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Radical Muslims in France's housing estates are waging an undeclared "intifada" against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day.

If the controlled French economy grew at a rate comparable to America's, then most of the rioting youths of the Paris suburbs would probably have otherwise been too tired after coming home from work. If France tried to be a multiracial society — more like the United States, whose secretary of state and attorney general are minorities — then there would not have been such a racial component to the class resentment. If the rioters were not almost exclusively from Muslim backgrounds, then there would not have been yet another extremist dimension to the sectarian tension. If France were not...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, director emeritus of the classics program at California State University, Fresno, and currently a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of The Western Way of War, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and Ripples of Battle. His new book is A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.   FP: Victor Hanson, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.Hanson: Thank you Jamie for having me back.FP: In your new book, you draw some powerful...

11/08/05--When I wrote this May 2002 column on France and its radical Muslim population resulting from uncontrolled borders, I predicted violence worse than the wildings in Central Park. Unfortunately, over the last two weeks, French Muslims from North Africa proved me correct, 3.5 years later. The column is as newsworthy today as it was then--perhaps more so. -- Debbie Schlussel. http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2002/05/will_america_be.html Will America Be the Next France? By Debbie Schlussel Will America be the next France-and become a radical Muslim country? Or will it remain the home of the free and the brave? That depends upon whether you agree with...

As the French intifada spreads into its second week and across the country, the French government has a dilemma. To whom does it surrender? French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin — whose name may one day be as synonymous with appeasement as Petain's is with collaboration — would like to make a deal. His problem is finding Muslim "community leaders" who can stop the rioting. In communities where law and order are absent, it is thugs with guns who are in charge, not the voices of moderation, such as they are. The rioting began Oct. 27th in the Paris suburb...

For 10 nights now, France has burned and spun.  The fire has been provided by rioters, but the spin has been provided by the French government and the mainstream media, both in Europe and in North America.  At first the riots were ignored, then portrayed as typical French-style protest, then as understandable acts of anger by an underclass made desperate by poverty, and finally they are being reluctantly described for what they are: race riots.Gangs of Arab and African Muslim men, the children and grandchildren of immigrants accepted into France following the collapse of her African empire, are conducting an...

Bonfire of the Vanities - By THEODORE DALRYMPLE - November 7, 2005 When it comes to rioting, there's no 35-hour week in France. It may be difficult nowadays to get people in what the French call the Hexagon to work on Friday afternoons, but not to riot, at least not in the "sensitive" quartiers that surround most towns and cities. The productivity of the rioters has been increasing rapidly of late, and France looks like it will be breaking its record for burnt-out cars: 1,295 on Saturday night alone and 750 on Friday night, 500 the night before, and 300...

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the US media became preoccupied with a key question: "Why do they hate us so much?" A fair-minded people, the Americans believed there must be a good, rational explanation why 19 educated, economically comfortable young men would ram planes into buildings, killing themselves along with thousands of innocents. Among the many reasons proffered, one that appeared frequently - and drew concern in Jerusalem - was that it was all due to US support for Israel. If the US would only toe a more pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian line, this argument ran, then the...

Imagine for a moment that the City of New York is engulfed in smoke from thousands of burning cars. Young men are shooting at cops and beating anyone with whom they come into contact. Imagine that for 11 days young immigrants from Arab and North African countries roamed the streets of New York carrying weapons, gasoline bombs and Molotov cocktails defying government officials and police officers who are prevented by a politically-correct orthodoxy from taking any offensive action. Then imagine that while all of this chaos is going on, night after night after night after night, the President of the...

SOME FRANCE-bashers are taking great delight in the Muslim riots that are burning French neighborhoods and claimed their first fatality Monday. But this 12-night rampage is no laughing -- or gloating -- matter. It is as tragic as it was inevitable. Coverage of the riots by major American media has been incomplete. Headlines have referred to "angry French teens" and "angry immigrants." That's misleading. According to a French official, most of these rioters are French born -- the children or grandchildren of African and Arab immigrants. The word that is missing in the headlines, and that comes in later paragraphs...

As the night falls, the "troubles" start; and the pattern is always the same. Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones, and, ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. Once the police have arrived on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats. The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back, with real bullets.The scenes described above are not from the West Bank but from 16 French cities, most of them close...

