Six years ago, French intellectual Christian de Moliner suggested that his nation essentially be divided, with the creation of a quasi-Sharia state within its borders, to avoid civil war with its Muslims. While de Moliner was wrong in his prescription — appeasement never works — his prognosis appears spot-on. In fact, France has for days been torn apart by rioting, and President Emmanuel Macron has been fiddling while Paris burns.
Ostensibly, the spark lighting this inferno, euphemistically called “protests” by some, was the police killing of a 17-year-old Muslim boy named Nahel Merzouk. Yet this motivation wouldn’t explain why the miscreants used gasoline to burn down an elementary school; have dragged drivers from vehicles and beaten them; had reportedly released zoo animals, which then roamed the streets; have desecrated a Holocaust memorial; are ransacking and looting stores; have already caused tens of millions in damages; and, as one observer put it, “are burning down everything in [their] path.”
This said, it’s hard to know the exact magnitude of the situation. But the following tweets, with embedded video, provide a disturbing glimpse.
So in a country with strict gun control, in which it’s very difficult for average citizens to obtain effective firearms, these rioters have military-grade weaponry. Is there a lesson here?
I guess they’re doing it “for the children.”
Perhaps the above tweeter has forgotten that Our Strength Lies in Our Diversity™.
Maybe this isn’t surprising given that an Islamic “scholar” recently stated that the “Jews are not the enemies of the Palestinians alone,” but “of humanity as a whole.”
Nothing says “I’m honoring the slain youth’s memory” like stealing groceries in his name.
Back in the ’90s already, Reginald Denny’s plight should have informed about the judicious use of gas pedals and the meaning of, “It’s better to be judged by 12 than carried by six.”
If this doesn’t convince Beijing the West is weak and ripe for domination, what will?
(Hat tip for the tweets: American Thinker’s Monica Showalter.)
To be clear, there apparently are some “garden variety” left-wingers participating in the riots as well. It also seems the unrest is waning and that the violence will soon burn itself out even as it burns up the country. Yet this is becoming an old story.
Muslim riots in France date back to at least 1979, when the Lyon suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin erupted after a local youth was arrested. This is believed to have been the first suburban riot in French history, no doubt occurring when it did because the suburbs were where Muslim immigrants were settling.
There have been at least a dozen Muslim riots since then, virtually always, ostensibly, over encounters with police. Notable was 2005 unrest that lasted three weeks, involved 274 towns, saw more than 9,000 vehicles torched, and saw a multitude of buildings burned or attacked, among other violent acts.
Not surprisingly, this is all attended by denial. As philosopher Alain Finkielkraut once stated in an interview, in “France, they would like very much to reduce these riots to their social dimension, to see them as a revolt of youths from the suburbs against their situation, against the discrimination they suffer from, against the unemployment,” related The Jerusalem Post in 2015. Yet “most of these youths are blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity.”
“Look, in France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult — Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese — and they’re not taking part in the riots,” Finkielkraut elaborated. “Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character.”
“The looters do not demand more schools, more day-nurseries … more buses: they burn them,” he added.
Of course, just try burning a Quran and you know what will happen — more violence, as just occurred in relation to a Swedish anti-Quran protest.
So, as commentator Monica Showalter put it Saturday, opining on the Gallic woes, “Obviously, this isn’t about police misconduct. This is about a power struggle, fueled by the rage of unchecked immigration, and rage-filled migrants who haven’t found the streets of Paris paved with gold, or at least any they think they’re entitled to. That it’s spreading to other countries suggests that this is a European Union-wide problem.”
“It certainly could spread to [even] more of them, particularly with the weak response seen from French authorities,” she adds.
As to this, “Macron has ‘apologized’ to the migrants for what appears to be police misconduct, even though there’s been no formal investigative conclusion about what happened yet, signaling to the cops that the fix is in,” Showalter continues.
Moreover, French interior minister Gérald Darmanin stated late last week that the level of violence was “unacceptable.” But what’s an acceptable level of violence? Just enough so that the little rascals who wish “to destroy, [have] space to do that,” as ex-Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake put it in 2015?
The police will always encounter criminals, and sometimes will have to forcibly subdue them; thus, there’ll always be an excuse to riot, whether the criminal’s name his Rodney King, Michael Brown, George Floyd, or Nahel Merzouk. But civilized societies don’t allow a small minority of miscreants — whatever community they may be from — to harm the innocent, destroy what better men have built, and put a country asunder. While non-lethal means can be attempted, force sufficient to quickly and decisively quell unrest must be used — even if this means shooting rioters. Once the example is set, it won’t have to be repeated very often, either.
Unfortunately, we can expect continued rioting and destabilization of Western nations. For we’ve become weak, sorely lacking in masculine virtue, as epitomized by the simulacrum of a man who recently broke down crying (video below) because, concerned about racial appearances, he didn’t want a criminal who’d threatened his family with a knife arrested.
This snowflake should be embarrassed and, because he’s a microcosm of the West, so should we.
