Under that magnificent Burkean title, recalling an age of Frenchmen both more venal and more noble, Daniel Pipes provides a great deal of important information on the jihad in France in FrontPage (many good links in the original):
The rioting by Muslim youth that began Oct. 27 in France to calls of “Allahu Akbar” may be a turning point in European history.What started in Clichy-sous-Bois, on the outskirts of Paris, by its eleventh night had spread to 300 French cities and towns, as well as to Belgium and Germany. The violence, which has already been called some evocative names – intifada, jihad, guerilla war, insurrection, rebellion, and civil war – prompts several reflections:
End of an era: The time of cultural innocence and political naïveté, when the French could blunder without seeing or feeling the consequences, is closing. As in other European countries (notably Denmark and Spain), a bundle of related issues, all touching on the Muslim presence, has now moved to the top of the policy agenda in France, where it will likely remain for decades.
These issues include a decline of Christian faith and the attendant demographic collapse; a cradle-to-grave welfare system that lures immigrants even as it saps long-term economic viability; an alienation from historic customs in favor of lifestyle experimentation and vapid multiculturalism; an inability to control borders or assimilate immigrants; a pattern of criminality that finds European cities far more violent than American ones; and a surge in Islam and radical Islam.
Not a first: The French insurrection are by no means the first instance of a semi-organized Muslim insurgency in Europe – it was preceded days earlier by one riot in Birmingham, England and was accompanied by another one in Århus, Denmark. France itself has a history of Muslim violence going back to 1979. What is different in the current round is its duration, magnitude, planning, and ferocity.Media denial: The French press delicately refers to the “urban violence” and presents the rioters as victims of the system. Mainstream media deny that it has to do with Islam and ignore the permeating Islamist ideology, with its vicious anti-French attitudes and its raw ambition to dominate the country and replace its civilization with Islam’s.
Another method of jihad: Indigenous Muslims of northwestern Europe have in the past year deployed three distinct forms of jihad: the crude variety deployed in the United Kingdom, killing random passengers moving around London; the targeted variety in the Netherlands, where individual political and cultural leaders are singled out, threatened, and in some cases attacked; and now the more diffuse violence in France, less specifically murderous but also politically less dismissible. Which of these or other methods will prove most efficacious is yet unclear, but the British variant is clearly counterproductive, so the Dutch and French strategies will probably recur.
Sarkozy vs. Villepin: Two leading French politicians and probable candidates for president in 2007, Nicholas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin, have responded to the riots in starkly contrasting ways, with the former adopting a hard line (proclaiming “tolérance zéro” for urban crime) and the latter a soft one (promising an “action plan” to improve urban conditions).
Anti-state: The riots started eight days after Sarkozy declared a new policy of “war without mercy” on urban violence and two days after he called violent youth “scum.” Many rioters see themselves in a power struggle with the state and so focus their attacks on its symbols. A typical report quotes Mohamed, 20, the son of a Moroccan immigrant, asserting that a “Sarko has declared war…so it’s war he’s going to get.” Representatives of the rioters have demanded that the French police leave the “occupied territories”; in turn, Sarkozy partially blamed the riots on “fundamentalists.”
The French can respond in three ways. They can feel guilty and appease the rioters with prerogatives and the “massive investment plan” some are demanding. Or they can heave a sigh of relief when it ends and, as they did after earlier crises, return to business as usual. Or they can understand this as the opening salvo in a would-be revolution and take the difficult steps to undo the negligence and indulgence of past decades.
I expect a blend of the first two reactions and that, despite Sarkozy’s surge in the polls, Villepin’s appeasing approach will prevail. France must await something larger and more awful to awake it from its somnolence. The long-term prognosis, however, is inescapable: “the sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced,” as Theodore Dalrymple puts it, “by the nightmare of permanent conflict.”
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There is a solution for the Paristinian uprising:
Give them a state!
After all, if it's good for Israel, then why not for France?
Seriously, it seems that everyone has forgotten that the major, mob-scale anti-social violence of Arab/Muslim youth in France started back in 2000 with attacks on Jews. These attacks on Jews were encouraged by the French media [TV, press, radio]--as well as by some politicians-- that at that time were presenting a very one-sided, pro-Arab view of events in Israel, going so far as to collaborate in the invention of the alleged death of an Arab boy, Muhammad al-Dura at the hands of Israeli troops.
One year ago, Pres. Chirac fawned over yasser arafat, a notorious murderer of Jews.
For a long time, this anti-Jewish violence was overlooked or minimized by official France. Now the violence is striking at the French state itself, at French sovereignty in France. It was said years ago that outbursts of barbarism and brutality start by attacking Jews, then move on to others. This was put in another way by saying that Jews are like the canary in the coal mine. The canary is affected by the fumes before the miners are, hence, the canary is their early warning system. But France didn't learn that.
Now, France should be encouraged to quell the violence which is so often falsely interpreted by the media. BBC world affairs editor, John Simpson, went so far as to incite violence against France in an editorial on the bbc website.
http://telchaination.blogspot.com/2005/11/bbcs-anti-french-bias.html
This mad statement by Simpson should not merely be criticized but condemned. The man ought to be dismissed, if only in the name of EU solidarity. The madness of the bbc is fully the equal of anything on France2.