OK, enough is enough. It's clear France is no longer in control of its population. It's clear millions within its borders are struggling for freedom and independence. It's clear that these people are not rioting for the sake of rioting, they are responding to oppression from French authorities. It's clear that their uprising cannot be met with state violence, because that would only lead to a cycle of violence. It's clear that these freedom-fighters – whom I have dubbed "Paristinians" – want a state of their own. It's clear that the international community must force France to the negotiating table...

HH: I'm now joined by Victor Davis Hanson, military historian extraordinaire, and you can read him every Friday at National Review Online. Victor, good to have you back on the program. VDH: Glad to be here, Hugh. HH: You passed through Paris recently. When? VDH: Yesterday. HH: And did you get a sense of crisis as you walked around De Gaulle Airport? VDH: I did. I've never been through more security. It was...I think I had to show my passport on five different occasions. HH: Did you go into the city at all, or was this just a change of...

According to its Office du Tourisme, the big event in Evreux this past weekend was supposed to be the annual fête de la pomme, du cidre et du fromage at the Place de la Mairie. Instead, in this charmingly smouldering cathedral town in Normandy, a shopping mall, a post office, two schools, upwards of 50 vehicles and, oh yes, the police station were destroyed by - what's the word? - "youths". Over at the Place de la Mairie, M le Maire himself, Jean-Louis Debré, seemed affronted by the very idea that un soupçon de carnage should be allowed to distract...

French police made 395 arrests last night as riots intensified for the 11th consecutive night, with violence and fire engulfing towns from the North to the Mediterranean. In the impoverished suburbs and satellite towns around Paris, where the unrest began on October 27, churches, schools and warehouses were set alight. At least 1,408 vehicles were destroyed, many more than on previous nights, and the random attacks have spread into the heart of the city. In Grigny, south of the capital, a gang of around 200 youths are reported to have lured police into a housing estate before opening fire with...

The Associated Press is reporting that rioting has spread to 300 towns in France. Note to Associated Press: 300 towns is not a riot — it's a general uprising. AP says that "Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured..."Ace of Spades points out the Washington Post headline:  Rage of French Youth is a Fight for Recognition. Apparently all these rioters just want attention. The poor young things feel rejected by a cold and callous society: "We feel rejected, compared to the kids who live in better neighborhoods," said Nasim, a chunky...

In 1973, the French novelist Jean Raspail artfully predicted in the form of fiction the very real Palestinian-style intifada that now rages on the west bank of Europe: France. Ten years after the book's publication, Raspail described the "vision" he had, portrayed in the book, which lasted for ten feverish months: "They were there! A million poor wretches, armed only with their weakness and their numbers, overwhelmed by misery, encumbered with starving brown and black children, ready to disembark on our soil, the vanguard of the multititudes pressing hard against every part of the tired and overfed West. I literally...

There are very few things as amusing these days as watching the French grapple with their backyard intifada. The suburbs of Paris are now more dangerous than Jenin, and the French are getting their comeuppance for decades of snootiness, anti-American and anti-Israel agitprop, and decades of cowardice. Paris is now being targeted by violent rioting hordes. For years the French accused American racism of having produced the race riots of the 60s and 70s in the US, as well as the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King business. And the French are sure that only Jewish cussedness and just...

November 06, 2005 I haven't written about the Paris (and now perhaps French) intifada, partly because I've been too busy and partly because it's so sad. I've been saying since the early days of Power Line that France is done-for, but seeing this evidence of the phenomenon is much more harrowing than contemplating the concept. Despite my frequent and harsh criticism of France and the French (too frequent and harsh to suit my French wife), I love the city of Paris and some aspects of French culture. The demise of that city and that culture, for all the faults of...

All the Youths down in Youth-ville hated Christians a lot. But the Frinch– who all lived in Paris, just north of Youth-ville– did not. Or, more precisely, they kept Christ at arm’s length Understanding completely France’s “secular strength.” Now we call them all “Youths”, ’cause the papers won’t stress What makes them so violent– you’ll just have to guess. So all the Frinch smoked and drank and lived without fear And they waited for government checks to appear And just when their faith had been completely diluted Three Moo-si-lem “Youths” got E-lectro-cuted. “Why, they’re burning our streets!” all the Frinch...