35 Comments

1. dougf:

Hmmm, let’s see here.

On the one hand we have the Interior Minister saying that,in effect, ” I don’t really care about the ‘root causes’(partly because we can’t fix them anyway), but i’ll be damned if I will allow thugs and muggs to impose their violent will on French society”.

On the other hand we have the rest of the French apparatus saying that what is needed is “a spirit of dialogue and respect”,and appealing to that glorious French tradition of abject surrender to a willful opponent.

Tough call, but I think I will have to go with what’s behind door #2, Monty.

And the WINNER IS : More Appeasement !!!!

Woohoo !! Another fine moment(pending) in French History.

Nov 2, 2005 - 9:03 am 2. dubhail:

dougf is right. Expect an anouncement of taxpayer largesse heading banlieu direction soon.

Nov 2, 2005 - 9:07 am 3. jedrury:

Take the RER – the train – from Garde du Nord to Charles De Gaulle Airport, past the Stade de France, on the left, a shack community exists looking like a hundred card houses packed with immigrants.

Walk a few hundred yards on the Boulevard des Italiens/Boulevard Montmartre east away from the fashionable downtown, and, Paris is Tangiers and Casablanca without Humphrey Bogart. Suspicious eyes assault the Westerner, the European to the edge of fear.

Nov 2, 2005 - 9:09 am 4. syn:

Maybe Sean Penn and his cup full of photographers could go in and help the ‘youths’ by having a compassionate conversation on finding ways of saving their ways.

I mean, it worked with the Mullahs in Tehran, why not Happy Paree?

Nov 2, 2005 - 9:34 am 5. David Thomson:

Wait a minute, isn

Nov 2, 2005 - 9:55 am 6. Percy Dovetonsils:

Now, now, remember that all good-thinking people of the West should be supporting insurgencies like this.

Obviously, the French are illegally occupying the land, and need to be expelled.

Nov 2, 2005 - 10:06 am 7. vegetius:

The ‘coq au vin’ comes home to roost.

Nov 2, 2005 - 10:20 am 8. Fausta:

On the one hand we have the Interior Minister saying that,in effect, ” I don’t really care about the ‘root causes’(partly because we can’t fix them anyway), but i’ll be damned if I will allow thugs and muggs to impose their violent will on French society”.

Sarkozy’s talking tough on that, which has made him unpopular with the rest of his party,

BUT,

at the same time, wants to give long-term foreign residents the right to vote in municipal elections even if they don’t have full French citizenship.

Sarkozy’s also named a panel to suggest ways of reviewing the 1905 secularity law that bans the state from funding places of worship, because he’s

Concerned that a shortage of mosques is allowing extremists to gain a foothold among Frances 5.5 million Muslims by funding places of worship, so he’d rather have the state fund mosques.

While Le Monde’s headline reads, Clichy-sous-Bois cristalizes political and social tensions, Viking Observer posts on the riots in Denmark, and translates,

Rosenhøj Mall has several nights in a row been the scene of the worst riots in Århus for years. “This area belongs to us”, the youths proclaim. Sunday evening saw a new arson attack.

Their words sound like a clear declaration of war on the Danish society. Police must stay out. The area belongs to immigrants,

just at it does in France.

For what it’s worth, France2 newscasts didn’t mention the muslim component to the story until the third day of rioting.

Nov 2, 2005 - 10:35 am 9. jerry:

Bear with me while I get to the ultimate point…

As we all know the 2000th American death occurred in Iraq last week. The pro-Islamofascist faction of the Democratic Party and points farther left have been celebrating this fact as indicator of war we are losing at an unacceptable cost. However, the total number of deaths, no matter how tragic each death may be to a family, pales in comparison to the central event of America’s European intervention in 1944. The 2000th death on D-Day occurred not after three years of fighting. It occured sometime around 1500 hours on 6 June, 1944. Those are American losses only. 900 Canadians died on the beach within the first few hours of the invasion.

