I don't wish to flog this to death, there certainly are more important events happening in the world, but Spencer throws in Eurabia in that mess, that's interesting.
Riots have now continued for eight days in and around Paris. Thursday night, November 3, Muslim rioters burned 315 cars. In the previous week, they torched 177 vehicles and burned numerous businesses, a post office, and two schools. They have rampaged through twenty towns and shot at police and firemen. In an episode that summed up the failure of Franceâs efforts to create a domestic, domesticated Islam, when moderate Muslim leader Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Paris mosque, tried to restore calm, his car was pelted with stones and he had to rush away.
The riots began on October 27 when two Muslim teenagers ran from police who were checking identification papers â why they ran is as yet unclear. The police did not chase them, but evidently the teenagers thought they were being chased; they eventually hid in an electrical power sub-station, where they accidentally electrocuted themselves. That night young Muslims took to the streets for the first time, throwing rocks and bottles at police, burning cars, and vandalizing property. The next day rioters, throwing rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails, injured twenty-three police officers in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. The violence continued over the next few days: more destroyed vehicles and injured police officers. Then on Sunday, October 30, a tear gas shell hit a mosque, further enraging local Muslims; French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy stated somewhat cryptically, âI am, of course, available to the imam of the Clichy mosque to let him have all the details in order to understand how and why a tear gas bomb was sent into this mosque.â Since then the riots have continued unabated, defying appeals for calm from French President Jacques Chirac and others. The crisis now threatens to swamp the French government.
Why have the riots happened? From many accounts one would think that the riots have been caused by Franceâs failure to implement Marxism. âThe unrest,â AP explained, has highlighted the division between Franceâs big cities and their poor suburbs, with frustration simmering in the housing projects in areas marked by high unemployment, crime and poverty.â Another AP story declared flatly that the riots were over âpoor conditions in Paris-area housing projects.â
Reuters agreed with APâs attribution of all the unrest to economic injustice, and added in a suggestion of racism: âThe unrest in the northern and eastern suburbs, heavily populated by North African and black African minorities, have been fuelled by frustration among youths in the area over their failure to get jobs and recognition in French society.â Deutsche Presse Agentur called the high-rise public housing in the Paris suburbs âa long-time flashpoint of unemployment, crime and other social problems.â
One might get the impression from this that France is governed by top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalists, building their fortunes on the backs of the poor, rather than by socialists and quasi-socialists who have actually strained the economy by spending huge amounts of money on health and welfare programs. Nor does the idea that the rioting has been caused by economic inequalities explain why Catholics and others who are poor in France have not joined the Muslims who are rioting. Of course, all the news agencies have either omitted or mentioned only in passing that the rioters are Muslims at all. The casual reader would not be able to escape the impression that what is happening in France is all about economics â and race.
The areas hardest hit by the riots, according to Reuters, are âhome to North African and black African minorities that feel excluded from French society.â AP shed some light on this feeling of exclusion: âthe violence also cast doubt on the success of Franceâs model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community â its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europeâs largest â by playing down differences between ethnic groups. Rather than feeling embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.â
So evidently Franceâs failure to live up to its policy of playing down the differences between ethnic groups has bred the simmering anger that has now boiled over in the riots. However, in fact France has done just the opposite of playing down the differences between ethnic groups. In her seminal Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, historian Bat Yeâor details a series of agreements between the European Union and the Arab League that guaranteed that Muslim immigrants in Europe would not be compelled in any way to adapt âto the customs of the host countries.â On the contrary, the Euro-Arab Dialogueâs Hamburg Symposium of 1983, to take just one of many examples, recommended that non-Muslim Europeans be made âmore aware of the cultural background of migrants, by promoting cultural activities of the immigrant communities or âsupplying adequate information on the culture of the migrant communities in the school curricula.ââ Not only that: âAccess to the mass media had to be facilitated to the migrants in order to ensure âregular information in their own language about their own culture as well as about the conditions of life in the host country.â[1]
The European Union has implemented such recommendations for decades â so far from playing down the differences between ethnic groups, they have instead stood by approvingly while immigrants formed non-assimilated Islamic enclaves within Europe. Indeed, as Bat Yeâor demonstrates, they have assured the Arab League in multiple agreements that they would aid in the creation and maintenance of such enclaves. Ignorance of the jihad ideology among European officials has allowed that ideology to spread in those enclaves, unchecked until relatively recently.
