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November 07, 2005
Charles the Hammer, Chirac the Croissant
Normally, I'd just link to an article, but Mark Steyn's take on what's going on in France is so on-target that I've just cut and pasted the whole thing.
I have just learned that the Muslim rioters have set fires in The Marais, the Jewish Quarter of Paris. The riots have spread to Belgium, and some parts of Germany. Extremist Muslim websites are encouraging the violence.
Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands
November 6, 2005
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.
Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.''
''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.
The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.
The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. -- as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ''like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,'' as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ''Martel'' -- or ''the Hammer.''
Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they'd won, they'd have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. ''Perhaps,'' wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, ''the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.'' There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was ''an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.''
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. ''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''
What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.
A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.
If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.
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Posted by Robert J. Avrech at November 7, 2005 09:33 AM
Comments
Seraphic Secret is private property, that's right, it's an extension of our home, and as such, Karen and I have instituted two Seraphic Rules and we ask commentors to act respectfully.
1. No profanity.2. No Israel bashing. We debate, we discuss, we are respectful. You know what Israel bashing is. The world is full of it. Seraphic Secret is one of the few places in the world that will not tolerate this form of anti-Semitism. That's it. Break either of these rules and you will be banned.
too bad this guy does not work or write for the l.a. times.
Posted by: Ari Z. Miller at November 7, 2005 02:38 PM
Ari:
The LA Times would never, ever hire Mark Steyn, nor anyone as committed to reporting the truth as he is. The LA Times is a cesspool of politically correct ideology. Vladimir Ilich Lenin, (1870-1924) a man who helped invent and put into place the modern totalitarian and genocidal state, called Western liberals, "useful idiots." The LA Times and the NY Times fit Lenin's characterization perfectly.
Posted by: Robert at November 7, 2005 02:46 PM
My point is not to advocate for the war on Iraq or otherwise. However, those countries that favored appeasing the Arab countries are, unfortunately, starting to realize that the problem of "fanatical" Islam is not going to disappear by placating them. France, Turkey, Russia have all felt the threat of Muslim terrorists.
glen
Posted by: glen at November 7, 2005 03:48 PM
Glen:
Thanks for your comment. You are quite right, those countries who self-righteously rejected participating in the liberation of Iraq were sure that they would be rewarded by the Jihadists. In fact, as always happens, the Jihadists rightly saw this as a sign of weakness and immediately attacked. Germany, Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Netherlands, Italy, all have been targets of the Islamic terrorists.
In one of the loony Islamic websites, France is declared "Enemy #1 of Islam." Personally, I'm indignant. I thought that America or at least Israel was enemy # 1. But France!? A country whose army is in permanent retreat! A country that specializes in collaboration. France! Puh-leeeeze!
Posted by: Robert at November 7, 2005 04:46 PM
Why did you ruin this blog that was consistently poignant and touching with such amateurish political invective. I can listen to Rush Limbaugh whenever I want to. I loved this blog because it was much more humane than the garbage you seem hellbent on putting up. And I am a conservative! Whether you are conservative, liberal or independent, seraphic secret was a place you could feel a sense of community and humanity, and be comforted for a loss. Now its not. That is sad. "Robert J. Avrech, a Jewish screenwriter, tries to cope with the death of his beloved son Ariel by blogging his way to... What?" Political Partisanship.
Posted by: Sam at November 7, 2005 06:39 PM
Sam:
I'm sorry you're disappointed. Try and understand that writing about my grief, my personal life, takes a tremendous emotional toll. I am a man of many corners and I am compelled to explore them. Ariel, by the way, was deeply concerned about politics, and deeply conservative. He asked Larry Elder, a conservative talk show host, to visit him in the hospital. So writing about politics is not alien territory as far as Ariel is concerned. Nevertheless, I write what I feel. I cannot make all my readers happy. I wish I could. Heck, I can't make myself happy.
Posted by: Robert Avrech at November 7, 2005 07:23 PM
Robert,
I appreciate the political and the personal posts. You are a person of passion and wit and that requires exploration of various corners of the soul.
Do what you do because you want to. Readers will come and go but this blog will remain.
Posted by: Jack at November 8, 2005 12:27 AM
Jack:
Thanks so much for your kind words.
Posted by: Robert Avrech at November 8, 2005 12:38 AM
Great article, and yes, the Eurabian War has begun, post 9-11, and guess what, this is the beginning of the 1000 year holy war jihad against Western civilization, and I feel that "they" are going to win, because one, time is on their side, and not on our side, we are in too much of a hurry all the time; two, they believe in their "god", and we don't believe in our God; and three, the banality of evil trumps the decadence of wealthy glazed over people.
Posted by: Alain Linden at November 8, 2005 11:38 PM
Alain:
Thanks for your comment. However, i strongly disagree. Once the sleeping tiger of American Democracy is awakened nothing can stand in its way. Not the evil of Nazism, not Soviet Communism, not the genocidal madness of Mao's China. The Islamic Jihadists are just another in a long line of totalitarian monsters who will be crushed. It will take time and it will be a bloody affair, but we will destroy them, and they will end up in the trash bin of history.
Posted by: Robert Avrech at November 8, 2005 11:48 PM