So where are we 60 years after the sacrifice of these brave men? Our ally to be liberated, [France] has reverted to appeasment and collaboration with our fascist enemies. Our enemy to be defeated [Germany] has reverted to the instability of the Wiemar Republic complete with a dysfunctional government, occasional left/right rioting and depression level rates of unemployment.

So what is the significance of these Paris Riots? The riots are sign of the ball rolling down hill toward a continent wide Balkans style civil war with the likelihood of the defeat of a culture in its death throws in the not so distant future.

Nov 2, 2005 - 11:15 am 10. Knucklehead:

Vegetius,

The ‘coq au vin’ comes home to roost.

I’m stealing that! Well, with the dreams of the resurrecte caliphate fading to black at least they’ll always have Paris.

Nov 2, 2005 - 11:22 am 11. Fausta:

Jerry,

900 men died in the simulacrum (the dress rehearsal, so to speak) of D-Day before the invasion, and this fact, along with their names were kept in secret files for 60 years, until this year.

So where are we 60 years after the sacrifice of these brave men? Our ally to be liberated, [France] has reverted to appeasment and collaboration with our fascist enemies.

In August last year I posted about how France 2 news to report for several days in a row on the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Paris without once mentioning the role played during the war by the USA, the 28th Infantry Division, or, for that matter, any of the allies except Spain.

Yup, Spain.

No American flags were flown in Paris last year for the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

(with apologies for the triple self-promotion)

Nov 2, 2005 - 11:35 am 12. neo-neocon:

Europe seems virtually clueless at knowing how to deal with a problem that’s been brewing and festering for many long decades. The present situation represents, at least partly, a clash between those in France who would like to try a law-and-order solution, and those on the left who only want to deal with what they see as the underlying causes. Meanwhile, the riots go on.

I spent quite a while today digesting a whole bunch of articles that attempt to explain the whole thing in some depth. Here’s the post, entitled “While Europe Slept.”

Nov 2, 2005 - 11:48 am 13. TomTom:

I’m wondering why, if Muslim immigrant life is so crappy in France, Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Italy, why do they still come? Oriana Fallaci says in her little book, “The Rage and The Pride” (2002), Italy takes in 500,000 new Muslims yearly. I conclude they come 1)because they can, 2)because welfare benefits them materially AND 3)they can get away with behavior not tolerated by their non-socialist, non-democratic countries of origin.

The implications must not be lost on the U.S. Victor Davis Hanson’s “Mexifornia” is pretty negative about attitudes in 1st generation Mexican-Americans, which are pretty similar to the young Euro islamofascists. And never forget our own burgeoning Muslim minority.

Multiculturalism is the death of western Europe as we know it…not an altogether undeserved outcome, though the new Euro is an abomination. I’m just glad my progenitors got on the boat!

Nov 2, 2005 - 12:04 pm 14. thibaud:

The root of the difference between Europe and the US as regards our respective islamic minorities is that Americans, though they may not use the word, actually practice and believe in multiculturalism owing to a long and deep-rooted tradition of encouraging religious minorities to immigrate here, build communities, and worship more or less as they see fit. The European approach remains corporatist (in the mUssolini sense of the term), seeking to organize and co-opt the leadership of the minority group under paternalistic state structures like France’s absurd muslim parliament.

Parallel to this is the expectation of most religious minority immigrants to Europe that they will be eligible for generous welfare benefits, as opposed to no such expectation for those coming to the US. The European approach is guranteed to attract a high proportion of resenters; ours is far more likely to attract strivers.

This is a constant through our history. From the quakers to catholics and later mormons, jews, muslims and sikhs, religious difference has always been considered normal and acceptable by most residents of this country, and more importantly, by the state, which has welcomed religious minorities not only for their help in alleviating labor shortages and thus enhancing the political power of thinly-populated new states but also for the immgrants’ entrepreneurial zeal and wealth creation. We see this even today, in the welcome given to Vietnamese and South American immigrants in depopulating great plains states and in the Bosnian immigrants in St Louis.

