Paris inferno is ominous
---The Sunday Telegraph ^ | 6 Nov 05 | Piers Akerman
November 6, 2005 Paris is burning - burning furiously with a blind rage that Australian authorities must heed if suburbs in Sydney and Melbourne are not to suffer the same fate.
For more than a week, Muslim youths in more than 20 Paris-region towns have created a wave of violence in which more than 300 cars have been have burnt and hundreds of millions of francs worth of property destroyed.
The suburbs, many of them among France's poorest, have been declared off-limits to police by militant Muslims, who have turned them into religious ghettos where Islamist extremists and criminals have free rein.
The trigger for the outbreak of riots were the deaths of two youths, Ziad, 17, and Banou, 15, who were electrocuted after climbing into an electricity substation in Clichy-sous-Bois on October 27.
Their friends claim they were fleeing police, but the French authorities say they were running "for no reason", incorrectly believing police were pursuing them.
There are obvious parallels with Sydney's Redfern riots of February, 2004, sparked when 17-year-old Thomas "T.J." Hickey died after being impaled on a fence paling when he panicked at the sight of a police patrol seeking a bag-snatcher, and the Macquarie Fields riots a year later, which erupted when two youths, Matt Robertson, 19, and a 17-year-old, died in a stolen car that crashed during a police chase.
But just as ominous are other underlying grievances. In the 751 zones French authorities have designated areas of special concern, unemployment stands at 19.6 per cent – double the national average, and at more than 30 per cent among 21- to 29-year-olds.
In the predominantly Islamic suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, unemployment numbers were even higher among Muslims, according to figures obtained from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' 2001 census.
In NSW, unemployment in the Islamic community in Auburn was 26.2 per cent, in Canterbury 20.3 per cent, Liverpool 20.6 per cent and Bankstown 20.2 per cent. In Victoria, Muslim unemployment in Moonee Valley-Essendon ran at 39.1 per cent, in Darebin-Preston it was 27.6 per cent and in Dandenong 21.1 per cent.
In the general community, unemployment has been at historically low levels.
In mosques in both France and Australia, mullahs and imams have been preaching messages of unconditional hate towards the West and, in particular, towards Jews and Israel.
There have also been riots in Denmark, where the daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten featured a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed as an exercise in free speech after an author complained that nobody dared illustrate his book on the founder of Islam.
Editor-in-chief Carsten Juste said: "We live in a democracy, that's why we can use all the journalistic methods we want to. Satire is accepted in this country, and you can make caricatures. Religion shouldn't set any barriers on that sort of expression. This doesn't mean that we wish to insult any Muslims."
In one cartoon, Mohammed was shown wearing a turban-like bomb and, in another, brandishing a sabre, with two burka-clad women behind him.
The pattern is, again, sadly familiar. Muslims in Western countries constantly resort to civil-rights law to claim their religion has been vilified or ridiculed, though some Islamic nations outlaw all other religions and turn a blind eye toward persecution of non-Muslims.
Ironically, France has long claimed to be one of the world's most tolerant nations and has played down ethnic differences in the community.
With its Muslim population estimated at five million, western Europe's largest, the dam has finally burst. Both immigrant and French-born Muslims claim they are treated as second-class citizens and discriminated against in employment, housing and opportunities for advancement.
The reality, as the French are finding, the Danish are learning and the British found when they sought some rationale for the development of the home-grown terrorists responsible for the July 7 bombing of the London public transport system, and as the Dutch discovered a year ago last week when film-maker Theo van Gogh had his throat ritually slit by a Muslim born in Holland, is that there are considerable populations of extremists who owe their sole allegiance to a fanatical brand of Islam and not to any nation.
As historian Francis Fukuyama noted in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal: "We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries ...
"There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in western Europe.
"In addition to Mohammed Bouyeri (convicted of the Dutch murder), the London bombers and the March 11 Madrid bombers, ringleaders of the September 11 attacks, such as Mohamed Atta, were radicalised in Europe.
"In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6 per cent of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism, despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem."
Nor, for that matter can we wall off Australia from the influences of extremists, despite the anti-globalisation protests of assorted dopey Greens and Democrats, and ABC presenters.
Radical Islam is using all the modern tools of the globalised Internet and cheap air travel to spread a hate-filled medieval philosophy that gives some hope to young Muslims trapped in their ghettos and fearful of integration.
Unfortunately, blinded by the mantra of multiculturalism, too many of our leaders have encouraged these young men and women to remain isolated from the freedom of choice offered by our culture and left vulnerable to the perverted teachings of an abominable death cult. |
