Intifada a la Française
November 12, 2005
By Nidra Poller
The French government falters and fails as the flames of urban warfare spread across the country unchecked. Schools, warehouses, gymnasiums, bus depots, restaurants and shopping malls are sacked and burned. Journalists, ambulance personnel and firemen are attacked. And the very riot policemen sent to quell the violence are faced down and forced to retreat.
President Chirac, supposedly recovered from a stroke suffered at the end of August, is apparently out of commission. His dauphin, Dominique de Villepin, makes pompous promises while trying to roast his archrival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in the flames of "immigrant" rage.
This has been going on for years, on a smaller scale – a steady increase in lawless behavior that met with no vigorous response from the State, coupled with an outpouring of uncritical sympathy for those designated as victims. Of course, there has been police harassment of the usual suspects, but much of what goes under the name of harassment is simply the intrusion of the forces of law into territories that have been conquered by another system of values and coercion, where the State has no rights.
Pimping, drug dealing, theft, terrorism and Islamic law mix and match wherever there is a high concentration of Muslims. The block of working class suburbs, or banlieues, on the northeast outskirts of Paris, collectively included in the Seine-St. Denis (department 93), is one of the greatest concentrations of lawless zones. But it would be wrong to picture these banlieues as dismal, dilapidated hellholes. Most of the residents are law-abiding, and most of the housing is decent.
The insurrection spreading through France and breaking out in other European countries cannot be understood through the prism of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, even if these ills exist, as they exist in varying degrees all over the world.
In June 2004, a huge "anti-war" demonstration was staged in Paris to protest against the visit of the "world's worst terrorist, George W. Bush," who made a brief stop to attend the 60th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landing. I watched the demonstrators go up the boulevard Beaumarchais. Roughly one-third of them were from the left – far left dizzies, Communists, Socialists, labor unions, ecologists and wilted flower people. Another third were jihadis of various stripes and checkered kaffiyehs. And one-third were raunchy nihilists, high on drugs and beer, marching with pit bulls and Rottweilers, calling for death and destruction. They painted graffiti on lowered store shutters and bus stop shelters, promising "à Paris comme à Falluja, la guérilla vaincra" (in Paris as in Falluja guerrilla warfare will triumph).
The same media that tally up the number of cars torched each night – 1,300 on the night of Nov. 5-6 – while reminding us that Sarkozy is accused of pouring oil on the fire with incendiary words, managed not to notice the pit bulls for peace or the insurrectional slogans. Just as they failed to notice the cries of "Death to the Jews" in the "pro-Palestinian" demonstrations that began in October 2000 and went on until they blended into the "anti-war" demonstrations in 2003. Incendiary slogans against Israel and the United States were the meat and potatoes of those demonstrations. They did not provoke rebukes from the media and, of course, gave rise to no violence from Jews, Israelis or Americans.
For five years, resentful French Muslims have been fed a steady diet of romanticized violence – jihad-intifada in Israel, jihad-insurgency in Iraq. When they started firebombing synagogues and beating up Jews in the fall of 2000, they were abundantly excused for identifying with Palestinian rock-throwing shababs. They were excused for admiring Palestinian inhuman bombers. They were encouraged to look with murderous rage at uniformed Israeli soldiers. They could freely drink at the fountains of hatred gushing from Al-Jazeera and other, even worse Arab stations. But they could partake of the same incitement in the French media in a more insidious, more elegant style. After 9-11, they were treated to the delights of the Arab street, up in arms against America's planned invasion of Afghanistan. With the buildup to the war in Iraq they were invited to bathe in the spotlight of Islamic peace and love, as the French government rode on the white steed of appeasement-pacifism and the French president took himself for the sheik of all sheiks.
The enemy was clearly identified. Not Islamism, not Islamofascism, not Hamas, not the bloody dictator Saddam Hussein, not the beheaders, not al-Qaida, not the suicide-belt murderers, but the men and women in uniform, the disciplined troops of democratic states. Their uniforms, their tanks and humvees, their airplanes and helicopters were presented as legitimate targets for the wretched of the earth.
Perhaps the journalists, political scientists, intellectuals and public officials who have been peddling this merchandise for five years under the falsified label of Résistance meant it to remain an abstract entertainment. But the same forces that are working everywhere to destroy civilization have harnessed the resentment of young French Muslim males and directed their energies to destructive guerrilla warfare. Burned out cars and buildings in the streets of France reproduce the images they have been drugged on.
Jihad indoctrination created a state within the state where adult males send young men to commit violence and destroy their own lives. Unless and until the French government decides to exert its authority and protect its citizens, there is a danger that charred bodies will come to complete the picture of charred vehicles and blackened hulls of burned out buildings. |