Consequently, among a generation of Muslims born in Europe, significant numbers have nothing but contempt and disdain for their native lands, and allegiance only to the Muslim umma and the lands of their parentsâ birth. Those who continue to arrive in Europe from Muslim countries are encouraged by the isolation, self-imposed and other-abetted, of the Islamic communities in Europe to hold to the same attitudes. The Arab European League, a Muslim advocacy group operating in Belgium and the Netherlands, states as part of its âvision and philosophyâ that âwe believe in a multicultural society as a social and political model where different cultures coexist with equal rights under the law.â It strongly rejects for Muslims any idea of assimilation or integration into European societies: âWe do not want to assimilate and we do not want to be stuck somewhere in the middle. We want to foster our own identity and culture while being law abiding and worthy citizens of the countries where we live. In order to achieve that it is imperative for us to teach our children the Arabic language and history and the Islamic faith. We will resist any attempt to strip us of our right to our own cultural and religious identity, as we believe it is one of the most fundamental human rights.â AEL founder Dyab Abou Jahjah, who was himself arrested in November 2002 and charged with inciting Muslims in Antwerp to riot (Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said that the AEL was âtrying to terrorize the cityâ[2]), has declared: âAssimilation is cultural rape. It means renouncing your identity, becoming like the others.â He implied that European Muslims had a right to bring the ideology of jihad and Sharia to Europe, complaining that in Europe âI could still eat certain dishes from the Middle East, but I cannot have certain thoughts that are based on ideologies and ideas from the Middle East.â
What kind of ideologies? Perhaps Hani Ramadan, grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan Al-Banna and brother of the famed self-proclaimed moderate Muslim spokesman Tariq Ramadan, gave a hint when he defended the traditional Islamic Sharia punishment of stoning for adultery in the Paris journal Le Monde. In Denmark, politician Fatima Shah echoed the same sentiments in November 2004. That same month, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who had made a film, Submission, about the oppression of women by Islamic law, was murdered in Holland by a Muslim, Mohammed Bouyeri. Bouyeri later declared in court: âI did what I did purely out my beliefs. I want you to know that I acted out of conviction and not that I took his life because he was Dutch or because I was Moroccan and felt insulted.â In other words, his problem was religious, not racial: Van Gogh had blasphemed Islam, and so according to Islamic law he had to die. Significantly, Bouyeri maintained during his trial that he did not recognize the authority of the Dutch court, but only of the law of Islam.
How many European Muslims share the sentiments of Mohammed Bouyeri? How many of these are rioting this week in Paris? Alleviating Muslim unemployment and poverty will not ultimately do anything to alter this rejection of European values by growing numbers of people who are only geographically Europeans. And the problem cannot be ignored. For France is not alone: Muslims in à rhus, Denmark have also been rioting this week. And in France, Sarkozy recently revealed that this weekâs riots are just a particularly virulent flare-up of an ongoing pattern of violence: he told Le Monde that twenty to forty cars are set afire nightly in Parisâ restive Muslim suburbs, and no fewer than nine thousand police cars have been stoned since the beginning of 2005.
Blame for the riots in France has thus far focused on Sarkozyâs tough talk about ending this violence. On October 19 he declared of the suburbs that âthey have to be cleaned â weâre going to make them as clean as a whistle.â Six days after this, Muslim protestors threw stones and bottles at him when he visited the suburb of Argenteuil. He has been roundly criticized for calling the rioters âscumâ; one of them responded, âWeâre not scum. Weâre human beings, but weâre neglected.â However, as a solution the same man recommended only more neglect, saying of the Paris riot police: âIf they didnât come here, into our area, nothing would happen. If they come here itâs to provoke us, so we provoke back.â Others complained of rough treatment they have received since 9/11 from police searching for terrorists: âItâs the way they stop and search people, kneeing them between the legs as they put them up against the wall. They get students mixed up with the worst offenders, yet these young people have done nothing wrong.â
But of course, all these problems are exacerbated by the non-assimilation policy that both the French government and the Muslim population have for so long pursued: the rioters are part of a population that has never considered itself French. Nor do French officials seem able or willing to face that this is the core of their problem today. It is likely that the riots will result only in intensification of the problems that caused them: if French officials offer an accommodation to Muslims, it will probably result only in further intensification of the Islamic identity, often in its most radical manifestations, among French Muslims. The French response to the riots is likely to unfold along the lines of a decision by officials in Holland last May: they declined to ban a book called De weg van de Moslim (The Way of the Muslim), even though it calls for homosexuals to be thrown head first off tall buildings. The Amsterdam city council did not want to contravene âthe freedom to express opinions.â
That decision is a small example of what the Paris riots demonstrate on a large scale: the abject failure of the multiculturalist philosophy that disparate groups can coexist within a nation without any idea that they must share at least some basic values. The French are paying the price today for blithely assuming that France could absorb a population holding values vastly different from that of the host population without negative consequences for either.
