Joy Renee comments on the ongoing riots by Muslim youths in the suburbs of Paris, now in their eighth straight day:
There’s no one who can’t say they really haven’t seen this coming. Chirac & his trusty sidekick Pepe Le Pew de Villepin have ignored the looming threats to freedom in France by playing the politically correct cards of the socialist party. While Jews were being murdered & driven from Paris and France, the courts and the government chose instead to pay attention to hate speech directed against Muslims. If the Jews were leaving the country, eh bien, who really cares? If the rights of conservatives and moderates were being trampled in ridiculous attempts to appease the growing immigrant population, no problem.
But now, after five [now eight] days and nights of unrest in Paris, the government has failed to contain the situation and the lives of the French may never be the same. The painful lesson the French are learning right now should be a lesson to the rest of Europe and the world. The French have catered to radical Islam in every way possible and still they are attacked. While they called us too hard, too much the cowboy, they said understanding was all that was needed. Where has that understanding gotten them? Five nights of rioting by mainly North African muslims.
England is trying very hard to curb this wave of anti-western terror and succeeding somewhat. According to the police, they have stopped several other attempts at terror and are arresting and expelling those who would try to destroy England. Will the French do the same?
Wretchard of the Belmont Club elaborates on the deep undercurrents of the problem:
At least one nation has been born in the last week, that of immigrants who once colloquially referred to themselves as "Arabs" but who now prefer to call themselves "Muslims". While the riots will start to abate at some point, from exhaustion and the onset of cold weather as much as anything else, the sense of identity forged at the barricades will not so easily fade. A new meme has been born which neither Sarkozy's rubber bullets nor de Villepin's appeasement can bring under control.
The only question is whether another nation has been reborn under the events of the last week; a nation once called France. There is in a sense, something magnificent about the stirrings of identity among the Muslims in the Parisian ghettos; all the grander in comparison to the tentativeness, doubt and reflexive abasement of the officials of the Fifth Republic. The riot police, fire department and public order apparatus may have been present in the rioting banlieus, but the Idea of France was conspicuously absent. The Idea of France, not the hodgepodge of welfare benefits, Marxist obscurantism and world-weariness that that is palmed off as sophistication, is what has to present itself as an alternative to the Green Banner of Islam. Otherwise it will be a contest between something and nothing.
The Muslim uprising of the last week is a challenge to the half century of policy that has brought France to this point. Polices which deprecated European culture, frowned on a national identity, lowered the birthrate, created a welfare state, imported 'guest workers', promoted mindless multiculturalism and relied on 'international' treaties for protection -- all articles of Leftist faith -- are now facing the judgment of history; and worse, the verdict of Islam. It would be supremely ironical if the European Left, the 'vanguard of history', required for its future survival the very things it had set out to destroy.
Imagine if riots of this nature broke out in the suburbs of New York or Washington DC. It would be headline news 24/7, and proof positive of the racist nature of the US under the failed Bush administration. But this is France, the country that opposed the Iraq war and which has a long history of cultural ties and rapprochement with the Muslim world, with all the "correct" beliefs and the nuanced and sophistcated world view Americans should aspire to. Yet the banlieues are in flames. Best to ignore it on this side of the pond, turn our heads away and distract ourselves with our own internal politics and scandals while Paris burns.
I have long feared seclar Europe was on the brink of a religious civil war with its immigrant population. Now it seems to be tipping into the abyss. Events in Spain, the Netherlands, the UK, and now France are adding up to a grim pattern of homegrown terrorists willing to tear down the societies they grew up in but do not feel part of. Europe will have to stand and fight to defend the secular liberal values that it claims to hold so dear against an aggressive radical religious movement that sees it as decadent and destined to be colonized. Appeasement, diplomatic niceties and anti-American rhetoric won't save the continent from its fate.
UPDATE: More background via Betsy Newmark and Michelle Malkin.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Don't miss Mark Steyn's piece, "Wake up Europe, you've a war on your hands" in which he notes:
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.
He alos points out that, "it turns out finally that there really is an explosive 'Arab street,' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois."
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