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WtFDragon Blog
France is not equipped to deal with its problems
by WtFDragon on Comments
I see by the figures and tables at Wikipedia that are tracking the tally of burned automobiles, there were 215 cars burned last night in France, mostly in the Saint-Chamond and Bourges areas.
I guess that counts as an abatement in the rioting...or at least, it's about as good as France dares expect. Eventually, the number of cars being burned will come down again to the usual 80 or so, and all will be well again, right?
Well, no.
But Jacques Chirac is going to give it his best shot!
The problem is, it's a sentiment that comes years, perhaps even a decade or more, too late. Did it honestly never occur to the French government that they should strive to integrate its immigrant population when they first arrived, instead of a generation (or more) later?
...Chirac also announced the creation of national volunteer corps to provide job training for 50,000 youths by 2007. The president said in the coming days he would meet business and labour leaders to discuss work force diversity and more jobs for youths from tough neighbourhoods.
"We can build nothing lasting if we allow racism, intolerance, and abuse," Chirac said in a televised speech. "We can build nothing lasting unless we fight this poison for society that is discrimination."
...The crisis has led to collective soul-searching about France's failure to integrate its African and Muslim minorities. Anger about high unemployment and discrimination has fanned frustration among the French-born children of immigrants from France's former colonies.
Chirac appealed for all to help eliminate attitudes that lead to youths not being considered for jobs because they have a non-French name, a suburban postal code, or the wrong skin colour.
Mark Steyn, as always, weighs in with the perfect handle on the moment:
I remember being told numerous times all throughout my years in elementary school that the Americans were a "melting pot" culture, which was apparently a Bad ThingTM. Conversely, we proud Canadians were "multicultural" and "diverse" and all that happy stuff.
...whatever their problems, most Islamic countries have the advantage of beginning any evolution into free states from the starting point of relative societal cohesion. By contrast, most European nations face the trickier task of trying to hold on to their freedom at a time of increasing societal incoherence.
True, America and Australia grew the institutions of their democracy with relatively homogeneous populations, and then evolved into successful "multicultural" societies. But that's not what's happening in Europe right now. If you want to know what a multicultural society looks like, read the names of America's dead on September 11: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Hispanic, Arab, Indian, Chinese - in a word, American.
What was missing in all those lessons, though, is exactly what Steyn nails on the head above...social cohesion. In Canada, we sort of have that, to a limited extent...though in many places it fails too. Out in Alberta, there's always great examples for me when I drive out to some rural community east of Edmonton (Vermilion, usually, where Grace's folks live) and see Germans, Ukranians, Poles, and a variety of other cultures that are in their third (or greater) generation in Canada, living together in relative social harmony. Likewise, my own family, an odd fusion of Slavic descent with Irish/Scottish and a few others thrown in for good measure. My sisters claim to have worked it out that we kids are 1/3rd Irish (don't know how, or if, that's possible, exactly, so don't ask me) and that this was apparently our majority cultural background.
The point is, there is in Canada still a sense of cohesion -- of a society comprised of people of different cultures that are "glued" together in their common, however new-found, Canadianism. It's visible in lots of places, if you know where to look...offices, schools, churches especially (since there is no greater social "glue" than the Lord) , Scout groups, etc.
The problem is, though, that to a certain extent, that cohesion requires sacrifice by each cultural group of certain aspects of their culture that detract from unity with the others within the context of the nation in which they reside. Which means, for immigrants to Canada, things like developing a mastery of the English language (or French), conforming to the laws of the land, and taking an active role in "getting out" into the community, and the workforce too. Simple things...but also "melting pot" things. The Americans still make that clear (relatively) to prospective immigrants: you come to America to be American. And in a certain sense, that's what each nation has to impose on its immigrants in order to effectively integrate them into society...to bring about social cohesion, to keep society within that nation "glued" together and functional.
