Excuse Les Rioters

(Article appeared in GEES 12/1/2005)

Wasn’t it only yesterday the media were telling us that the French are so wise in choosing diplomacy over the use of force, and so clever at handling relations with Third World people – in other words, so unlike the trigger-happy unilateralists on this side of the Atlantic?

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!

Smith argues that le rampage is roo-ted in “growing inequalities,” “dis-crimination” and an “overly aggres-sive police presence in the country’s immigrant-heavy housing projects” — which, of course, is why immigrant rioters have torched those symbols of inequality and discrimination, syna-gogues and churches, to shouts of “Allahu akbar!” (God is great!) .

We are told the rioting was sparked by the deaths of two immigrant teens, who were electrocuted in a power station while eluding the gendarmes.

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.

Writers Steven Komarow and Rick Hampson began by wondering if the mayhem would “mark the beginning of social change, as the U.S. urban riots did four decades ago?” Read: Things began getting better for black Americans when they started burning down their neighborhoods.

The article approvingly quotes the assistant mayor of a town north of Paris, who insists the vandals “are asking for dignity. They don’t want make-work jobs. They want real op-portunities – jobs, education and re-spect.” The riots are a proverbial cry for help. By firebombing 40 schools, the disenfranchised were pleading for better educational opportunities. And how can one not respect thugs who emulate storm troopers in going after synagogues?

A lady who runs a community play-house (probably not a National Front-voter) says the current turmoil “is just the beginning. I work with people who don’t even have socks and live 10 people in a room.” But they do have petrol for Molotov cocktails, not to mention the cell phones and com-puters used to coordinate attacks.

In case you missed the point, after being bludgeoned with it for several hundred words, USA Today summarized its case: “The same com-plaints that fueled the fires in inner-city Detroit and Los Angeles – unem-ployment, discrimination, despair – are behind the arson and rioting in suburban France.”

The media’s it’s-South Central-on-the-Seine analysis helps them avoid cer-tain unpleasant realities. On those rare occasions when they managed to use the I-word, it was to assure us that Islam played no role (absolutely, positively none) in the violence.

Just as it played no part in the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the 2004 Madrid train-bombing, the July bus and train-bombings in Lon-don (52 dead), or the wave of anti-Semitism that’s swept the Continent in recent years.

Columnist Mark Steyn (“Wake Up, Europe, You’ve A War On Your Hands“) calls it the “Eurabian civil war.” Steyn notes, “For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against syna-gogues, kosher butchers, Jewish day schools, etc.”

The rioters in Clichy-Sur-Bois are immigrants alright, immigrants (or the children of immigrants) from North Africa – Moslem immigrants driven by the same burning hatred of the West (democracy, tolerance, sani-tation, in-door plumbing) seen in the streets of Tehran, Ramallah, Jakarta and Islamabad.

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.

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