(Article appeared in GEES 12/1/2005)
Well, guess what? After three weeks of rioting in Parisian suburbs, those sophisticated, worldly French have been transformed into a nation of re-pressive, racist pigs, in the eyes of the U.S. press. All it took was a few thou-sand burning Citroens to illuminate the situation. For the mainstream media (inveterate root-causers), riots invariably are the result of injustice, discrimination, hopelessness, poverty, lack of eco-nomic opportunity and unemploy-ment.
I don’t know about you, but when-ever I’m out of work, I firebomb a few cars.
“Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition,” read the headline in a Washington Post story. The New York Times’ Craig Smith informed readers that in France “a significant portion of the population has yet to accept the increasingly multiethnic makeup of the nation. Put simply, being French, for many people, remains a baguette-and-beret affair.” No, don’t tell me the French actually expect these immi-grant families to assimilate? Incroy-able!
In a hilarious malapropism, CNN’s Carol Lin referred to the deceased as “African-American teenagers.” While the lads were of African origin (name-ly, Tunisian), I don’t believe Parisian suburbs have been annexed by the United States. Or – perhaps Lin was making the youth honorary African-Americans, in tribute to their victim-hood.
But it was a USA Today story (“La be-lle France: A Country of equality and exclusion”) that scaled the heights of political correctness.
In the past 50 years, the Muslim po-pulation of Western Europe has gone from less than 250,000 to upwards of 20 million (10 percent of France is Muslim). This is the result of a deadly troika – demographic winter (Euro-pean secularists have chosen extinc-tion by childlessness), lax immigra-tion policies and brain-dead multicul-turalism. The Center for Security Pol-icy warns that by 2050, Europe will lose one-third of its native population.
Enter the Muslims, whose high birth-rates are subsidized by European wel-farism. Some doubtless want to as-similate into their host societies. More want to live in Europe while identify-ing with a culture that’s warred with the West for more than a millennium.
The Madrid train bombers (body count, 191), mentioned the loss of Grenada in 1492 among their griev-ances. Perhaps the immigrant youth of Stains are protesting the defeat of the Moorish army at Tours in 732 A.D.
One of the few journalists who gets it is Olso-based Bruce Bawer. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor on No-vember 17 (“Not all Muslims want to integrate”), Bawer observes: “Europe’s Muslim communities are powder kegs, brimming with an alienation born both of assiduously inculcated antagonism toward infidel society and an infidel society whose integra-tion policies – which should actually be called segregation policies – have perversely encouraged this ire.”
“Naively, they imagined they could preserve their nations’ cultural ho-mogeneity while letting in millions of foreigners and smiling on their pres-ervation and perpetuation of values drastically different from their own.”
Bawer cautions: “What they’ve rea-ped, alas, is a generation of Muslims, many of whom view their neighbor-hoods as colonies amid enemy terri-tory – and who demand this auton-omy be recognized. In Britain, imams have pressed the government to des-ignate part of Bradford as being un-der Muslim law. In Belgium, Muslims in the Brussels neighborhood of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek consider it under Islamic jurisdiction. In Denmark, Muslim leaders have sought similar control over parts of Copenhagen.”
The French problem began, Bawer maintains, not when the youth were accidentally electrocuted, but when police “invaded” Dar al-Islam (the house of Islam) – heavily Muslim su-burban towns. Muslims have always operated on the premise: “What’s mi-ne is mine. And what’s yours will eventually be mine.” Thus, wherever they settle, the delightful civilization they’ve created in the Middle East follows them.
In her insightful book The Rage And The Pride, journalist Oriana Fallaci wonders if Muslim immigration to Europe might be part of a grand de-sign: “Something else, then, I don’t understand: if they (Muslim immi-grants) are as poor as their abettors and protectors claim, who gives them the money to come? Where do they find the five or ten thousand dollars per head that pay for the trip? Might it be that this money is supplied by some Osama bin Laden for the mere purpose of establishing the ReverseCrusade’s settlements and better or-ganizing Islamic terrorism?”
But – not to worry, New York Times — among the European elite, such views are shunned. It appears that France will answer the latest outbreak of immigrant violence with hope and handouts.
Last week, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced a $35 billion program to provide employment, scholarships and other unspecified “opportunities” for the rioters and their kin, along with the creation of an agency for “social cohesion” to ad-dress all of the oppression and dis-crimination in the land of Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.
Even Nicholas Sarkozy, the French interior minister who calls the rioters “scum,” favors a Gallic form of Af-firmative Action.
In the face of this appeasement, the immigrants will keep coming and keep procreating. The have-nots (who have not a work ethic or a desire to live peaceably with others) will con-tinue to resent the haves. Their imams will continue to preach hatred of the infidels. Al-Qaeda and its clones will continue to recruit. And French fami-lies will continue to have fewer chil-dren, or no children, aiding the proc-ess of Islama-cide.
In place of La Marseillaise, perhaps the French will adopt as their new national anthem the theme song from “M.A.S.H.” – “That suicide is painless (well, almost). It brings on many changes, and I can take or leave it if I please….”
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant.