the beginning of this year. The problem has not been M. Sarkozy’s tough approach. On the contrary — until now this permanent grumbling insurrection has simply been ignored.

For more than twenty years France’s Muslim areas have been out of control. Indeed, they only turned into Muslim ghettoes in the first place because Muslim violence and harassment forced everyone else out. And they became no-go areas for the police, seen by the Muslims as occupation forces entering their territory.

In schools in such areas, teachers trying to teach French or European history have been threatened with their lives by both pupils and their parents. In some cases young French people have converted to Islam just to escape the harassment.

Blaming an official policy of segregation is wide of the mark. The fact is that French Muslims want to be segregated. The ghettoes are a way of ensuring a separate Islamic existence without having to assimilate into French society.

The fact is that whatever policies different European countries have pursued to deal with minorities, they have not cracked this problem. France has enforced a rigid policy of state secularism and assumed that all minorities would adopt French values simply by being French.

By contrast, the British and other Europeans have adopted multiculturalism, which means giving minorities equal status to the majority, and have bent over backwards to be accommodating to them and not give offence.

Yet while France was burning, there were riots over several days in Denmark over the publication of cartoons satirising the prophet Mohammed. In the super-tolerant Netherlands, the film-maker Theo van Gogh was murdered exactly a year ago because he had made an ‘insulting’ film about Islam. The Dutch immigration minister has had to wear a bullet-proof vest after shots were fired into her office, and death threats have been made against other ministers who have spoken against Islamist violence.

In Britain, British Muslims turned themselves into human bombs last July to murder as many of their fellow citizens as they could. We are told this was because of the war in Iraq. But France was a principal opponent of that war, and yet it is now being torched from Normandy to the Mediterranean.

For every country, a different reason can be found to blame it for the attacks being mounted upon it. Yet the common factor is the hostility of Muslims to the countries in which they have settled.

Clearly, not all fall into this category. Thousands of British Muslims are highly integrated and live law-abiding and productive lives. But it is equally clear that across Europe, those moderates are either unable or unwilling to stop those who want to impose their values on the majority.

And European governments have played into their hands. As the writer Bat Ye’Or reveals in her book Eurabia, the European Union and the Arab League entered into a series of official agreements some thirty years ago guaranteeing that Muslim immigrants in Europe would not be compelled to adapt in any way ‘to the customs of the host countries.’

This is all bound up with the erosion of national identities across Europe. This has affected even France, once a ferocious proponent of French culture which was imposed through a centralised schools system, a strong police force and national military service.

But now the schools system and the police have been weakened and national service has gone. Banning the hijab (Islamic headscarf) in schools represented a flickering of the old national certainty as France sniffed the danger that had arisen in its midst. But it was too little, and maybe too late.

Even now Britain, France and the rest of Europe are still in varying stages of denial over Muslim unrest. Reluctant even to admit that religion is central to this phenomenon, they look instead for ways to blame themselves and use the insult of ‘Islamophobia’ to shut down debate.

The warning for us from the disturbing events in France could not be clearer. We must end the ruinous doctrine of multiculturalism and reassert British identity and British values — and insist that although Muslims are a valued minority, they must abide by majority rules.

But if France fails to hold the line, the fall-out will be incalculable for us and for all of Europe.

[Dunstan McShane]

Yes, France has a great heritage way back when. If they would only acknowledge it instead of being embarrassed by it.

Yeah, but you know what it would take for them to acknowledge it. They'd essentially have to repudiate most of their history since the French revolution.

[Polyxene]

"They seem to not even begin to grasp that events would spiral back INTO control if they shot about 100 of them."

I guess "Kill or be killed" is not in the French vocabulary.

[pabianice]

How do you say, "Is Paris Burning?" in Arabic?

[rang1995]

yeah good luck
current vegas odds 50-1 (FRANCE)1-50 Muslims

[pabianice]

One cannot help but wonder how France's response to this attack would be unfolding if the French citizenry also had 230,000,000 privately owned firearms...

[Youngman442002]

It will be interesting to watch how soon the French Police start shooting the perps...if they don't.... it will go on forever or until it gets cold...if they won't.... same thing...if they do and do it well..it stops overnight...we need to learn as to what stops the perps..because this movie will soon be playing at a theatre near you...meaning us...

as I look down on my new shipment of ammo...1500 rounds no less......no more....

[MindBender26]

>Close all the mosques, deport the imams who are feeding this hate, and if anybody has a problem with it, deport them too.

No, Way to expensive, too time consuming, etc.

Shoot the rioters. Period

Case closed.

[Nameless]

Why France is Burning

Because they Celebrate Diversity™?

[mosquitobite]

The fact is that French Muslims want to be segregated. The ghettoes are a way of ensuring a separate Islamic existence without having to assimilate into French society.

Doesn't Spain have the largest Muslim population? How come none of the news articles I've read mention Spain?

http://www.crisismagazine.com/april2002/cover.htm

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

[backhoe]

Thanks for looking- Our own Prime Choice ( consult his profile page for more ) does excellent, pointed work.

[Roccus]

I think that 200+ year old debt has been repaid many times over in treasure and blood!!

[Siena Dreaming]

Absolutely right. They'd even have to go back to the 100 years war IMO.

[isrul]

Even if these mischievous youths pulled a Ceausescu on Chirac and that other panty waist, I doubt Western Europe would awake.

[Dunstan McShane]

Absolutely right. They'd even have to go back to the 100 years war IMO.

You may have a point. It's hard to think of a French historical figure in the past half-millenium to rival Joan of Arc. And if an actual Joan turned up in modern-day France, she'd probably be held in prison as a troublemaker.

[TASMANIANRED]

Logical consequence from years of socialist policy.

[lemura]

Please remember that these people saved our asses in the Revolutionary War.

Incorrect - the France of today is France in name only (FINO). The French who built Versailles, who were our allies in 1781, and who overran Europe until 1815 were all killed during WWI. Today's French are descendents of the cowards and weaklings who survived Verdun, et al.

[sean327]

"Please remember that these people saved our asses in the Revolutionary War."

Yeah and we paid em' back by saving their sorry butts in WWI and WWII. And they spit on us every chance they get. The soapless ones did this to themselves!

[mad puppy]

Great, though rather frightening article. Note the response that I'm responding to as well. Now where did I just hear that comment??? Oh yeah. From you at lunch today!

US gun ownership may very well be preventing terrorism in this country as we speak.

[Dick Vomer]

Why France is Burning

1. Cause they're pussies

2. Cause Muslim yutes got a lot of free time on their hands since the "youth" don't have to work in order to eat.

3. Cause the PC news media didn't adequately present this as an uprising waiting for a bogus excuse to happen... an accidental electrocution of two fleeing suspects.

4. Failure to take the threat seriously and immediately stop the instigators and leaders of the mob.... and now that it's widespread there is no "one leader".

5. No assimilation desired by the insurgents involved, they only want their areas left to Muslim law.

6. Failure of socialism on all levels of employment, job creation, business environment, and French patriotism.

7. No leadership

8.France is filled with pussies that don't know how to kick a bully's ass.... so they'd rather turn they're nose up, sniff and state how stupid Americans in general and Bush specifically is on Islamic relations......

9...and 10... Cause they're pussies. note the large cemeteries filled with American, British and Canadian men who gave their lives to free France.....oh, did I mention that France is filled with pussies?

[RightWhale]

They want their third world. It might be that France has made it too expensive and cumbersome to create new subdivisions legally, so the third worlders are going about it extralegally just like in their home country. America has a lot of this squatter law going on, and some of it is brand new rather than leftover from the settling of the West.