Nearly four years after their first car-burning spasm of mayhem, vandalism, and violence, those "restive youths" in Paris are at it again.
This time, the Associated Press reports, they are rioting in Bagnolet, a suburb of Paris. And as with the last time, the media are reluctant to explain who the "restive youths" are. That is because the "angry youths," as another report blandly described them, are mainly North African Muslims.
The situation in Bagnolet is a reprise of the rioting that sent Paris up in flames in 2005. According to the AP, "Restive youths in a Paris suburb torched a tourist bus and nearly a half-dozen cars and hurled objects at police early Tuesday, a night after full blown unrest prompted by the death of a teen fleeing police."
So not only is the rioting a reprise of 2005; so is what triggered it: "Some witnesses claimed a police car hit [a] young motorcyclist after he tried to flee a document check outside the project." Police say the teenager lost control of his motorcycle and wrecked. In, 2005, two teenagers were electrocuted in a power substation trying to hide from police.
Like many areas around Paris, Bagnolet is what French police call a "no-go zone." It is one of 751. That means you had better stay away if you are white and French.
The message of the rioters. "French" Muslims, 6.1 million strong, don’t like it when French police do their job. Muslims, they believe, are exempt from the law. When one of them is killed fleeing the police, riots and arson are the answer.
That should come as no surprise. For years, Muslims have been proclaiming they will impose sharia (Islamic law) in Europe, and Europeans have been helping them do it. France is but one example.
As this website has reported, politicians and clergy alike believe sharia must be accommodated because of the Muslim horde that has overrun Europe. The Archbishop of Canterbury so proclaimed in December, 2008, and a Dutch judge also said that if Muslims can impose sharia through a democratic vote, then so be it. Perhaps the judge doesn’t realize it, but that would likely be the last democratic vote in The Netherlands. It would also spell doom for the country’s homosexuals and feminists, but in any event a few years back, as The New American reported in its latest issue, a German judge exonerated a Muslim wife beater because the Koran permits the castigation of wives.
The French are learning an important lesson: you cannot import an alien culture and religion and not expect problems — big ones. Last time around in 2005, when the riots lasted nearly a month and the government declared a state of emergency, French officials rushed to blame themselves and the French people for not "doing enough" to assimilate and accommodate Muslims. Muslims, of course, do not want assimilation into the French nation but rather expect its capitulation to their religious and cultural demands. More welfare and understanding, French officials believed, was the answer.
After all, as the AP reported in its dispatch from Bagnolet, "Tensions between young people and police have long simmered in housing projects in France’s suburbs, feeding on poverty, unemployment and anger over discrimination against minorities."
But what was the real cause of what foreign-affairs writer Srdja Trifkovic called the “intifada” in 2005, as well as that of today? Muslim arrogance and French timidity, as well as the disease that has been draining Christendom of its vitality for two centures: leftism.
As Trifkovic wrote in Chronicles magazine in 2005,
The real cause of the French intifada is the enormous growth, dysfunctionality, and arrogant self-confidence of the Muslim immigrant community within France, coupled with the cultural enfeeblement and demographic decline of the French nation. The mix is dangerous. Its result has been stated with haughty arrogance by Tariq Ramadan, professor of Islamic studies at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and a grandson of Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ramadan proposes through his teachings and writings that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves not as hyphenated citizens seeking to live by “common values” but as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of others. Muslims in non-Muslim countries should feel themselves entitled to live on their own terms — while, under the terms of Western liberal tolerance, society as a whole should feel obliged to respect that choice.
In other words, resolving “poverty” and “discrimination” with welfare and integration isn’t the answer. Muslims in France will never be assimilated. They will cause trouble until France either surrenders voluntarily or the Muslims compel it.
Either way, barring a mass deportation and a total freeze on all Islamic immigration, France is doomed.
Photo: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood, managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va., has been writing about American politics and culture for more than 20 years. Mr. Kirkwood has written for Chronicles, The New American, National Review, The Remnant, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, The Orange County Register, Taki’s Top Drawer online magazine, and LewRockwell.com. For several years, he syndicated a column, “The Hard Line.” Mr. Kirkwood is the author of the nonfiction title, Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans To Know And Admire, published by Cumberland House.
