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Jewish World Review Nov. 10, 2005 /8 Mar-Cheshvan, 5766 Why the Islamists may well succeed By Jack Kelly
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 of Clichy sus Bois when two
Muslim teenagers sought to hide from police in an electric power substation
and accidentally electrocuted themselves. It has since spread to other
Paris suburbs, to Paris itself, and now to dozens of other cities.
The remarkable thing about the spark that set off the rioting is that there
were police in Clichy sus Bois for the youths to flee from. About ten
percent of France's population are Muslims. The overwhelming majority live
in concrete ghettoes like Clichy sus Bois, which the police as well as
ordinary Frenchmen tend to treat as "no go" areas.
The result is these ghettoes are largely under the control of criminal gangs
and religious extremists.
The news media have gone to considerable lengths to avoid mentioning the
rioters are mostly Muslim, or to report that there is an anti-Western
component to the violence. The rioters typically have been described as
"French youths" who are upset by high unemployment and racial
discrimination.
But these youths are French only in the sense that most were born there.
Many don't even speak French. Their alienation from the culture and mores
of the country in which they live could hardly be greater.
Unemployment is high in France. At ten percent, it is double what it is in
the United States, and is especially high among young people with little
education who speak French with difficulty. This would seem to suggest that
France's welfare state model is less desirable to follow than many American
liberals believe.
The discovery Saturday of a large Molotov cocktail factory in a southern
suburb far from Clichy sus Bois suggests the violence is not spontaneous.
But if it is jobs the rioters are after, it must be as automobile workers,
because the principal tactic of the rioters has been to torch cars, along
with nursery schools and the occasional police station.
A commenter on the Web log "Belmont Club" thinks this focus is a clever form
of brinkmanship. Car burning is spectacular, but not serious enough to
provoke lethal force, especially from a French government loathe to use it.
The tactics used by the rioters "bear an eerie resemblance" to those used by
Chechen rebels against the Russians in Grozny, said Richard Fernandez,
proprietor of the Belmont Club. The French respond slowly and with little
force to the hit and run tactics, so the violence spreads wider as contempt
for the authorities grows.
Most of the rioters are petty criminals. But others seek de jure
recognition of a de facto partition of France that's been under way for some
time.
"Some are even calling for areas where Muslims form a majority of the
population to be reorganized on the basis of the millet system of the
Ottoman Empire," wrote Amir Taheri, who lives in Paris. "Each religious
community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural
and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs."
A de facto millet system already is in place in parts of France, Taheri
noted: "In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized
Islamist hijab while most men grow their beards to the lengths prescribed by
the sheiks."
Unless the invertebrates in charge can grow spines, France seems poised to
become what Spain was before Ferdinand and Isabella, a patchwork of
principalities where Moors ruled some communities, Christians others, with
constant tension between them.
It seems inconceivable that a civilized Western nation would bargain away to
a handful of thugs its democratic principles and sovereignty over much of
its territory. But the Islamists may well succeed. For though what the
Islamists believe in is vile and reactionary, it is something. The French
believe in nothing.
© 2005, Jack Kelly | ||||||||||