In short, with some notable exceptions (mainly Know-Nothing agitation against Irish Catholics in the mid-19c), by and large the American experience with religious minorities is to welcome them as enablers of liberal capitalism, not shun them as a subversive element. Laissez-faire– in the economic and the cultural realm– is the best policy approach toward muslim immigrants. Let Sarkozy and his peers try to corral and co-opt their resentful subjects. Give us the strivers, and we’ll continue to provide them opportunities and then leave them and their communities alone to make money, build businesses and families and pursue happiness.

In many ways religious minority communities represent the very best of America: self-reliant communities who create wealth through hard work, mutual assistance and a dedication to their children’s welfare. Let Europe have the resenter muslims, and give us the hardworking, law-abiding strivers who want little more than to build communities and wealth and be left alone.

Nov 2, 2005 - 12:10 pm 15. thibaud:

Off topic: gotta love Google Ad Sense. A thread dealing with racial tensions in France, home of leading fascist and open racist presidential contender (18% of the vote in 2002) Jean Marie Le Pen, elicits ads for “quality pens.” Wonder whether retailers for Waterman, Mont Blanc etc think they’re getting good value for their Google advertising spend? How much of Google’s ad rate card is based on junk metrics that obscure their notoriously bad aim?

Nov 2, 2005 - 12:15 pm 16. Sandy P:

OT, but barring any attacks, WOOHOO! Via Econopundit:

Ray has at last finished this quarter’s updating, re-estimation, and re-running of Fairmodel. Here are some rather striking predictions from this quarter’s Forecast Memo:

Real Growth and the Unemployment Rate: The predicted growth rates for the next four quarters are 5.2, 2.9, 2.3, and 2.2 percent, respectively. The unemployment rate at the end of 2006 is 4.6 percent. The jobs variable, JF, is predicted to increase in the four quarters by 2.7, 2.8, 2.4, and 2.0 percent, respectively. The reason for the large change in 2005:4 is a large predicted increase in inventory investment. In the last two quarters real final sales have grown more rapidly than real output, and the model is predicting a positive inventory correction.

Whoa! Can you say — in a deep dramatic voice — BOOM!!!!!

Nov 2, 2005 - 1:05 pm 17. Ari Tai:

Hmm. Shades of the late 60s and the inner-city / slum riots in the U.S. This is good news. I’ve been worried that European society was permanantly stuck in a time warp and trapped 40 years behind the U.S.

Maybe this will remove the blinders and they will realize the sad result of socialism, utopian press, and government by the elites. Right, egality in the distribution of wealth is inveresely proportional to the size of government, and the power/wealth of elites in government. From worst (dictatorships by individuals or “the people”) to best (free market constitutionally-limited federal republics). Which means the U.S. actually (still) has the least inequality in wealth(power) (and hope of same based on merit) of all nations. And this is the most important competitive (wrt our economic health and security) advantage.

Nov 2, 2005 - 1:50 pm 18. Dymphna:

I have been in Ramallah and the back streets of Cairo and I was more tense in Monfleury.

Hey, Roger–

There’s nowhere to hide, to feel safe. Ever since the Baron found that Jamaat ul Fuqra compound down the road, I haven’t felt safe. Before, I used to think, well at least I’m not in DC or NY, maybe out here in the middle of beyond, we’ll be okay.

Hah. Since then, people have been reporting these places all over the US. And they’ve been here since 1980, started by a Pakistani mullah (the one that Richard Pearl was on his way to see, and who now resides in a jail in Lahore on suspicion). They’re kept goign with Saudi money, various nefarious schemes including welfare fraud, and a steady influx from the prison population and other marginal places.

It’s here, too. Just a matter of time. Ain’t none of us safe.

Nov 2, 2005 - 1:56 pm 19. Knucklehead:

I’ve searched several times today for news reports of these riots in Paris and Ahus (Denmark). There is remarkably little.

If several neighborhoods of a major American city were in the throes of a six day riot it would be front page, or broadcast opening, news everywhere – everywhere.

Why is this not being covered?

