French Riots: Not Getting Any Better

The riots in France aren't stopping and the French still seem oddly paralyzed by the scenario, though police are reacting -- and getting injured as well. Shot at, oddly enough, by those who shouldn't have weapons -- France being regulated by very strict gun control laws.

Still, the DEM and European media insist on portraying the rioters are mere "youths" -- as though this were merely the resulting of adolescent, rebellious growing pains. The rioters are Muslim. They are chanting: "It's Baghdad here."

The appeasing is already beginning throughout Europe. In Monday's Mark Steyn commentary from The Washington Times, Steyn writes: "Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers."

Today on Bill Bennett's Morning In America, he featured British journalist David Pryce-Jones, author of The Closed Circle. In a 12-31-2004 piece about the Islamization of Europe, Pryce-Jones wrote:

Does this (Islamist) crisis amount to a "clash of civilizations"? Many people reject that notion as too sweeping or downright misleading. Yet whether or not it applies to, say, the situation in Iraq, or to the war on terror, the phrase has much to recommend it as a description of what is going on inside Europe today.

As Yves Charles Zarka, a French philosopher and analyst, has written: "there is taking place in France a central phase of the more general and mutually conflicting encounter between the West and Islam, which only someone completely blind or of radical bad faith, or possibly of disconcerting naiveté, could fail to recognize."

In the opinion of Bassam Tibi, an academic of Syrian origins who lives in Germany, Europeans are facing a stark alternative: "Either Islam gets Europeanized, or Europe gets Islamized." Going still farther, the eminent historian Bernard Lewis has speculated that the clash may well be over by the end of this century, at which time, if present demographic trends continue, Europe itself will be Muslim.

Continuing, this morning David Pryce-Jones said on Bennett's show:

There's a new Intifada going on, that's what it is, a sort of uncoordinated uprising of disaffected Muslims, and they are saying that's their identity, and they don't like France and they don't like being French. And there's no sense of organization which in some ways makes it more sinister, the fact that it has now spread over the entire country.

There are some really astonishing figures. Since January the first of this year there have been 28,000 cars burned in France and 70,000 incidents of violence. That is astonishing. That means several hundred cars burned a day.

It has obviously been building up for a very long time and it has caught the French state completely by surprise. It is a Muslim uprising and it is nothing else but that. They have decided that they're not going to integrate, they've decided that they want separatism. Part of the thing that is so difficult for outsiders to understand is that they want all the advantages and the privileges and the rights, but they're not prepared to give anything in return. If they don't like it, they really shouldn't be there at all, should they?

And it isn't just France. All over Europe there's an Islamization going on. The British shouldn't be so smug; we had Muslims and black rioting a few weeks ago. There are riots in Holland, and there are riots in Denmark.

I think one of the things we need to see in the next few days is whether this is the beginning of a really strong Muslim anti-European Intifada.

The French state is completely and totally baffled; it doesn't know what to do. We've had the extraordinary silence of Jacques Chirac. We had the equally extraordinary example of Mr. de Villepin; what he's done would make Neville Chamberlain proud. And Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, who called them (the rioters) scum, he's risking his position because he's taking a stand. He is risking his position because he is calling for a clampdown, for law and order. This can only be done through the gendarmerie; this can only be done by force.

The state is now closing factories, it's put thousands of people are on the dole, it's unsafe to take trains, and they can bring France to a halt.

It looks as if there are only two possibilities. Either taking a firm stand, which means enforcing law and order, which is Sarkozy's position, or de Villepin's position which is to surrender.

If they use force, and there is bloodshed, then I think Sarkozy is finished. People will say, the attempt to enforce law and order will have created much more trouble than it was worth. Then the surrender will succeed, and what we shall actually have is infinitely greater Islamization as the result of it.

The French are tough on terror, but they're not tough on people inside the country. The thing that is very striking is, the places where the Muslims are rioting are unpoliced. But now the police are being taken in by bus, but they're unfamiliar with the terrain. The rioters escape inside alleys and into parks and hideaways and underpasses and so on.

What we see here is that the French state, for all its tough talk and the way it's clamped down on terror, had taken no precautions at all to deal with something like this. There aren't armored vehicles; they have torched hundreds of police cars. Why aren't the police in armored vehicles? They're going against Molotov cocktails, and that shows a total lack of preparation. And that in itself shows a failure of analysis.

Mr. Bennett mentioned that a listener recently watched a BBC program and noticed that not once did the BBC refer to the rioters as Muslim. Mr. Pryce-Jones responded:

The BBC has completely given up its integrity. It is now just a
propaganda organ for the Left.

Look, what's actually happening is that thousands of French people are being put out of work. And many thousands of people have lost their livelihood, they've had their shops burned out, their businesses burned out, banks have been burned out and robbed. This is the beginning of anarchy. Can that be a good thing?

Bill Bennett asked: why should America be concerned, and what are the policy implications?

It means that we all have to consider very, very carefully what we're going to do with the Muslim communities in our midst. We have to make quite sure that they assimilate. If they don't assimilate and go the way of separatism, there can only be violence, and we are seeing that now in France.

The first recorded death due to the riots has occurred today, as a 61-year-old man beaten into a coma has died.

As urban unrest spreads to neighboring Belgium in apparent copycat attacks (5 cars have now been torched outside a Brussels train station) and possibly Germany, the French government faces growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm. The police are also afraid that the types of weapons they face could soon include grenades.

The match has been struck; it is apparent that other fuses are now being lighted.