Paris Burning: How Empires End

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A long time ago, I was told you can be born French, live in France 30 years, move to America and become American in 12 months or so. You can be born in America, move immediately to France live there 30 years and never be French.

BTW, I do not endorse Buchanan at all. But he is on the money here.

Paris Burning: How Empires End

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted Nov 7, 2005

As France Burns, Immigration Rears Its Ugly Head 

Islamic Jihad: The Conclusive Case 

   

The Romans conquered the barbarians—and the barbarians conquered Rome.

So it goes with empires.  And comes now the penultimate chapter in the history of the empires of the West.

This is the larger meaning of the ritual murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the subway bombings in London, the train bombings in Madrid, the Paris riots spreading across France.  The perpetrators of these crimes in the capitals of Europe are the children of immigrants who were once the colonial subjects of the European empires.

At this writing, the riots are entering their 12th night and have spread to Rouen, Lille, Marseille, Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Cannes, Nice.  Thousands of cars and buses have been torched and several nursery schools fire-bombed.  One fleeing and terrified woman was doused with gasoline and set ablaze. 

The rioters are of Arab and African descent, and Muslim.  While almost all are French citizens, they are not part of the French people.  For never have they been assimilated into French culture or society.  And some wish to remain who and what they are.  They live in France but are not French.The rampage began October 27 when two Arab youths, fleeing what they mistakenly thought was a police pursuit, leapt onto power lines and were electrocuted.  The two deaths ignited the riots.

Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, a candidate to succeed President Chirac, is said to have infuriated and inflamed the rioters.  Before the rampage began, he promised “war without mercy” on crime in the teeming suburbs where unemployment runs at 20% and income is 40% below the national average.  He has denounced the rioters as “scum” and “rabble.”

Like the urban riots in America in the 1960s, which the Kerner Commission blamed on “white racism,” Paris’s riots are being blamed on France’s failure to bring Islamic immigrants into the social and economic mainstream of the nation.  Solutions being offered range from voting rights for non-citizens to affirmative action in hiring for the children of Third World immigrants.

To understand why this is unlikely to solve France’s crisis, consider how America succeeded, and often failed, in solving her own racial crisis.

While, as late as the 1950s, black Americans were not integrated fully into our economy or society, they had been assimilated into American culture. 

They worshipped the same God, spoke the same language, had endured the same Depression and war, listened to the same music and radio, watched the same TV shows, laughed at the same comedians, went to the same movies, ate the same foods, read the same books, magazines and newspapers, and went to schools where, even when they were segregated, they learned the same history. 

[Tiger in Spain 0]

I wrote a term paper 2 terms ago on the European mindset towards immigrants and how the segregation of communities here was a tinderbox waiting for the right spark to set it ablaze. Well, it's here and it is going to be very interesting to see how far this spreads. Germany and Belgium are reporting violent incidents now. If the 18+ million muslims in Europe get behind this movement, it is going to be extremely hard on the EU to defeat it.

[AURaptor 1,137]

Muslims fight French isolation

...... Police checks are a common occurrence for young Muslims in the French underclass.

In life, Zyed, 17, and Bouna, 15, were average kids, just two of France's 5 million Muslims, the largest Muslim community in Western Europe. In death, they have inspired the country's worst civil strife in 40 years, leading some police officials to speak of a "civil war."

After 12 nights of unrest, no leader has emerged to articulate demands and there is no established pattern to the violence. Anger and frustration seem to erupt in spontaneous combustion that recalls the American race riots of the late 1960s.

More than 30 policemen have been injured and 1,400 cars torched. Urban unrest has already spread throughout the country, and incidents were reported yesterday in Germany and Belgium.

The spreading disorder has sharply damaged the prestige of embattled President Jacques Chirac, who seemed to abdicate responsibility for public safety to controversial Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Chirac's center-right government has already lost ground with French voters over corruption scandals, while Muslims dislike him for ushering in the law that banned headscarves and other religious symbols from schools in 2004.

Breaking more than 10 days of silence, Chirac said Sunday he was "determined" to halt the violence, but his vague and flowery statement was not universally convincing. To many French people, the president has done too little, too late.

Sarkozy, who is in charge of the national police, offended many Muslims at the start of the unrest when he dismissed the rioters as "scum" who pollute the suburbs.

"For many of the rioters, that comment was an invitation to hate the government more," said Samiha, 24, who is of Moroccan origin and grew up in the suburbs.

The young people who are rioting are the second and third generation of immigrants who came to France seeking jobs and played down their religious beliefs to blend in.

Their children, growing up in an increasingly polarized world, are questioning the secular society that they feel isolates them. They cannot find jobs -- unemployment tops 60 percent in some suburbs -- or afford to move out of their housing projects. They resent the discrimination against anyone with a Muslim name.

French laws strictly separating church and state have been in the constitution since 1905. But many Muslims feel the headscarf law violates civil liberties.

In many ways, young French Muslims feel trapped between two societies -- France and their countries of origin -- and accepted in neither. Many complain not just of discrimination, but of total isolation from French society.

"In Britain and America, Muslims are free to be who they choose," said Yusuf, 24, a second-generation Algerian from the suburbs who works in a Paris disco. "Here, we have to pretend to be French but we are not really French. We do not have a true identity."

Dounia Bouzar, who was the only woman on the official body representing Muslims in France, the French Council of Muslim Religion, said those taking to the streets are the first generation to consider the problem of identity.

"We are in the process of defining who we are," she said. "This definition is still being written, and at the moment we are prisoners of the French definition."