BTW, neo-neocon, thanks for the link to your fine article on this topic.

Nov 2, 2005 - 2:28 pm 20. Kevin P:

Roger:

Ah, but the French must not look at the rioting and violence without looking at the root causes. These poor youths feel hopeless, they see no future. They are herded into these slums like animals so it is wrong to blame them when they act like animals.Men with no hope will act out in their dispair. It is the French government that is at fault, in fact I think that the U.N. should pass a resolution equating Gaulism with Racism. The insurgents are like the Minutemen of our Revolution. They have a right to a seperate state because they will never be given true full rights, only a phoney bantustan like charade of eqaulity. The French have no right to occupy those area’s when it is their policies that are forcing these noble Men to finally take action to assert their humanity. To the barricades, Bread, Jobs, Sharia!

Nov 2, 2005 - 2:41 pm 21. colin:

Roger,

Heinlein posited in one of his “future history” books that cities would have free zones in which police wouldn’t venture.Looks pretty smart doesn’ he?

I’d like someone more knowledgeable than I to comment on the Euro anti Semitism.Is it thought to be Arabic (or cultivating middle Eastern origin voters) or is it something more basic and sinister.

Nov 2, 2005 - 2:55 pm 22. Dymphna:

Knucklehead–

Here’s a link to a translation of what’s going on in Denmark:

the Danish characters don’t come thru)

http://viking-observer.blogspot.com/2005/10/war-in-france-war-in-denmark.html

Rosenh?ll has several nights in a row been the scene of the worst riots in Ųhus for years. ?This area belongs to us?, the youths proclaim. Sunday evening saw a new arson attack.

Their words sound like a clear declaration of war on the Danish society. Police must stay out. The area belongs to immigrants.

Four youths sit on the wall in Rosenh?ll sunday afternoon, calling themselves spokesmen for the groups, that three nights in a row have ravaged and tried to burn down the restaurant and other stores .

It’s coming to a town near you…just not right away. We have to wait for the re-runs.

Nov 2, 2005 - 3:20 pm 23. John Moore ( Useful Fools ):

Roger,

I must once again recommend The West’s Last Chance. This book discusses in depth the various phenomena at work in Europe on the Muslim immigration question. It shows that in some cases, especially the Van Gogh execution, Europeans have taken far more notice than Americans, and have reacted violently. In addition, the European elite seems to have started to recognize that they have a big problem. The book also gives an example of the outcome if appeasement is what comes to pass.

Furthermore, the US MSM is not correctly identifying these riots as Muslim, and you often have to dig several paragraphs in to find the word even mentioned, if at all (except Fox, which is making it clear that these are riots by the inhabitants of Muslim slums). Hence we may not be seeing the full European reaction.

The book gives historical examples to show that European cultures (including our own, sorta), when finally riled up, are remarkably quick and brutal in dealing with this sort of nonsense. After the Van Gogh slaying, 10 Mosques were burned, for example.

The US has far less of a problem for several reasons:

1) We are not importing many people with a tendency in their young towards incredible violence towards our society, and

2) We are not keeping Muslims in ghettos, and they are assimilating much better, reducing the conditions under which Islamofascism is best spread.

3) We are not dependent on Muslim immigrants to solve the issue of bloated welfare states and demographic decline.

On the other hand, the Islamist slums of Europe breed terrorists who are quite happy to come here and do violence (or Iraq, where many have been killed).

Furthermore, the US elite, being at a safe distance, has not yet started to question the danger of multiculturalism, while at least some of the European elite (see the book) are well aware of the danger they face.

