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| Why the Rioters are not "Muslim" - Yet |
| 2005-11-14 |
| I don't believe that the current riots in France are about Islam. This puts me to the "left" of a great many conservative Nostradamuses who've prophesized for quite awhile that France's North African and other Muslim "immigrants" were going to bring jihad to the home front. I don't think their predictions are necessarily wrong: it's just that this is at best a dress rehearsal. I put "immigrants" in quotation marks for the simple reason that most of the rioters are no such thing - they were born in France and hold French passports. Their parents were from former French colonies. But the French establishment - a term I use in the most Catholic sense possible so as to include Katie Couric and her colleagues - has had a very hard time coming up with a useful vocabulary to describe these events. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, came out of the blocks with "scum" but the uncharacteristic nuance didn't go over well in a culture which has always believed there are two sides of the story for every murderer, never mind window-smashers. We seem to have settled on "youths," which is as correct as "Muslims" and marginally more accurate than "immigrants," but it will hardly do. It's not as if airport screeners are going to keep a keener eye on young blond Frenchmen named Jacques because a bunch of guys named Abdul and Hamid looted the local brasserie. And then there's the fact that there's very little evidence that these "youths" are particularly pious Muslims. I don't mean to say that a devout Muslim would never break the peace - I think that theory has been sufficiently falsified in recent years so as to be inoperative. Rather, these "youths" appear to be closer to nothing than any specific something - except of course rioters. And it's in the rioting that these kids get meaning. Rioting is how they appear on the Gallic radar system. They aren't les Muslimerables so much as les invisibles. The Islamic leadership in France would clearly and dearly love to have this be a Muslim riot so that they could then stop it and become true Left Bank Arafats, able to fire up a rent-a-mob whenever convenient so as to shake down the government for one concession after another. That's why the French government is so desperate to prevent the imams from becoming middlemen. If they stop the riots, these will become Islamic riots even though they didn't start as such. And once Islamified, the conservative Nostradamus scenarios kick in and we can all get ready for talk of "two-state solutions," the need to make Paris an "international city," etc. The reason the youths are invisible is undoubtedly in part because they are Muslim, but also because the French are snobs and racists (but excellent dancers). And, unlike in America, where snobbery, racism and anti-Muslim bigotry can all operate independently of each other, in France they're always served as a menage a trois. If a resume arrives at the patisserie with the name Hamid on it, it gets trashed without the recipient wondering whether he was unfair to a Muslim, a black, an immigrant or even a French citizen. But they are invisible for another reason. The French "social model" which pays wealthy, educated, people not to work much and prevents poor and desperate ones from working at all, simply has no solution for what to do with these surplus Frenchmen. So they get shunted off to the Islamic Bantustans surrounding the capital where social pathologies fester. The fact that France is more likely to embrace Velveeta as the national cheese than fix this system spells long-term disaster for France. Sarkozy had the right idea calling the rioters scum not only because rioters tend to be exactly that, but also because calling them much of anything else would politicize the rioters into "rebels." The long-term problem is that history shows that if you treat people like the invisibles like scum long enough, they'll become rebels. And that's when the battle for Gaulistan will truly begin. Examiner columnist Jonah Goldberg is editor at large at the National Review Online and a syndicated columnist. |
| Posted by:Bobby |
| #1 They are manipulable street "scum" to be used by an elite: "scum." The link between criminality and Islam, a favorite in our prisons, justifies all manners of mayhem in the name their deity. This is how you do it when you do not get the Saudi checks. You get them out on the street through the net, word of mouth besides this fun. The Frenchman the Arab; can you can't tell them apart? |
| Posted by: Bardo 2005-11-14 17:25 |