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| Europe |
| Spot on analysis of the "Francifada" by Nidra Poller |
| 2005-11-09 |
| The bit about the romanticized glamourasiton of the jihad is very true. PARIS - The French government is faltering as the flames of urban warfare spread from Paris to over 300 towns. Schools, warehouses, gymnasiums, bus depots, restaurants and shopping malls are being sacked and burned. Journalists, ambulance personnel and firemen are being attacked. Even armour-clad riot police now fear for their lives, as some of the protesters have equipped themselves with guns. President Jacques Chirac, supposedly recovered from a stroke suffered in August, is out of commission. His dauphin, Dominique de Villepin, makes pompous proclamations while trying to roast his arch-rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in the flames of immigrant rage. But the plain-spoken Mr. Sarkozy did not summon this rage on his own. It has been simmering for years in the form of a steady increase in lawless, anti-social behaviour. Until now, the angry Muslim men who constitute the bulk of the rioters have been allowed to masquerade as victims. It is a common refrain that these second- and third-generation North African immigrants have been marginalized by a racist French society. But much of what goes under the name of harassment is simply the half-hearted intrusion of the forces of order into territories that have been conquered by another system of values. In Muslim ghettoes, pimping, drug dealing, theft, terrorism and Islamic law mix and match. The block of working-class suburbs, or banlieues, in the Seine St-Denis region outside Paris, is especially lawless. These areas are hardly dismal, dilapidated hellholes. Most of the housing and infrastructure is decent. Those who wish to pursue clean, honest lives have plenty of opportunities to do so. The insurrection spreading through France cannot be understood through the traditional Marxist prism of poverty, unemployment and discrimination. These problems exist in all nations. What is different in France's Muslim ghettoes is a tradition of hate and xenophobia, one which the state has until now either ignored or encouraged. In June, 2004, a huge demonstration was staged in Paris to protest the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush, who made a brief visit to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Posters depicted Bush as the world's worst terrorist. By my first-hand observation, roughly one-third of the marchers came from hard-left parties and organizations: communists, socialists and ecologists, labour unions and wilted flower people. Another third were militant Muslims, many of them with checkered kaffiyehs. The other third were raunchy nihilists high on drugs and beer, marching with pitbulls and Rottweilers, calling for death and destruction. They painted graffiti on lowered store shutters and bus stop shelters, promising "a Paris comme a Falluja la guerilla vaincra" (In Paris as in Falluja, guerrilla warfare will triumph). The same media that are now tallying up the number of cars torched and lecturing Sarkozy on the virtues of tolerance didn't seem much put out by such displays. The hard words were aimed at Bush, after all -- so the hatred expressed was seen as unremarkable, even admirable. In the same way, much of France ignored the cries of "death to the Jews" that went up in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that began in 2000, and which eventually blended in with the anti-war demonstrations of 2003. Incendiary, sometimes bloodthirsty slogans against Israel and the United States became commonplace. For five years, resentful French Muslims have been fed a steady diet of romanticized violence -- jihad-intifada in Israel, jihad-insurgency in Iraq, jihad-insurgency in Afghanistan. When they started firebombing synagogues and beating up Jews in the fall of 2000, the media dutifully reported that these thugs were products of the "frustration" felt in regard to the treatments of Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia. France's own government was full of hectoring words for the Americans, after all. The protesters were very much on message. In elite French society, the enemy was clearly identified: not Islamism or Islamofascism, not the stewing mobs in the Paris suburbs, not Saddam Hussein, not al-Qaeda, but the British and U.S. troops in Iraq. The burned-out cars and buildings that litter French streets are the domestic residue of the jihadi cult that these French Muslims have been drugged on through al-Jazeera, and which has been legitimized by a French intellectual class that has always romanticized resistance in all its forms. Perhaps some of the journalists, political scientists, intellectuals and public officials who've been peddling this merchandise meant it to remain an abstract ideological diversion. France is a long way from Iraq, after all. But now that the militancy is being turned on the French state itself, they are suddenly shocked at what they've sown. Things could get worse. Until the state can exert its authority, restore order and protect its citizens, there is a danger that images of charred bodies will replace pictures of burnt cars. For decades, the French media and government have been painting a rosy picture of social harmony within their borders. When the truth suddenly burst out with guerrilla warfare in the streets, the public was totally unprepared, as were the police and even the army. They might all have known that this is the terrible price to be paid for turning a blind eye to those who preach violent resistance. |
| Posted by:anonymous5089 |
| #2 I think the old term "useful fool" works nicely 2b. |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2005-11-09 18:18 |
| #1 spot on! I only have one complaint. I'm tired of the flattering term "elites" for those who consider themselves to be the keepers of morality. I'm going to only refer to them now as the RFSP - as income/race/education really have little to do with their belief system. |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-11-09 15:56 |