Nov 2, 2005 - 4:50 pm 24. Gideon7:

This article from 2002 is very prescient: The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris (City Journal, Autumn 2002)

Nov 2, 2005 - 5:20 pm 25. Jamie Irons:

Yesterday at LGF I was directed to this fascinating analysis* by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a man who seems to have spent his life in a sympathetic but critical study of the various facets of the British underclass, and I excerpt a few paragraphs below. This is the best deconstruction of the minds of the British suicide bombers I have yet encountered:

Muslims who reject the West are therefore engaged in a losing and impossible inner jihad, or struggle, to expunge everything that is not Muslim from their breasts. It can’t be done: for their technological and scientific dependence is necessarily also a cultural one. You can’t believe in a return to seventh-century Arabia as being all-sufficient for human requirements, and at the same time drive around in a brand-new red Mercedes, as one of the London bombers did shortly before his murderous suicide. An awareness of the contradiction must gnaw in even the dullest fundamentalist brain.

Furthermore, fundamentalists must be sufficiently self-aware to know that they will never be willing to forgo the appurtenances of Western life: the taste for them is too deeply implanted in their souls, too deeply a part of what they are as human beings, ever to be eradicated. It is possible to reject isolated aspects of modernity but not modernity itself. Whether they like it or not, Muslim fundamentalists are modern men–modern men trying, impossibly, to be something else.

They therefore have at least a nagging intimation that their chosen utopia is not really a utopia at all: that deep within themselves there exists something that makes it unachievable and even undesirable. How to persuade themselves and others that their lack of faith, their vacillation, is really the strongest possible faith? What more convincing evidence of faith could there be than to die for its sake? How can a person be really attached or attracted to rap music and cricket and Mercedes cars if he is prepared to blow himself up as a means of destroying the society that produces them? Death will be the end of the illicit attachment that he cannot entirely eliminate from his heart.

In addition, Dr. Dalrymple’s linking of the “inner” and the “outer” “jihad” is, to the best of my knowledge, entirely original.

Jamie Irons

*Also from the amazing City Journal.

Nov 2, 2005 - 6:02 pm 26. DWPittelli:

Thibaud: Parallel to this is the expectation of most religious minority immigrants to Europe that they will be eligible for generous welfare benefits, as opposed to no such expectation for those coming to the US.

Actually, asylum seekers in the US are immediately eligible for welfare services. And US states can’t discriminate against out-of-state or even foreign asylum seekers. One reason for the rapid move of 2,000 Somali immigrants from the Atlanta area to Lewiston, Maine in about 2 years (around 2002) despite a dearth of jobs in Lewiston, a depressed mill city of just 36,000 people: a more generous welfare system in Maine.

Nov 2, 2005 - 7:00 pm 27. thibaud:

Pittelli – your anecdote doesn’t even begin to invalidate my larger point. Please note my repeated emphasis on religious minorities– that is, immigrants from persecuted or otherwise oppressed or disadvantaged sects or minority religions who, historically, have come to this country primarily to exercise their religion, not to gain a handout. I’ve no idea what religion the somalis are, but I’m willing to bet a large sum that desire for religious freedom played at most a very small part in their decision to come here.

The quakers, congregationalists, catholics, mennonites, mormons (emigrating so to speak from New York to the great desert territories of the far west), Irish and German catholics, hasidim, chaldeans, sikhs, and shi’a muslims and bosnian muslims came to this country desiring two things above all:

1) the freedom to raise their families and preserve their faith and norms in peace, unmolested by the state or the majority; and

2) economic opportunities to apply their entrepreneurial talents and work ethic toward building a base of wealth that would sustain their independent communities.

Note the mutually-reinforcing nature of 1) and 2). There’s nothing more American than this intersection of personal freedom and economic opportunity. These religious minority immigrants are not outside the mainstream; they represent the essence of this nation’s promise.

Nov 2, 2005 - 7:45 pm 28. thibaud:

This discussion is confusing two vastly different experiences of immigration and “multiculturalism.” America is and always has been multicultural– we were multiculural before multiculti was cool– and this diversity was and is a source of enormous strength, not weakness. Go back and read Bernard Bailyn’s account of the development of our colonies in the 17-18c, each one founded and settled by a group of entrepreneurial religious believers seeking freedom to worship along with land and economic opportunity. Even after the source of wealth turned from land to market power and capitalist production of goods and services, the same pattern prevailed: religious immigrants seek a space of their own to cultivate and live in peace; a state grants them that space, often with certain favorable exemptions or benefits; and the immigrants thrive and prosper.

