November 9, 2005
Why the Islamists May Succeed in France
By Jack
Kelly
As the French intifada spreads into its second week and across
the country, the French government has a dilemma. To whom does
it surrender?
French Prime
Minister Dominique de Villepin -- whose name may one day be as
synonymous with appeasement as Petain's is with collaboration
-- would like to make a deal. His problem is finding Muslim "community
leaders" who can stop the rioting. In
communities where law and order are absent, it is thugs with guns
who are in charge, not the voices of moderation, such as they
are.
The rioting
began Oct. 27th in the Paris suburb of Clichy sus Bois when two
Muslim teenagers sought to hide from police in an electric power
substation and accidentally electrocuted themselves. It has since
spread to other Paris suburbs, to Paris itself, and now to dozens
of other cities. The remarkable thing about the spark that set
off the rioting is that there were police in Clichy sus Bois for
the youths to flee from.
About ten
percent of France's population are Muslims. The overwhelming majority
live in concrete ghettoes like Clichy sus Bois, which the police
as well as ordinary Frenchmen tend to treat as "no go"
areas. The result is these ghettoes are largely under the control
of criminal gangs and religious extremists.
The news
media have gone to considerable lengths to avoid mentioning the
rioters are mostly Muslim, or to report that there is an anti-Western
component to the violence. The rioters typically have been described
as "French youths" who are upset by high unemployment
and racial discrimination. But these youths are French only in
the sense that most were born there. Many don't even speak French.
Their alienation from the culture and mores of the country in
which they live could hardly be greater.
Unemployment
is high in France. At ten percent, it is double what it is in
the United States, and is especially high among young people with
little education who speak French with difficulty. This would
seem to suggest that France's welfare state model is less desirable
to follow than many American liberals believe.
The discovery
Saturday of a large Molotov cocktail factory in a southern suburb
far from Clichy sus Bois suggests the violence is not spontaneous.
But if it is jobs the rioters are after, it must be as automobile
workers, because the principal tactic of the rioters has been
to torch cars, along with nursery schools and the occasional police
station.
A commenter
on the Web log "Belmont Club" thinks this focus is a
clever form of brinkmanship. Car burning is spectacular, but not
serious enough to provoke lethal force, especially from a French
government loathe to use it.
The tactics
used by the rioters "bear an eerie resemblance" to those
used by Chechen rebels against the Russians in Grozny, said Richard
Fernandez, proprietor of the Belmont
Club. The French respond slowly and with little force to the
hit and run tactics, so the violence spreads wider as contempt
for the authorities grows.
Most of the
rioters are petty criminals. But others seek de jure recognition
of a de facto partition of France that's been under way for some
time. "Some are even calling for areas where Muslims form
a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of
the millet system of the Ottoman Empire," wrote Amir Taheri,
who lives in Paris. "Each religious community (millet) would
enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational
life in accordance with its religious beliefs."
A de facto
millet system already is in place in parts of France, Taheri noted:
"In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized
Islamist hijab while most men grow their beards to the lengths
prescribed by the sheiks."
Unless the
invertebrates in charge can grow spines, France seems poised to
become what Spain was before Ferdinand and Isabella, a patchwork
of principalities where Moors ruled some communities, Christians
others, with constant tension between them. It seems inconceivable
that a civilized Western nation would bargain away to a handful
of thugs its democratic principles and sovereignty over much of
its territory.
But the Islamists
may well succeed. For though what the Islamists believe in is
vile and reactionary, it is something. The French believe in nothing.
Jack
Kelly is national security columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
and the Blade of Toledo, Ohio.
