Riotism

Ironic Update Below

Paris is burning but, until recently, few -- outside of Al Jazeera -- noticed. Either (a) no one cares the city of light is on fire; or (b) someone's hiding the ball. The correct answer?: (c) all of the above.

There's been ten straight days of rioting, beginning in the suburbs, overtaking Paris and the rest of France, and now spreading to Denmark as well.

This isn't non-violent, says the Telegraph (UK):

So far more than 800 people have been arrested and 3,500 vehicles torched, mainly in the working-class, high-immigration outer suburbs of Paris where unemployment is as high as 20 percent.

But Saturday night's rioting was the most destructive so far as 1,300 vehicles were set alight and 349 people arrested.

Brainster, MarathonPundit and No Pasaràn have pictures. Several innocents are dead including, most horribly, a disabled woman firebombed on a bus. Which explains why Iran warned the French government on Sunday not to overreact in violation of rioters' human rights. The word "absurd" has lost all meaning: Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi called Chirac seeking an end to the violence.

David Warren on Real Clear Politics begins at the beginning:

As well as we can now reconstruct, it began in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburban, North African ghetto, which has been a police no-go area for several years (like many other Muslim ghettoes in Europe), and where young, declaredly Islamist, thugs rule the streets by day and night. (Their war cry, while hurling missiles and setting fires, is "Allahou Akbar!" -- "God is great!" There is no possible doubt about their orientation.) . . .

So everyone knows who started the riots, right? Not by reading the MSM. At Front Page Magazine, Robert Spencer explains:

From many accounts one would think that the riots have been caused by France’s failure to implement Marxism. “The unrest,” AP explained, has highlighted the division between France’s big cities and their poor suburbs, with frustration simmering in the housing projects in areas marked by high unemployment, crime and poverty.” Another AP story declared flatly that the riots were over “poor conditions in Paris-area housing projects.”

Simply put, the European media belched forth a week of lies, downplaying the riots as youthful pranks (at worst, gangs), while cutting references to the young rioters' religion--"African origin" being the common circumlocution.

Fortunately, Mark Steyn in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times clarifies:

"French youths," huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as "French": They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive "Arab street," but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

Until recently, the American press played along: the New York Times avoided the "T" and "I" words, apparently concluding neither "terrorism" nor "Islamic" are fit to print should they validate President Bush's GWOT. And no one's badgering the French for an accurate body count.

But the violence is real: Over the weekend, French police found a small bomb factory in a Paris suburb. And the cute little tykes started shooting French cops. Now the thugs -- no joke -- call Paris "occupied territory." Hence Don Surber's clever label: L'Intifada.

This isn't about jobs, housing or freedom of worship.¹ It's not even a riot: as SC&A says, it's terrorism. And it's organized, according to Reuters: "Without question what is taking place bears all the hallmarks of being coordinated," Yves Bot, the Paris public prosecutor, told Europe 1 radio. "The way things are organized is in response to a strategy ... with mobile tactics employed by youths, who turn up on scooters, throw a lighted bottle at a vehicle and then leave." David Warren agrees:

The French authorities are beginning to realize that this French Intifada is not entirely spontaneous, that e.g. weapons had been laid in for just such an uprising. Radical Islamists have been preaching strict separation between Muslim and French society; the French have themselves defeated their own project of assimilation by allowing large-scale immigration to congregate in nasty, Stalinesque public housing estates.

The rule of these districts is now effectively in the hands of radical Islamists, whose central demand is that French authorities stay out of the little emirates they have declared. The very secular French government, under Jacques Chirac, offers two contradictory responses. One is that of the prime minister, de Villepin, who keeps muttering about "tolerance" and "understanding". The other is that of the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose approach is to call the youth "scum" and "rabble" and send the gendarmes in waves. Neither of these gentleman has a clew.

Both give at least lip-service to the ludicrous idea that increased spending on social programmes for these "underprivileged" districts will finally win the day.

Paul at Brussels Journal blames the Blue-State/Euro/MSM alliance:

Our mainstream media, in attempts to preserve the Left’s chimera of “universal cultural compatibility,” hardly write about all this. Nevertheless, for some years now West European city folk and police officers have been familiar with the reality that certain areas of major European cities are no-go areas, especially at night and certainly if you are white or wearing a uniform. Three years ago, a French friend who had his car stolen learned that the thieves had parked the car in a particular suburb. When he went to the police he was told that the police did not operate in that neighbourhood and consequently would not be able to retrieve his car. This is Western Europe in the early 21st century.

Doug at Below the Beltway agrees:

France, and Europe in general, is reaping the whirlwind for its lax immigration policies, lack of attention to the rising Muslim population in its midst, and adherence to the multiculturalism meme. Is it any surprise that this is happening given that much of the planning for 9/11 occurred not in a mosque in Riyadh but in Western Europe?