We should be encouraging certain muslims– namely, persecuted, perhaps also well-educated kurds, shi’a, iranians etc– to come to this country and repeat the happy example of the dozens of other religious minorities who’ve planted a stake here and prospered before them.

Nov 2, 2005 - 7:56 pm 29. thibaud:

Dymphna,

It’s coming to a town near you…just not right away. We have to wait for the re-runs

What does this mean? What evidence do you have that religious minorities, rather their Know Nothing persecutors, have ever been a major source of strife and sedition in this country? Nb. the Rosenbergs and the other communist first-generation jews from eastern Europe weren’t religious.

Let’s not repeat the idiocy of the European approach, which oscillates between a lift-the-drawbridge hysteria and shambolic co-optation measures in the best corporatist, ie fascist/state-dontrolled, fashion.

The Europeans simply don’t get it: the formula is attract strivers, give them opportunities, and then get the hell out of the way.

“Striver” is defined here as one who seeks to build a peaceful, prosperous, law-abiding community, not tear down the larger society. Bring us more strivers, muslims as well as any other faith. Let Europe have the resenters– and those native-born Americans who resent strivers of any sort.

Nov 2, 2005 - 8:04 pm 30. ex-democrat:

jamie – i’m sure you’ll find this interesting: http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19293

Nov 2, 2005 - 8:23 pm 31. TomTom:

Dymphna is right, thibaud is idealistic but wrong. Islam cannot fit in Western civilization, given its primary tenets of no church-state separation and Sharia. ‘Good’ muslims, as the Kurds may or may not be, are vulnerable to the charge of apostacy (deviancy) by Wahhabis and Sunnis, which the Koran charges as punishable by death.

There simply is no substitute for strong barriers against islamic immigration and proselytization. Islam is a Jim Jones cult gone hugely huge. Finding a constitutionally legitimate way to set the barriers is an American problem.

I wish it were otherwise.

Nov 3, 2005 - 12:09 pm 32. oceanclub:

>cannot fit in Western civilization, given its >primary tenets of no church-state separation >and Sharia

Umm, have read about the history of Catholicism? Up until the time the new Italian republic stormed the Vatican late in the last century, the above applied that religion also. I mean, even as late as the 1960s, many Americans were wary of voting for JFK since as a Catholic, he would “obviously” be taking his orders from the Pope.

P.

Nov 4, 2005 - 4:50 am 33. thibaud:

Oceanclub – don’t bother. TomTom is a Know Nothing ignorant of Know Nothings.

Folks, much of what’s said about muslims today was said about Irish Catholics in the 19c (and in the South, into the mid-20c as well). There is a problem with a minority of muslims, who are resenters. Most muslims who seek to come to the US do so for the same reason that Irish Catholics, and hasidim, and sikhs, and quakers and congregationalists and the pilgrims did before them: to worship as they choose and to build businesses, families and communities without being persecuted or harassed. Deport the resenter radicals, sure, but keep bringing in the strivers.

Nov 4, 2005 - 5:27 am 34. Peter Boston:

thibaud

Islam is indeed different from most if not all other religions. Islam comes wrapped in a complete birth-to-grave package including a hierachial system of governance, a civil and criminal code, and a court system to enforce laws and adjudicate disputes.

A Muslim cannot buy into the American Dream without disassociating from a major part of their Islamic culture. That’s very difficult to do if one will retain any contact with other Muslims who treat such apostates as traitors, even to the point of killing them (as commaned by the Koran). Stop thinking of Islam as a religion and more as a political ideology, a binary (us and them) totalitarian political ideology at that.

I suppose there are many, many former or normative Muslims who can adapt and assimilate into Western scoierty quite easily but that would be in spite of their Islamic heritage and not because of it.

Nov 7, 2005 - 12:53 pm 35. jinnyhierty:

There is Download Joy mp3

Dec 25, 2008 - 6:35 am

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