Posted on 11/07/2005 10:49:11 AM PST by 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.
No, only since the 1920's. When Paris was beseiged by the Germans in 1870, Parisians let themselves be reduced to eating rats, rather than give in. They fought with great courage during WWI--the lists on war memorials, even in very small towns,are heartbreakingly long. When they ran out of transport to bring troops to the Battle of the Marne, the Army commandered the taxis of Paris to get troops to the front. (Take note, Mayor Nagin). But they lost their best and bravest, and the survivors have shamed them.
Either way, the cathedral of Notre Dame will be turned into a mosque. The French won't care because after all, it's nothing but a "museum" now that Christianity is all but over in France.
Yes, and besides, they were acting out of national self interest when they stirred the pot with England's American colonies. They were in the middle of of a war with England and they helped us to distract the Brits, not out of support for our revolution.
If the insurgency in Iraq were winning there, then we would not be seeing what we are now seeing in France.
Isn't this uprising an admission on the part of the "Arab street" that Iraq is a loser for them?
Could this be a deliberate smokescreen to obscure a gradual, stealthy exit from Iraq on the part of the jihad?
Ping for later reading
The surrender monkeys are having their bastille stormed all over again. Get out the white flags before they trash the Eiffel tower.
Bush Fault...
Thanks - Now I'll have that dang tune ringing in my ears for a day or two!
"We will not be able to resist jihad without recovering pride in western civilization." Robert Spencer - The Politically Incorrect Guide (PIG) to Islam.
Some say that England really did have a right to the throne of France.
The Crusades gave Europe 200 years of breathing space. After the Crusades, Islam was again on the march with victories in Kosovo, Varna, culminating in defeat at Vienna in 1683. The Crusades made possible the Renaissance and explosion of scientific inquiry.
"Or simply follow the old British system of shoooting the ringleaders. And how do you identify the ringleaders? It's very simple. Every 5th man!"
"Anyone else wanna negoitiate??"
Corbin Dallas, The Fifth Element
"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. "
This article and the above statement is very concise. What France can do about it, as well as all other major Western Democracies:
1) Limit immigration to 50,000 total immigrants per year, or scaled based on population. The immigrants allowed in must have a degree of some kind and a specific trade that can be utilized such as Doctors, Engineers, etc. No more temporary work or college visas, if you come into the country, you become a resident. These 'temporary' programs have been strongly abused in the last decade. It is too easy to become a citizen in a Western country now.
2) Discontinue any State benefits to any legal immigrant that has lived here longer then six months. After six months, an immigrant should have learned enough of the language to get buy and apply for a job. Employers can and should decide dress codes, not Muslims nor any government for that matter. The ban on head scarves was stupid. They should have left it up to employers who employ Muslims.
"US gun ownership may very well be preventing terrorism in this country as we speak."
I don't know that it prevented an attack, but I can tell you US citizen gun ownership would stop this nonsense quickly. I think France is going to see a small civil war.
Well fine - let them keep their little palestinian states within France. Just cut off all of the unemployment/welfare, etc. and let them fend for themselves.
Simple rule. Anyone who runs is a terrorist. Anyone who stands still is a well disciplined terrorist.
IF the French saved our asses in the Revolutionary war.Which they didnt.---- Actually before the Revolutionary war they armed the Indians against us.---But IF they helped us at all it was because they wanted to damage the English which they had kept losing wars too, It wasnt because they wished to help us.
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