Never mind the nonsense about troops in Iraq being Al Qaeda's best recruiter; terrorists looking for a few good men troll and post to Paris. Somehow, the Blue State/Euro preachers of tolerance miss the more serious threat from the murderously intolerant.

Steyn concurs:

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness. . .

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

And Victor Davis Hanson joins in:

Westerners far too rarely publicly denounce radical Islam for its sick, anti-Semitic, anti-female, anti-American, and anti-modernist rhetoric. Just imagine the liberal response if across the globe Christians had beheaded schoolgirls, taken over schoolhouses to kill students, and shot school teachers as we have witnessed radical Muslims doing these past few months.

Instead, Western parlor elites are still arguing over whether there were al Qaedists in Iraq before the removal of Saddam Hussein, whether the suspicion of WMDs was the real reason for war against the Baathists, whether Muslim minorities should be pressured to assimilate into European democratic culture, and whether constitutional governments risk becoming intolerant in their new efforts to infiltrate and disrupt radical Muslim groups in Europe and the United States. Some of this acrimony is understandable, but such in-fighting is still secondary to defeating enemies who have pledged to destroy Western liberal society. At some point this Western cannibalism becomes not so much counterproductive as serving the purposes of those who wish America to call off its struggle against radical Islam. . .

[T]he world — if it is to save its present liberal system of free trade, safe travel, easy and unfettered communications, and growing commitment to constitutional government — must begin seeing radical Islamism as a universal pathology rather than reactions to regional grievances, if it is ever to destroy it materially and refute it ideologically.

Yet the antidote for radical Islam, aside from the promotion of democratization and open economies, is simple. It must be militarily defeated when it emerges to wage organized violence, as in the cases of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Zarqawi’s terrorists in Iraq, and the various killer cliques in Palestine.

Finally alarmed, the French government is "in crisis mode". But if the WaPo's Molly Moore is correct, France can't fix it:

"We feel rejected, compared to the kids who live in better neighborhoods," said Nasim, a chunky 16-year-old with braces and acne. "Everything here is broken down and abandoned. There's no place for the little kids to go." . . .

"We don't have the American dream here," said Rezzoug, as he surveyed the clusters of young men. "We don't even have the French dream here."

The American Dream won't get a European visa so long as the French run France. Even were it to increase employment or speed immigrants' assimilation, France's Fifth Republic won't suddenly seize American-style economic "liberalism." It won't tackle terrorism at its roots by joining the GWOT, though that would send a more effective message to French Islamics. Moreover, if they can't (or won't) quell Islamic terrorist/rioters at home, I'm relieved France refused to join the Iraq invasion. Worst of all, modern France can't even mimic old France, according to Warren:

The solution of the old Catholic France was, over the centuries, that of Charles Martel: victor at Tours in 732 A.D., where the advance of Islam on Western Europe was stopped. It consisted in a frank realization that two civilizations were clashing, where only one could prevail. The choice was relatively simple: victory over the invaders, or death and servitude.

The modern, enlightened alternative is "negotiation". Good luck with it.

My French/English dictionary tells me that -- when force is unavailable -- French-style "negotiation" covers only two ways to preserve and maximize the status quo: 1) stall; or 2) surrender, though choice two brings 24/7 scrutiny by gun-wearing enemies. MaxedOutMama calls it another step toward the cliff of appeasement. ShrinkWrapped agrees:

The French authorities had already abandoned the Muslim areas and stood with the tyrants and Islamic fascists against the American led coalition, yet this hasn't protected them and won't save them in the future; the writ of the Islamists has to grow, it is inevitable and inherent in their ideology and the clashes will become more frequent and, likely, more violent as time goes on.

Worse still, both Betsy's Page and Daisy Cutter think M_O_M and S_W underestimate the problem: "How do you appease when the objects of your appeasement seek only to destroy you?"

Call me an optimist: France will find a way to appease, then surrender to, itself.

MORE:

Brussels believes if you can't do, teach!:

The EU plans to announce on Monday that it will launch a three-year mission, starting January 1, to help the Palestinians build up a credible police force, EU officials said.

____________________

¹ Examining Islamic terrorists in Britain, Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal says religion has become an excuse for arrogance:

[Y]oung Muslim males have a strong motive for maintaining an identity apart. And since people rarely like to admit low motives for their behavior, such as the wish to maintain a self-gratifying dominance, these young Muslims need a more elevated justification for their conduct toward women. They find it, of course, in a residual Islam: not the Islam of onerous duties, rituals, and prohibitions, which interferes so insistently in day-to-day life, but in an Islam of residual feeling, which allows them a sense of moral superiority to everything around them, including women, without in any way cramping their style.

(via Roger Simon, Red Hot Cuppa Politics, NIF, SC&A, A Certain Slant of Light, Instapundit, Six Meat Buffet and Best of the Web)