That French officials show no sign, on the eighth day of the Paris riots, of recognizing that this clash of values is the heart of the problem only guarantees that before they will be able to say that their difficulties with their Muslim population are behind them, many more cars will be torched, many more buildings burned, and many more lives destroyed.
Notes:
[1] Bat Yeâor, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. P. 97.
[2] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, âEx-Hezbollah charged with inciting rioting,â London Daily Telegraph, November 30, 2002.
#3
Because several of the countries have nuclear arms and I'd rather those didn't come under the control of islamacist regimes - or be sold during the chaos of failing states.
#4
I'd rather those didn't come under the control of islamacist regimes
Well, get ready for it.
I doubt the route will be street violence. Instead after this is over there will be much French soul searching, or whatever it is they search now that they are soulless. The result will be that Muzzies must be integrated into French society more rapidly. There will be a race by all parties to bring showcase/token muslims into government to show how much success there is with integrating them. At some point, perhaps a couple of decades away, one will be interior minister, then defence minister and finally prime minister. And a crescent moon will be superimposed on to the tricolour.
#6
#3 Because several of the countries have nuclear arms and I'd rather those didn't come under the control of islamacist regimes - or be sold during the chaos of failing states.
Ok. And "saving Europe" is the only (or, in fact, practical) way to do this?
Not at all. You could launch pre-emptive nuclear strikes, for instance, and take out most or all of their arsenals. Or you could sit down with the sons of de Gaulle and persuade them to give up their independent nuclear capability and sing Kumbaya ...
#8
or you could take the best of their citizens, arm them, say "get your shit act together and reclaim your heritage kill your opponents" and let them loose. The route through Spain shouldn't pose any hazard to fleeing islamists...
Let's see how hardy and able the French "resistance" can be when nobody's there to lead them. To hear history, roughly 117% of French were partisans in WW2 - time for the knife, garrotte, and fine-cuisine-before-missions to rear its' ugly head again!
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/05/2005 23:06 Comments ||
Top||
Via AMERICAN FUTURE
Link is a 95 page PDF file of Freedom Houseâs Center for Religious Freedom report on the Saudi government's incitement of religious hatred in American mosques. Save it and browse it at your leisure.
FOREWARD by R. James Woolsey, excerpt:
Americans are not normally comfortable distinguishing between what is acceptable and what is not acceptable within a religion, unless they are, say, debating views within their own church. Because of the First Amendment and American culture, most Americans tend not to make judgments about othersâ religions. But the Wahhabis and the Islamists whom they work with and support have a long political reach and their views have substantial political effect. Some of the consequences of this "grotesque protection racket" have been quite lethal: American deaths and the failure to apprehend the terrorists who killed them.
One analogue for Wahhabismâs political influence today might be the extremely angry form taken by much of German nationalism in the period after WW I. Not all angry and extreme German nationalists (or their sympathizers in the U.S.) in that period were or became Nazis. But just as angry and extreme German nationalism of that period was the soil in which Nazism grew, Wahhabi and Islamist extremism today is the soil in which al Qaeda and its sister terrorist organizations are growing. We need to recognize the problem posed by the international spread of this hate ideology, including within the American homeland.
This report is a first step in an effort to contain the destructive ideology being proliferated by the Wahhabis within the American homeland. Hopefully it will lead to the removal of tracts spreading hatred within American mosques, libraries and Islamic centers. The publications analyzed in this Report and others like them that advocate an ideology of hatred have no place in a nation founded on religious freedom and toleration.
INTRODUCTION
On December 3, 2004, Ahmed, an Arab exchange student, walks down a palm-lined boulevard in a working class neighborhood of Los Angeles. Since it is Friday, he bypasses the Hispanic restaurants, the 7/11, and the sporting goods store, and enters the King Fahd mosque â an elegant building of white marble etched with gold, adorned by a blue minaret, that is named after its benefactor, the King of Saudi Arabia. Later he will join 500 other California Muslims in prayer but, because it is early, he visits the mosque library where he picks up several books on religious guidance, written in Arabic, that are offered free to Muslims like him, newly arrived and uncertain on how to fit into this modern, diverse land.
