New York Post Online Edition: commentary
By AMIR TAHERI
November 4, 2005 -- AS THE night falls, the "troubles" start — and the pattern is always the same.
Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. When the police arrive on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats.
The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back — with real bullets.
These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control.
The troubles first began in Clichy-sous-Bois, an underprivileged suburb east of Paris, a week ago. France's bombastic interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, responded by sending over 400 heavily armed policemen to "impose the laws of the republic," and promised to crush "the louts and hooligans" within the day. Within a few days, however, it had dawned on anyone who wanted to know that this was no "outburst by criminal elements" that could be handled with a mixture of braggadocio and batons.
By Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of "an unprecedented crisis." Both Sarkozy and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel foreign trips to deal with the riots.
How did it all start? The accepted account is that sometime last week, a group of young boys in Clichy engaged in one of their favorite sports: stealing parts of parked cars.
The problem came when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned the police and reported the thieving spree taking place just opposite her building. The police were thus obliged to do something — which meant entering a city that, as noted, had been a no-go area for them.
Once the police arrived on the scene, the youths — who had been reigning over Clichy pretty unmolested for years — got really angry. A brief chase took place in the street, and two of the youths, who were not actually chased by the police, sought refuge in a cordoned-off area housing a power pylon. Both were electrocuted.
Once news of their deaths was out, Clichy was all up in arms.
With cries of "God is great," bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.
Ah, Amir, the interior minister was bombastic, the poor underprivleged youths that were killed weren't the ones being chased by police...why did they run and what WERE they doing there...all in all it really IS hard not to revert back to the old school ties, eh, Amir? And I really hope that this "a female busybody" was tongue in cheek, but to be honest it didn't come across that way.
Paris is burning for one simple reason. Moslem enclaves were allowed to grow and fester. Where there are moslems there are no jobs, so there are plenty of the underprivleged. It IS the city's fault for allowing this to get as dire as it became, but spare us the underprivleged youth bullshit just for a moment or two, if you'd be so kind.
"The French used to flatter themselves for the success of their policy of assimilation, which was supposed to turn immigrants from any background into "proper Frenchmen" within a generation at most.
That policy worked as long as immigrants came to France in drips and drops and thus could merge into a much larger mainstream. Assimilation, however, cannot work when in most schools in the affected areas, fewer than 20 percent of the pupils are native French speakers.
France has also lost another powerful mechanism for assimilation: the obligatory military service abolished in the 1990s.
As the number of immigrants and their descendants increases in a particular locality, more and more of its native French inhabitants leave for "calmer places," thus making assimilation still more difficult.
In some areas, it is possible for an immigrant or his descendants to spend a whole life without ever encountering the need to speak French, let alone familiarize himself with any aspect of the famous French culture.
The result is often alienation. And that, in turn, gives radical Islamists an opportunity to propagate their message of religious and cultural apartheid.
Ah I was wondering. Wondering how long it'd take for Amir to drag out another old saw. Apartheid. Good one. Underpriveleged. Youths. Apartheid. It's a wonder of wonders Barbara Boxer hasn't rushed to Paris and staged a weepy conference. With Jackson and Sharpton along for the coverage.
"Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the "millet" system of the Ottoman Empire: Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs.
In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place. In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist "hijab" while most men grow their beards to the length prescribed by the sheiks.
The radicals have managed to chase away French shopkeepers selling alcohol and pork products, forced "places of sin," such as dancing halls, cinemas and theaters, to close down, and seized control of much of the local administration.
A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.
It is now clear that a good portion of France's Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into "the superior French culture," but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire.
So what is the solution? One solution, offered by Gilles Kepel, an adviser to Chirac on Islamic affairs, is the creation of "a new Andalusia" in which Christians and Muslims would live side by side and cooperate to create a new cultural synthesis.
The problem with Kepel's vision, however, is that it does not address the important issue of political power. Who will rule this new Andalusia: Muslims or the largely secularist Frenchmen?
Suddenly, French politics has become worth watching again, even though for the wrong reasons"
Read the entire story, please. Nowhere does Amir tell us how the French escape this nightmare, a nightmare anyone paying attention saw coming years ago, and the fact of the matter is they don't have the intestinal fortitude to do much of anything but placate and wait for it happen again. Give them something. That's the European tradition, isn't it. Give them something and hope they won't want anything more. But that's never worked, never worked in the history of mankind, and the ONLY way for the French to extricate themselves from this morass is to be strong, and that is something they've never been all too good at.
In 10 years France will be two seperate nations. And the French-speaking one will be in the minority.
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