I see Dominique
de Villepin -- the French prime minister who, as foreign minister,
was so generous with advice to the U.S. and Israel -- has now
prepared the rewards package for the rioters. Lots of new spending
on social services and "opportunities" programmes in
the 751 “sensitive urban zones” -- which is the official
state euphemism for Muslim ghettoes. Also, special favours for
the imams who agree to sign limp-wristed fatwas against rioting
after curfew. This is a joke, I refuse to report it seriously.
And part
of the joke is that, since long before they were born, the Muslim
young raised in these ghettoes were in fact prevented from getting
the usual sorts of jobs, and thereby insinuating themselves into
bourgeois French society. And this because the powerful, leftwing
unions of France -- themselves quite willing to riot for results
-- have long since achieved 30-hour weeks, high pay, and perpetual
employment for three-quarters of the labour force. It is an arrangement,
secured in a form of “social contract” with the French
state, that shuts out everyone else. Tamper with THAT, and the
rest of France will be back on the streets.
The story
is roughly similar through the rest of what Donald Rumsfeld acutely
called “Old Europe”. Not exactly similar: the postmodern
German economic model, for instance, welcomes Muslim immigrants
as “Gastarbeiters” -- people to do the kind of work
that Germans feel too good for. What has made France the seat
of the Islamist Revolution in Europe, is the sheer number of unassimilated
people, their explosive birth rate, and levels of unemployment
that leave the young free to imbibe contemporary Islamism.
Their ostracism
from French society is completed by overt racialism. The contrast
between the hypocritical liberalism of French public speech, and
the overt racialism of private behaviour, is such as no North
American will fully comprehend. We come from the society of the
melting pot. The European melting pot froze and hardened -- quite
literally, more than a thousand years ago. And that racialism
is mutual. What the Muslims feel for their aging French “hosts”
-- whom they consider to be perverts, by every Islamic standard
-- is expressed by the way they torch their cars.
The joke
is completed because, except for the odd media-savvy poseur, the
rioters aren’t asking for improved welfare arrangements.
They are asking e.g. for Nicolas Sarkozy’s head. They want
French policemen dead. They are demanding that the French state
recognize that parts of France are “Islamic territory”.
They want French laws replaced with Sharia. And their chant, in
each of the many hundred locations where the rioting continues
every night, is “Allahou Akhbar! Allahou Akhbar!”
It is impossible to imagine a more complete disconnect between
them and the French society that is now looking for ways to appease
them.
And they
will not be appeased -- any more than the Palestinians will be
appeased, by anything short of the disappearance of Israel. I
do not even think de Villepin’s extravagant offer to hurl
money will make things worse. It will have no effect whatever.
The rioting will stop and start, for the rioters’ own tactical
reasons, like the West Bank Intifada. It is not “senseless”.
It is anyway
too late to change the entire approach of the French state to
the assimilation of Muslim immigrants. Nor, had it been much different,
do I think the result would have been different. For the deeper
reality is that France has become a moral and demographic vacuum.
It has become, in the main, a pagan, childless, hedonistic country,
in which there will be a Muslim majority within two generations.
(Already, at least 40 per cent of the children born in French
hospitals are to Muslim parents.) On present trends, the Islamicization
of France, within the lifetime of most of my readers, is inevitable.
Egypt, too,
was once a Christian country. And generations after the arrival
of the Arabs, there were Egyptians who could not imagine it any
other way. But whereas it took about five centuries to Islamicize
Coptic Egypt, it will take less than one to Islamicize postmodern
France.
It is against
this background reality, that the riots happening today across
France must be considered. They are a turning point, not only
in France but all Europe. For the “moral and demographic
vacuum” I mentioned above, is not in France alone. The same
cultural deathwish prevails in Spain, Italy, Germany, the Low
Countries, Britain, Scandinavia -- and Canada, by the way. It
is called “multiculturalism” in this generation, but
in another generation will be called something else.
