Règne De La Terreur Musulman

You know, with hurricanes, you can see the storm coming, and then the storm hits, and then it, well, storms for a few hours, and then the storm passes and the clean-up begins.

Heaven (and Florida and Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi and Texas) knows that this has been a busy and heavy hurricane season. But we are blessed indeed not to (yet) be afflicted with the "storm" that is parked on the Fifth French Republic and shows no signs of either abating or passing any time soon.

We touched on what is becoming a turning (or tipping) point in European history almost a week ago, when the "youthful" Muslim hellraisers had been at their uprising for over a week. Thanks to the typically weak, insipid, delusional, and feckless response of the Black Jacques Chirac regime, the rioting has not only intensified, but is spreading, first across France and now spilling over into its Belgian and German neighbors.

Cap'n Ed Morrissey has been all over this story, and leafing through his posts is like watching time-lapse photography of a slow-motion train wreck.

SUNDAY, 11/6 - Violence expands from Paris suburbs into the very heart of the capital itself:

Violent riots in France have spread throughout the nation and now have crossed into Paris proper after remaining on the outskirts for ten days. The police have not yet shown any ability to contain the rioting, nor has the government come up with much of a strategy to oppose the escalation of the arson and protest. Last night's violence generated the most destruction yet, including a the loss of a police station to firebombers.

Signs of organization to the seemingly "random, unfocused" rioting arise indicating it is being coordinated via the Internet and cell phones. Also, a bomb/Molotov cocktail factory is found south of Paris. Meanwhile, the Extreme Media is loathe to admit that the rioters are, predominantly, militant Islamists.

Ed asks, "Is this the beginning of the war for Eurabia?"

MONDAY, 11/7 - The "youthful" rioters up the ante by attacking the French police head-on:

On the eleventh night of spreading and intensifying violence, French rioters shifted tactics as the French finally began to respond. Last night, the mainly Muslim rioters fired on French police, wounding 30 and transforming the unrest into something more overt:

Last night about 30 police were reported injured by buckshot in Grigny, south of Paris. Youths seized a bus in Saint-Etienne and set it alight. In Rouen a burning car was pushed against a police station while cars were burned in Nantes, Rennes and Orleans.

The besieged Black Jacques, by contrast, could not escape his intellectual paralysis:

Mr.Chirac, speaking after an emergency security meeting at the Elysée Palace, said: "The last word must go to the law." He warned the rioters that they would be brought to justice, but also sought to show understanding for the plight of youth in poor suburban areas. [emphasis added]

Oh, those "youths" understand things a lot better tha Jacques does. So do his cops, who threw up their hands and passed the buck to the French Army:

"They really shot at officers," said one officer after about 200 youths attacked his colleagues in Grigny. "This is real, serious violence. It's not like the previous nights. I am very concerned because this is mounting." ...

The police union Action Police CFTC urged the government on Monday to impose a curfew on the riot-hit areas and call in the army to control the youths, many of whom are French-born citizens of Arab or African origin complaining of racial discrimination.

"Nothing seems to be able to stop the civil war that spreads a bit more every day across the whole country," it said in a statement. "The events we're living through now are without precedent since the end of the Second World War." ...

In that act of unforced surrender the French police remind me of nothing so much AS the French Army - circa June 1940, when another fascist, if far better organized and conventional, horde was spreading across the length and breadth of the then-Third Republic. Rotsa ruck for Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy's bid to reestablish government control over the so-called "no-go" areas that the "youthful" rioters seek to transform into hundreds of Gaza strips all over the country.

Meanwhile, the Extreme Media stubbornly refuses to admit that France is under Islamist siege at its own policy hand, despite multiple warnings of this very situation over a month before:

[A]lert CQ reader Mr. Michael points out that both American and French media sources warned of coordinated Islamist action against France in the weeks before the riot. Agence France Presse even had a quote from the maligned Nicolas Sarkozy noting the imminent nature of the threat in its 9/27 dispatch:

An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as "enemy number one", intelligence officials said Tuesday.

"The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," the group's leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.

"France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community," he was quoted as saying. ... Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is "at a very high level... There are cells operating on our territory."

So much for multi-culti "understanding." But such is the nature of that incurable mental disfunction that learning from it is functionally impossible. Which helps explain why a pre-emptive sweep by French authorities for GSPC operatives was a pathetic failure, and how a "virtual underground railroad" exists between France and Lebanon/Syria/Iraq for the jihadi training of the very same "youths" that are inexorably bringing France to its knees.