The tracts he opens are in the voice of a senior religious authority. They tell him that America, his adoptive home, is the âAbode of the Infidel,â the Christian and the Jew. He reads:
âBe dissociated from the infidels, hate them for their religion, leave them, never rely on them for support, do not admire them, and always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.â
The advice is emphatic: âThere is consensus on this matter, that whoever helps unbelievers against Muslims, regardless of what type of support he lends to them, he is an unbeliever himself.â
As he reads this warning, Ahmed thinks back to the U.S. governmentâs request to the American Muslim community for their voluntary cooperation in the fight against terrorism and he is afraid. He knows that the tractsâ author views such officials as âunbelievers,â so that, if he helped them, he would be an unbeliever himself, a renegade, an apostate from Islam who should therefore be put to death. He begins to worry too about his cousin, an American citizen who recently enlisted in the U.S. military.
The books give him detailed instructions on how to build a âwall of resentmentâ between himself and the infidel: Never greet the Christian or Jew first. Never congratulate the infidel on his holiday. Never befriend an infidel unless it is to convert him. Never imitate the infidel. Never work for an infidel. Do not wear a graduation gown because this imitates the infidel.
Ahmed looks carefully at the bookâs cover. It says âGreetings from the Cultural Departmentâ of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C. The book is published by the government of Saudi Arabia. The other books are textbooks from the Saudi Education Ministry, and collections of fatwas, religious edicts, issued by the governmentâs religious office, published by other organizations based in Riyadh.
In another book he reads that, if relations between Muslims and non-Muslims were harmonious, there would be âno loyalty and enmity, no more jihad and fighting to raise Allahâs work on earth.â
Ahmedâs experience is repeated, not only in Saudi Arabia and the notorious madrassas of Pakistan, but throughout America: the texts he read have been spread from coast to coast and now fill the libraries and study halls of some of Americaâs main mosques. To be sure, not all the books in such mosques espouse extremism and not all extremist works are Saudi. Saudi Arabia, however, is overwhelmingly the state most responsible for the publications on the ideology of hate in America.
The Center for Religious Freedom has gathered samples of over 200 such texts over the last twelve months -- all from American mosques and all spread, sponsored or otherwise generated by Saudi Arabia. They demonstrate the ongoing indoctrination of Muslims in the United States in the hostility and belligerence of Saudi Arabiaâs hardline Wahhabi sect of Islam.
Posted by: ed ||
11/05/2005 17:42 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[1 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Saudi Arabia, however, is overwhelmingly the state most responsible for the publications on the ideology of hate in America.
The Center for Religious Freedom has gathered samples of over 200 such texts over the last twelve months -- all from American mosques and all spread, sponsored or otherwise generated by Saudi Arabia.
America's leadership had best begin the task of reversing this disgusting phenomenon. Saudi Arabia represents the penultimate in Arab perfidy. Even the frothy Iranians are more intellectually honest in that the hatred they spew is open and relatively transparent.
The Saudis have, in the guise of an ally, presided over the fostering of Wahabbism, its Pakistani madrasahs and the Taleban born therein. This evil trinity aided in summoning forth al Qaeda and has served the ends of international terrorism for untold decades.
If we do not attach a price tag to such deceit, we give it our tacit approval. France's institutionalized anti-Semitism is now reaping the full harvest of being willing bedfellows to their supremely ungrateful Islamist radicals. America needs to learn from this stark object lesson and carry away a vivid perception of what awaits any further fostering of such venomous fanaticism.
Many are unaware of just how austere and astringent Wahabbism actually is. I have repeatedly advocated America's taking hostage Islam's holy cities. This would represent the ultimate "flypaper" strategy. Every radical Muslim on earth would be drawn to Mecca and Medina like moths to a candle flame. Consider how much more brutal it would be to cripple the House of Saud such that the Wahabbis gained control. These violently antiseptic clerics look forward to the day when they can cleanse the holy cities of their idolatry. Yes, idolatry.
The decorative elements and gorgeous flowing Arabic script that adorns the walls of mosques in Mecca and Medina are viewed as blasphemous ornamentation of what they feel should be a stark monument to pure and untainted worship of their desiccated God. The Wahabbis would just as soon chisel off every square inch of such embellishment and leave these grand mosques as unadorned as the Washington Monument. Were it not for the dire implications of Wahabbists run riot in such a politically sensitive corner of the globe, I would just as soon unleash them upon their erstwhile masters.
