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The French Intifada?

Ronald in the Rubble

Christopher Hitchens on the Laura Ingraham Show (paraphrase):

If you doubt that the rioters in France are Muslim radicals or that they’re being incited by Islamist web-sites, just go there and cover the story wearing a yarmulke. See what happens to you.

They have also targeted churches.

Which will happen first? The French government surrenders to the “the insurgency” or NPR describes the rioters as Muslims?

Nightly riots raging in the immigrant communities of Paris’ suburbs for the past two weeks have spread to some 300 cities around France. Thousands of cars and buses have been torched, as well as commuter trains, businesses, community centers and schools.

* * *

The mayhem sweeping neglected and impoverished neighborhoods with large African and Arab communities is forcing France to confront anger that has been building for decades among residents who complain of discrimination and unemployment.

Get the pessimistic, cultural take from Pat Buchanan:

Severed from the civilization and cultures of their parents, these Arab and Muslim youth may hold French citizenship and carry French passports, but they are no more French than Americans who live in Paris. Searching for a community to which they can truly belong, they gravitate to mosques where the imams, many themselves immigrants, teach and preach that the West is not their true home, but a civilization alien to their values and historically hostile to their nations and Islam.

In any “war of civilizations,” the soaring Muslim population is a potential Fifth Column inside Europe.

Nevertheless, their numbers must grow. For not only do they have a higher birthrate than the native-born Europeans, no European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate (2.1 births per woman) that will enable it to endure for many more generations. The West is aging, shrinking and dying.

Get the optimistic, economic take from Max Boot in the L.A. Times:

BACK IN 1992, when cars were burning in Los Angeles, not Paris, French President Francois Mitterrand thought he knew why. It was, he explained, because of the “absence of social legislation and protection” in a “conservative and economically capitalist” country.

“There can be no comparison between us and what happens elsewhere,” he assured his countrymen, “for France is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world.”

Au contraire, mon ami. It is precisely because of France’s high level of “social protection” that it is now experiencing its own version of urban hell. The welfare state that is the pride and joy of postwar France has become a ball-and-chain hobbling its ability to keep up economically with the despised Anglo-Saxons. In the United States, the government spends 35.9% of gross domestic product; in France, it’s 54.5%.

* * *

The outlook for the Continent may appear hopeless, but it’s not. Britain faced an equally severe crisis in the winter of 1979, when a series of strikes left the dead unburied and the garbage uncollected. Things got so bad that voters tossed out the Labor government and brought in free-market firebrand Margaret Thatcher.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 9:22 pm and is filed under The Media, Global War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “The French Intifada?”

  1. Rex Says:
    November 10th, 2005 at 12:34 am

    I condemm the practice of rioting, violent protest, and certainly any demonstration that bring damage to personal property and endagers the well being of any human being. This behavior by the rioters is wrong and immoral.

    But why are they rioting? Why is it a poor community against the rich? Whatever the cause may be, it does not seem to be fueld by religion. The little news that I have watched, has conveyed reports from French officials which point to a more social reason.

    Whatever the reason is, we see the product of a fallen world once again.

    That is why Christian are called to a higher standerd which James so eloquently describes by saying “But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness” (James 3.17-18, TNIV).

  2. extremist Says:
    November 10th, 2005 at 10:52 pm

    Rex, so you think unemployment made them do this?

    A handicapped woman riding a bus in the Sevran suburb suffered burns over 20 percent of her body Thursday night after two youths doused the inside of the bus with a flammable liquid and set it on fire. Youths have also burned cars in Dijon, in the east, and in Marseille, in the south.

  3. Rex Says:
    November 11th, 2005 at 1:05 am

    I think the reasons behind this rebellious rioting are probabaly complex. Was religion a factor? Maybe a little, but I am sure there was also sociological factors and political factors which are contributing to the problem. I would be willing to bet there is a lact of proper communication that creates an environment where a desire to engage in violent protest can develop.

    Since I do not know all the fact, I do not know whose to blame for the ill feeling that have been brooing over time. If I was guessing, I would say that it is the people in power (simply because the wealthy and powerful have always had a tendancy to ignore the poor, ever since evil existed).

    Nonetheless, regardless whether the rioters have been mistreated or not, it does not justify their actions. And as the old cliche goes “two wrongs will never make a right.”

  4. extremist Says:
    November 11th, 2005 at 1:15 am

    I think you could not be more wrong. The welfare state in France is among the most generous in the world.

    They burned a handicapped woman.

    This not about poverty. It is about the eternal struggle between good and evil. It is about the forces and ideologies who oppose civilization:

    In June, 2004, a huge demonstration was staged in Paris to protest the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush, who made a brief visit to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Posters depicted Bush as the world’s worst terrorist. By my first-hand observation, roughly one-third of the marchers came from hard-left parties and organizations: communists, socialists and ecologists, labour unions and wilted flower people. Another third were militant Muslims, many of them with checkered kaffiyehs. The other third were raunchy nihilists high on drugs and beer, marching with pitbulls and Rottweilers, calling for death and destruction. They painted graffiti on lowered store shutters and bus stop shelters, promising “a Paris comme a Falluja la guerilla vaincra” (In Paris as in Falluja, guerrilla warfare will triumph).

    The same media that are now tallying up the number of cars torched and lecturing Sarkozy on the virtues of tolerance didn’t seem much put out by such displays. The hard words were aimed at Bush, after all — so the hatred expressed was seen as unremarkable, even admirable.

  5. Rex Says:
    November 11th, 2005 at 2:06 pm

    I never said social policy was solely to blame. I simply said it probably is “a” contributing factor. How much of a contributor, I have no idea.

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