TUESDAY, 11/8 - Minister Sarkozy tries curviews. They don't work. So in swoops the li'l Napolean, Prime Minister Dominque de Villepin with the, um, heavy artillery:

Mr. de Villepin added that the government aimed to give more funds to community associations, accelerate housing renovation, offer individual attention to jobseekers, and ensure France's education was better suited to the needs of the suburbs, by offering apprenticeships from age 14 for those failing at school, and scholarships to those succeeding. "We have to offer hope," he said.

Oh, DdV will offer France's Islamist insurrectionists "hope," alright - that they won't have to settle for just autonomous Muslim enclaves on French territory, but can take over the country outright and transform it into "Taliban West." Faced with the inevitable result of years of appeasement of Islamic fundamentalism, both at home and abroad, the only government response is more appeasement. Feed 'em, throw money they don't have at 'em, anything to kick the can of reckoning further down the road. But this is what eventually happens when a nation and a culture no longer has the will to survive - it can no longer stuff the predator fast enough to buy more time. It's kind of the foreign policy equivalent of hyperinflation - the price of "peace" gets bid upwards exponentially until the "commodity" is unaffordable. And then the "debts" come due, and the creditor has nothing left with which to pay them.

Check and mate.

The French government isn't quite to straits that dire - not yet, at least. But with the Islamist rebellion raging in over three hundred French cities and towns, possibly as part of a global "Ramadan offensive" that almost included a London-style attack in Australia, and the long-warned of demographic shift in the French population bringing the proportion of Muslims up to one out of every six, twice or more that level in the major metropolitan areas, and those Muslims being predominantly younger than the ethnic French majority, the riots of the past fortnight are definitely a fork in the road where the choice, and stakes, are little short of the survival not just of France as it has existed, in ethnic terms, for centuries, but in the bigger picture, Europe and "Europeanism" itself.

That's Mark Steyn's take in twin columns from yesterday. In the London Telegraph he writes:

Indeed, it's an almost perfect tactic if your aim is to have the entire French establishment dithering in grievance-addressing mode until you've extracted as much political advantage as you can. Look at it this way: after two weeks, whose prestige has been more enhanced? The rioters? Or Mayor Debré, President Chirac and Prime Minister de Villepin? On every front these past two weeks, the French state has been tested and communicated only weakness....

Some of us believe this is an early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war. If the insurgents emerge emboldened, what next? In five years' time, there will be even more of them, and even less resolve on the part of the French state. That, in turn, is likely to accelerate the demographic decline. Europe could face a continent-wide version of the "white flight" phenomenon seen in crime-ridden American cities during the 1970s, as Danes and Dutch scram to America, Australia or anywhere else that will have them.

Not "Euro-flight" - European refugees, whose migration would further deplete the former Western-based civilization and ease the transition of the "Continent" into an Islamist entity far more "Arabian" than "Euro," and, lest we forget, in possession of French (at the very least) nuclear weapons - and more than a thousand miles closer to North America.

This apocalyptic gloom is echoed in Steyn's Chicago Sun-Times column:

If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.

And lest the message not get sledghammered home, here's what noted Middle East expert Daniel Pipes had to say:

The French can respond in three ways. They can feel guilty and appease the rioters with prerogatives and the "massive investment plan" some are demanding. Or they can heave a sigh of relief when it ends and, as they did after earlier crises, return to business as usual. Or they can understand this as the opening salvo in a would-be revolution and take the difficult steps to undo the negligence and indulgence of past decades.

I expect a blend of the first two reactions and that, despite Mr. Sarkozy's surge in the polls, Mr. Villepin's appeasing approach will prevail. France must await something larger and more awful to awake it from its somnolence. [emphasis added]

Allow me to garnish this stiff dose of sober reality with a parting shot of historical perspective.

What has been the tendency of European states, and particularly France, in periods of crisis, unrest, and instability over the past two centuries? Resort to dictatorship. Given the failure earlier this year of the attempted European constitution, and the degree to which it was an anti-democratic, de facto bureacratic dictatorship itself, it does not seem much of a stretch to see the European peoples, drowning in Islamic chaos, being willing to follow any charismatic strongman who promises a way out - and even a restoration of European - or dare I say neoRoman - greatness.

Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, and their successors - the pattern is well established. Ditto the blind obstinancy of preludal appeasers from Chamberlain and Daladier to Chirac and de Villepin. The wonder will be if history doesn't repeat itself yet again.

If it does, expect this new "Dark Age" to be a lot darker - and a lot shorter.