Disregarding how much Islam, as a whole, richly deserves this sort of self-inflicted desecration, such a satisfying option is of no use to American interests in the Middle East. Instead, we must summon forth the courage to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for its treachery. Sadly, the stranglehold that petro-dollars maintain upon domestic political campaign finance bodes rather ill for any such thing. So it becomes incumbent upon America to begin a painful awakening to the facts as they stand. To date, this nation's people have shown a modicum of wisdom in their continued, if marginal, support for the Iraq campaign. Far less probable is our population having sufficient intestinal fortitude to back the badly needed kinesis of a "domino" strategy within the Middle East's hive of tyrants and theocrats.
Due to this less-than-unanimous support, I maintain that swifter and less elaborate solutions are called for. Simple decapitation of these sundry despotic governments is one of the few tools that can yield certain results. Whatever detritus, be it favorable or more hostile, which is sucked into the resulting power vacuums cannot possibly have an equal degree of malignance, if only due to inexperience.
Dealing with these subsequent fledgling upstarts will be much simpler than navigating the hazardous shoals of what are certainly among the most duplicitous political entities that have ever manifested. Simply put, rinse and repeat is far less troublesome than slowly tearing our hair out by the roots amidst futile negotiations with hopelessly corrupt opponents. Iran, Saudi Arabia, take your pick, but make a choice of where we shall expand upon our current policy of making those who call the terrorist tune finally pay the piper.
The main objective of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held this month in Tunisia is to ensure that poor countries get the full benefits that new information and communication technologies -- including the Internet -- can bring to economic and social development. But as the meeting draws nearer, there is a growing chorus of misinformation about it.
One mistaken notion is that the United Nations wants to "take over," police or otherwise control the Internet. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The United Nations wants only to ensure the Internet's global reach, and that effort is at the heart of this summit.
Of course, to do that you have to take it over.
Strong feelings about protecting the Internet are to be expected. In its short life, the Internet has become an agent of revolutionary change in health, education, journalism and politics, among other areas. In the United Nations' own work for development, we have glimpsed only the beginning of the benefits it can provide: for victims of disaster, quicker, better-coordinated relief; for poor people in remote areas, lifesaving medical information; and, for people trapped under repressive governments, access to uncensored information as well as an outlet to air their grievances and appeal for help.
Which is why you've stood by and allowed repressive governments to censor information and stifle grievances.
There are also legitimate concerns about the use of the Internet to incite terrorism or help terrorists, disseminate pornography, facilitate illegal activities or glorify Nazism and other hateful ideologies. But censoring cyberspace, compromising its technical underpinnings or submitting it to stringent governmental oversight would mean turning our backs on one of today's greatest instruments of progress. To defend the Internet is to defend freedom itself.
Which is why you'll tell the Chinese to back off, right?
Governance of matters related to the Internet, such as spam and cybercrime, is being dealt with in a dispersed and fragmented manner, while the Internet's infrastructure has been managed in an informal but effective collaboration among private businesses, civil society and the academic and technical communities. But developing countries find it difficult to follow all these processes and feel left out of Internet governance structures.
For openers, they're poor and can't afford the infrastructure. And they're usually run by thugs who aren't especially interested in letting the common folk gain enlightenment on their situation.
The United States deserves our thanks bet it hurt to say that for having developed the Internet and made it available to the world. For historical reasons, the United States has the ultimate authority over some of the Internet's core resources. It is an authority that many say should be shared with the international community. The United States, which has exercised its oversight responsibilities fairly and honorably, recognizes that other governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns, and that efforts to make the governance arrangements more international should continue.
The need for change is a reflection of the future, when Internet growth will be most dramatic in developing countries. What we are seeing is the beginning of a dialogue between two different cultures: the nongovernmental Internet community, with its traditions of informal, bottom-up decision making, and the more formal, structured world of governments and intergovernmental organizations.
And it's the latter, whether run by thugs like the Chinese communists or by statist fools like Chirac, who can most harm the internet.
Posted by: Captain America ||
11/05/2005 00:30 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under:
#2
Ghosted by stooges. Written by the Great One himself. Pure 100% Bullshit. Every other article on this topic has been as clear as it can be - I guess they're all calling SecTwit a liar. They're right, of course, but perhaps this is a signal to the kleptocrat cabal that the power grab is "off", for now. From what I've read, it won't be over until they find a way to control it so they can tax and censor and, probably, use it to punish those who don't play ball.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The main objective of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held this month in Tunisia is to ensure that poor countries get the full benefits that new information and communication technologies -- including the Internet -- can bring to economic and social development. But as the meeting draws nearer, there is a growing chorus of misinformation about it.
