Thomas Fleming answer’s those liberals who want to blame these riots in Paris on social problems, specifically racism, with a simple question. How do you explain the behavior of the rest of the Muslims in the world?
I was sitting at my desk about 5:00 pm the 8th, wondering whether to start work on a new project or to pack up a few books and go home for a Martini. The telephone rang. It was a friend who lives in Metz, a long train ride away from Paris, a quiet town without a great deal of either night life or ethnic strife. ?I?m looking out my window,? he said, ?watching an apartment building going up in flames. A police helicopter is going back overhead but nothing is being done to stop the rioters.?
I asked him how long the rioting had been going on in Metz. ?It?s night after night. Not so bad as in Toulouse or in the Paris suburbs but bad enough.?
I had been watching the news since the disturbances broke out, and on All Saints I noted that of nearly 300 stories on Google mentioning France and Interior Minister Sarkozy, only one was an American reference to the violence?a few seconds on FOX news. When the Washington Post and the New York Times finally made up their minds that the news could not be suppressed?always a painful decision for them to have to make?we quickly learned about French racism and the plight of the poor Arabs and Africans. Time after time on NPR I heard a comparison with America?s own civil rights struggle in the 1960?s. Apparently, people who work for NPR or the Post are under the impression that the Watts riots had something to do with civil rights. Some day they should read Edward Banfield?s The Unheavenly City, particularly the chapter on ?Rioting for Fun and Profit.?
If Muslim young men in Paris are rioting, raping, setting buildings and women on for, all for better jobs, what explains their behavior everywhere else in the world? In Egypt, where they riot to protest a secular government. In Pakistan, where they stage cross-border raids into India for the sole purpose of killing non-Muslims. In New Jersey, where they slaughtered an Egyptian Christian family because the father was too critical of Islam and where they went out into the streets to celebrate their victory on September 11.
[…]In fact, the non-Muslims of France are now experiencing what some of their ancestors endured in the days before Charles Martel beat the Muslims back into Spain. Do not expect French politicians (apart from the ?extreme right?) to use such language. PM Sarkazoy, after describing the rioters as scum, now declares his government?s eagerness to promote civil rights. France, like the countries of North America and Western Europe, is a leftist country, where so-called conservatives talk only of free markets, equality, and economic growth. Only a fascist beast like Jean-Marie Le Pen or Charles de Gaulle would waste time talking about the French nation. Nations, in the eyes of liberals?whether of the Marxist or libertarian stripe (not much difference, actually), are an optical illusion. There is no forest, only trees, and if an entire forest of trees were to disappear while they were not looking, then nothing would happen unless they happened to have an investment?political in the case of Marxists, financial in the case of libertarians?in the place.
To make things worse, the Arab youths, as victims of discrimination, are behaving exactly as leftists think they ought to behave. Imagine you are a French intellectual approaching 60, forever dwelling on the glory days of the student riots in which you and your pals burned cars in 1968. Isn?t this the same scenario? Dispossessed people struggling for freedom and dignity?
In a sense, yes. The riots of ?68 and ?05 are both outbursts of hooliganism that need to be repressed by the most violent means at the French government?s disposal, but there is a difference. The Marxist students believed in the political violence for the sake of revolution; the Islamic youths believe in violence against infidels for its own sake, as a divinely sanctioned method of dealing with pigs and cattle. I have not talked to Jean Raspail in years, but these riots are, in miniature, the unfolding of his scenario in Camp of the Saints: violent and licentious Third-Worlders whose attacks meet with no resistance from the demoralized self-hating West.
At the heart of the problem is not the teachings of a wicked and stupid religion but the stupid leftism[…]
This article hits the nail on the head so hard it shattered the hammer. Unless this Country figures out the futility and stupidity of the leftist mode of thinking we may be in for the same ride as France is on. Of course, like I stated before in a prior post, we will shoot back.
On another note, The French Minister of Interior Department Nicolas Sarkozy has asked that those foreigners arrested for rioting to be kicked out of France: (translated via Babelfish)
The Minister of Interior Department Nicolas Sarkozy asked the prefects to expel all the foreigners condemned within the framework of thirteen last nights urban violences. It is what it announced Wednesday with the French National Assembly.
“120 foreigners all, not in irregular situation, were condemned” to have taken part in the last nights of urban riots, indicated the Minister of Interior Department at the time of the meeting of the topical questions. “I asked to the prefects that they be expelled without delay of our own territory, including those which have a residence permit”, Nicolas Sarkozy specified.
So it appears France has at least one person who doesn’t carry a white flag in his back pocket.
Unless this Country figures out the futility and stupidity of the leftist mode of thinking we may be in for the same ride as France is on.
See author page
Salam Al-Marayati wrote in the Los Angelas Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Friday, November 18, 2005 that America won’t suffer the rioting now occurring in France.
I’m a disbeliever.
Seven major cities in America have unemployment rates for another minority group of men of between forty and fifty percent (in Milwaukee it’s sixty percent). In these same cities the ex-felon rate is between fifty and sixty percent of this population.
America’s prison recidivism rate remains just under seventy percent.
African-Americans constitute twelve percent of the U.S. population, thirteen percent of it’s drug using population, and about seventy-four percent of the people in prison for drug possession. Approximately eighty percent of young black men under age thirty-five have a criminal record.
The United states incarcerates seven times more people per capita than most European democracies, despite the fact we have similar rates of crime. Incarceration has become one of the fastest growing businesses in the United State, generating large profits.
Finding a job for a man with a criminal record is very difficult. If you are a man of color it’s even harder.
Success usually means low wages and no benefits. $7/hour doesn’t pay for a new car let alone a house.
The high school dropout rate for their male children is about fifty percent. The teen pregnancy rate among their daughters is astronomical.
66% of African American men living in Minneapolis Minnesota (Hennepin County) are felons. 44% of Black men living in Hennepin County were arrested in 2001 (there were no duplicate arrests–and 58% of the arrested men went on to be re-arrested for a second crime within 2 years). African American Men’s Study.
13 percent of America’s Black men are barred from voting because they are felons (1.4 million men). More than ten states have disenfranchised over twenty percent of their Black Male citizens.
In 1986 Philadelphia law enforcement lost five officers as it bombed the Move organization and burned to the ground blocks of poor peoples homes in the process.
Today (November 18, 2005) the United States federal government cut fifty billion dollars from programs that help mostly the children of the men I write about.
Some of these Children I’ve come to know in the Hennepin County child protection system as a guardian ad Litem. Children who without help from the programs that were unfunded today, will soon become much like their fathers.
At the same time, the senate is passing laws to make certain, that nothing disturbs the great wealth owned by those at the top of the pile.
Rioting by Muslims, maybe not.
Read book, http://www.invisiblechildren.org
Or, respond to the weblog,
http://www.invisiblechildren.org/weblog
Mike T
It’s the failure of French socialism as much as it is a race or cultural issue. What did they expect would happen when their compassion led them to warehouse people for generations in Soviet style housing blocks?
It’s the same problem in this country.
Some time ago, I did need to buy a house for my business but I did not have enough money and couldn’t order something. Thank heaven my friend proposed to try to get the loans at reliable bank. Thence, I acted that and used to be satisfied with my college loan.
@Mike’s America: Apparently those people still found the apartments preferable to the accommodations where they came from… and as for ‘warehousing’ them there, I don’t believe that France has internal travel restrictions and residence permits a la China; they could live wherever they like, money permitting of course. The problem on that front I expect is that few of them have the skills and work ethic necessary to support themselves at anything like a normal French standard of living.