Wake up, Europe,

[Tigermike 3,053]

Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands

November 6, 2005

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. -- as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ''like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,'' as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ''Martel'' -- or ''the Hammer.''

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they'd won, they'd have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. ''Perhaps,'' wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, ''the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.'' There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was ''an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.''

Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. 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. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. ''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''

What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

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.

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[AURaptor 1,126]

''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.

Europe, and especailly France, has always shown such pride in being so progessive and ahead of the rest of the world. Once again, they're right.

[Wishbone 0]

Europe is culturally dead, they have no sense of common identity or common cause. Many factors contributed to this: two world wars, the rise of socialism and the decadence that comes with affluence. Europe really has no means of combating the Muslim threat.

[Tiger in Spain 0]

The anarchy is spreading across France. So much for the policy of appeasement. The frogs are getting just what they deserve. Chirac and his flying monkey Villepin had best do something quick. There are only around 4.5 million muslims living (legal residents) in France.

I have been following the coverage of this on TV with Headline News and CNN, and through the AP. Not suprisingly, the word muslim is being avoided like the plague.

Europe is culturally dead, they have no sense of common identity or common cause.  Many factors contributed to this:  two world wars, the rise of socialism and the decadence that comes with affluence.  Europe really has no means of combating the Muslim threat.

195547[/snapback]

Europeans have a great sense of common identity, that is one of the biggest causes of this mess. As much as the typical European would have you believe they are all about being culturally sensitive, there is a no more racist civilization than Europe. They are just closet racists, they don't openly flaunt it.

Muslims were brought into Europe at the end of WWII to build the continent back after the war because there was a shortage of European men available to do the work. Muslims (and other immigrants) have taken on the grunt work of getting the continent back up and running, but Europe has refused to accept them as part of the population. They use these muslims to do the menial jobs that are beneath the common European citizen, however they keep social services either completely away from them or make it so hard to get that they give up from frustration. There is absolutely no integration at all here.

Europe has the means to combat the muslim threat.....they just don't have the cajones to do it. The next several weeks will tell the tale. There are vast population muslim centers extending from Stockholm south through all the major European cities. If this insurgency takes root and muslims in other cities and countries take up the fight, get the popcorn out. This could get really ugly really fast.

[AURaptor 1,126]

The anarchy is spreading across France. So much for the policy of appeasement. The frogs are getting just what they deserve. Chirac and his flying monkey Villepin had best do something quick. There are only around 4.5 million muslims living (legal residents) in France.

Almost 2 weeks of do nothing policy by the Frogs, ( ok..appeasement is a policy, of sorts) and where are the cries of outrage at Chirac's incompetence? Over here, Bush has been villified by the far Left for bogus claims of having done nothing after a natural disaster, why isn't the same or more being said about the French Gov't ?

I'm certain we'll see Michael Moore over in France ( if he's not there already ) getting film for his next masterpiece, similar to what he's done for post Katrina New Orleans.

Yeah, right.

[Tigermike 3,053]

The anarchy is spreading across France. So much for the policy of appeasement. The frogs are getting just what they deserve. Chirac and his flying monkey Villepin had best do something quick. There are only around 4.5 million muslims living (legal residents) in France.

Almost 2 weeks of do nothing policy by the Frogs, ( ok..appeasement is a policy, of sorts) and where are the cries of outrage at Chirac's incompetence? Over here, Bush has been villified by the far Left for bogus claims of having done nothing after a natural disaster, why isn't the same or more being said about the French Gov't ?

I'm certain we'll see Michael Moore over in France ( if he's not there already ) getting film for his next masterpiece, similar to what he's done for post Katrina New Orleans.

Yeah, right.

195885[/snapback]

How long before President Bush will be blamed for this?

[Wishbone 0]

Tiger in Spain,

I see you points, but would you agree or disagree that the Europeans have no tradition of non-european immigration and that Europeans can decide what groups they want to welcome into their countries? I don't feel the Muslims really have a say so in how France is run and North africa is always waiting to take them back if they don't like it.

[Tiger in Spain 0]

Tiger in Spain,

I see you points, but would you agree or disagree that the Europeans have no tradition of non-european immigration and that Europeans can decide what groups they want to welcome into their countries?  I don't feel the Muslims really have a say so in how France is run and North africa is always waiting to take them back if they don't like it.

196455[/snapback]

I would disagree with the statement that Europeans have no tradition of non-European immigration. Non-European immigrants make up the vast majority of new arrivals into most EU countries. As far as the welcoming part goes, that really doesn't happen. Immigrants are tolerated in that they work the low end jobs that the typical European finds beneath them. They live in poverty, with barely any help from the social service system of the EU.

My 10 years experience living in Europe has brought the social disparity between born and bred Europeans and the immigrants that come in and gain citizenship in whatever country they settle in. Take Italy for instance. The cities are split up by ethnicity. You'll have true Italians living in section A of a town, Albanians in section B, Macedonians in C, North Africans (Tunisians, Egyptians, Algerians, etc) over in D. They DO NOT mix, and the social services and state benefits that are readily available to the average Italian are not extended to the immigrants, even if they do become legal citizens.

This is the biggest beef the muslims in France have with Chirac and his government. They are working their rear ends off (40-70 hours per week when the typical frog works 30-35) and even though they have legal citizenship, they wind up holding the crappy end of the stick simply because they are not true blooded Frenchmen. Immigrants over here in Europe are facing the same prejudices the blacks did in the states prior to the '60's. They're fed up with the treatment, and are starting to do something about it.

The muslims, at least, have been taking this treatment over the years because (1) they didn't have the population numbers to demand a true voice in the way things are done here, and (2) even working and living like dogs in Europe was gravy compared to what they left in their native country. Well, Europe-wide they number over 20 million today and this tantrum they just threw is a harbinger of things to come if the EU governments don't start listening to them.

This is the Cliff notes version from my point of view. The research I did for my paper really opened my eyes to some things going on here that one might miss just casually glancing around. I can't say I truely feel sorry for the French; they deserve everything they get and then some. I love seeing Chirac and his gang of undermining backstabbers squirm. I don't really care for the other side either; I believe they are the most responsible for their current social situation.

[vatz22au 142]

Europe is culturally dead, they have no sense of common identity or common cause. 

195547[/snapback]

Your kidding me right?

[Wishbone 0]

Europe is culturally dead, they have no sense of common identity or common cause. 

195547[/snapback]

Your kidding me right?

197357[/snapback]

Europeans have taken their culture and heritage for granted. That's why they didn't mind letting Muslims inherit their nation.

[Tiger in Spain 0]

Europe is culturally dead, they have no sense of common identity or common cause. 

195547[/snapback]

Your kidding me right?

197357[/snapback]

Europe is culturally stagnant. As long as nothing interferes with their social handouts, they prefer to walk around with their head in the sand.