French Intifada

There is more than a little irony, and indeed poetic justice, in the fact that when the long-heralded "Arab street" finally erupted in raging violence, it would take place not in Iraq, or in angry reaction to U.S. foreign policy, but smack in the middle of Paris and directed at the corrupt and clueless Vichyite regime of Black Jacques Chirac:

President Jacques Chirac warned yesterday of a "dangerous situation" and the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, called an emergency cabinet meeting after a wave of serious urban unrest spread to more than a dozen towns and housing estates around Paris.

"The law must be firmly applied in a spirit of dialogue and respect," Mr. Chirac told ministers. "An absence of dialogue and an escalation of disrespect will lead to a dangerous situation. There cannot be no-go areas in the republic." ...

The unrest was triggered by last Thursday's accidental death in Clichy-sous-Bois, five miles from Aulnay, of two African teenagers who were electrocuted while hiding in a power substation from what they believed, apparently wrongly, was police pursuit.

Don't let Black Jacques's tough-but-prissy rhetoric fool you. He and his "little Napoleon" PM are still not serious about dealing with this rioting that is the most overt symptom yet of the Muslim influx that threatens to swamp their country and eradicate their culture:

If you listen to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the rioters who have set Paris suburbs ablaze for a week are "thugs," but the ever-poetic PM Dominique de Villepin cautions against "stigmatizing" vast areas.

What they are are disaffected, unassimilated would-be jihadis who would be murdering Parisians by the hundreds if they had even the armaments available to the "insurgency" in Iraq.

Cap'n Ed fills in the background:

After WWII, the French built so-called "sink estates" for the workers they encouraged to emigrate to help rebuild the nation, as did Germany. Most of these workers came from Turkey and colonies in North Africa. Instead of planning for their integration into society, however, the French allowed these communities to grow and fester in economic and social isolation. After two generations, the sink estates have proven to be nothing more than preplanned ghettoes, and the workers have no future except as second-class citizens of the nations they helped rebuild from devastation.

Even absent radical Islamism, the French should have foreseen the disaster that has presently come upon them, and had a plan to handle it. After 9/11, the French should have responded proactively to counter the push for French Muslims to join efforts with al-Qaeda and other kinds of terrorist groups. Whether through fatalism or Gallic arrogance, the French has refused to acknowledge the danger - and now the economic frustration has joined with the religious lunacy of Islamofascism to turn parts of one of the capitals of the West into little more than Fallujah-sur-Seine.

And by isolation, he means isolation. As in what Chirac referred to as "no-go zones," areas where French authorities have for all intents and purposes stopped administering altogether, virtually ceding these bits of their territory to what amounts to, and is actively becoming, a hostile incursion.

And yet they don't know what to do about it. So ingrained is the deliberate downplaying of Western culture and elevation of multiculturalism in its place that even as their capital is under Muslim siege, French leaders (other than Interior Minister Sarkozy) still can't bring themselves to even publicly acknowledge who the rioters are, much less the bigger picture behind why they are rioting.

This is the cultural manifestation of the old adage, "Nature abhors a vacuum," which is as alarmingly true across the English Channel:

The report ["Islam in Britain"] quotes Zaki Badawi, president of London’s Muslim College, holder of the Order of the British Empire, and the widely recognized “unofficial leader, representative, and advocate of Britain’s mainline Muslims”:

"A proselytizing religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavors to expand in Britain. … Islam is a universal religion. It aims at bringing its message to all corners of the earth [by any means necessary]. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim community, the Umma [i.e. global conquest]. As we know the history of Islam as a faith is also the history of a state and a community of believers living by divine law. The Muslims, jurists and theologians, have always expounded Islam as both Government and a faith. This reflects the historical fact that Muslims, from the start, lived under their own law. Muslim theologians naturally produced a theology with this in view – it is a theology of the majority. Being a minority was not seriously considered or even contemplated. … Muslim theology offers, up to the present, no systematic formulation of the status of being in a minority.”

The report’s authors cite similar views from authoritative spokespeople, and conclude:

"Muslims find it difficult to assume minority status in a majority non-Muslim society. More than other minority communities, they constantly, sometimes subconsciously, strive to redress the balance and assume an expanding and dominant position in their host countries.”

The report goes on to document this process, showing first how Muslim organizations in Britain have attempted to enforce Muslim custom and sharia law upon unwilling members of their own faith community, especially women – and then how they have gone on to attempt to enforce Muslim norms on all British people, Muslim or not....

“The Muslim community may have to define ‘no go’ areas where the exercise of ‘freedom of speech’ against Islam will not be tolerated.” And indeed the Blair government is attempting to extend Britain’s laws against hate-speech to forbid criticism of religion and religious practices.

The report describes how British authorities have quietly acquiesced when Muslim groups demanded the removal of symbols like the crown or the cross of St. George from police badges, have accommodated the public observance of Islam while dismantling Christian observances, have quietly accommodated polygamy and Islamic family law, and have granted honored positions in British life to anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-semitic Muslim leaders. [emphases added]

Do any of the italicized passages sound familiar? They should to our readers, as we have been writing about them consistently. Islam is not, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insipidly cooed last week, "a religion of love and peace." Rather, it is an imperialistic, warmongering tribal culture hiding under a cloak of feigned, parasitic religiosity. It is theocratic by definition and cannot abide anything less than complete dominance in whatever country it inhabits, and seeks in the end the planetary "Caliphate" that a certain bearded mass murderer hiding in a South Asian cave has talked up a great deal in recent years. And its almost instinctive utilization of bullying propaganda and violence - the jihad - manifested itself in London's subways back in July and is, as we speak, lighting up the "City of Light."

Thus is the defeat dealt to seventh-century Muslim invaders of Europe by, of all people, a Frenchman (Charles Martel) being reversed and avenged, one riot at a time. And in another generation, what will we see facing us across the Atlantic - Eurabia, or just plain Arabia, head-on?

Or will we be too busy drowning in intifadas of our own?

As long as our leaders persist in pre-emptive self-dhimmization, it's a question I'd rather not contemplate.