And the thing is, multiculturalism really doesn't do that -- in the end, it doesn't foster greater interaction between cultures, but instead greater segregation. Increasingly, in Canada's large cities, there are whole communities, whole suburbs, whole areas of those cities in which only one culture is present, be it Jamaican or Chinese, Sikh or Italian. Similar communities exist in the U.S. as well, of course, but there is still a difference to be observed. In the U.S., for the most part, people of like culture might live in close proximity, but most of them work in job environments that are more representative of the diversity in culture that is in the U.S. They work in workplaces like the one Steyn describes above, where even a simple look at the last names paints a true mosaic of cultures.
In Canada, the opposite is becoming true. Yes, there is still plenty of intermingling of cultures in many workplaces, but increasingly there is also greater isolation -- people of like culture live together and work together. That's something one can observe even taking a casual walk through a Canadian university campus. If you're a student, you've seen it in the study hall -- there's the large group of "Azns" at the table to your left, speaking Korean in hushed, stacatto tones. Further on, there's three or four young men with olive-tinted skin and neatly-trimmed beards, slacks and pressed shirts, speaking Arabic as they pore over sociology texts. Sometimes they are accompanied by one or two young ladies, usually wearing hijabs. Seated a couple of tables away from them are the three or four caucasian students, probably talking a little louder than the rest, in jeans or sweat pants and T-shirts. One of them has a ball-cap.
Each group, seperate, isolated, and anything but interested in mingling with the others.
This is the legacy of multiculturalism, and its extreme application is seen in France. But the problems go deeper than that also, and this is why I largely think that whatever Chirac and his government plan to do, they will meet with failure.
Job training for tens of thousands of youth? Nice idea, but what will come of it -- French companies are so beholden to the unions that they can't really even dismiss workers or retire the older ones to open up new positions for new workers to fill. Couple that with the fact that there's a mandatory limit on weekly working hours (currently set at 30 hours, I believe) which necessarily prevents the conditions for industry growth that would create large volumes of jobs, and you can only help wonder -- even if they are able to train 50,000 people to do various jobs -- where all the jobs will magically appear from. It's hard enough to find work for 50,000 people in a relatively healthy economy!
Meet with business and labour leaders to discuss work force diversity? Again, a nice idea, but what good will it do? These are the same labour leaders and business heads that lobbied for the limited work hours, for the massive expansion of union powers, and the like. They are, in essence, the people who created the situations that render the creation of large numbers of new jobs virtually impossible! And really, does Chirac think he'll be able to coax more work hours out of the unions?
There is a problem of racism -- that much is sure. Even I've been told by friends who've been to Europe that you have not understood what racism is until you have seen it in Europe. That's something that has a long history there, unfortunately, with its most salient example having happened some time just short of the middle of the previous century to our own current one. And if Chirac can seriously effect some changes in these attitudes, all power to him.
The problem is, even if he can do that, his own society is now structured in such a way that he could not succeed with the rest. If France is to survive in its current state -- or indeed, in any iteration that does not involve becoming an Islamic republic -- it will have to bring about a number of truly massive social reforms. It will have to become more of a melting pot, it will have to toughen up its stance on these ghettoes and start policing them (and rigidly, at that). In a larger sense, it will have to rediscover values, and not those values that are presupposed on vague "human rights" legislation. No, it will have to rediscover those values that are presupposed on the teachings of the one who truly upheld human dignity in His (note: capital-H) life. France was once a magnificent nation -- the Catholic French were the iron-clad hard-asses who stopped the Moorish invasion cold so many centuries ago. The secular French have, for the most part, only a legacy of defeat and surrender to draw on from centuries more recent.
Chesterton once wrote that "there is no bigot like the atheist", and this simple statement has proven itself right in so many ways. What is happening now in France is one such way -- no bigotry ever contemplated has been quite as horrible as that bigotry that is contemplated (and implemented) by those who have turned their backs on God. I don't say that to be preachy, either. I say that as an observation on world history. And if the French government is going to succeed in its aims, they have nothing more than that to overcome in order to do so.
Which is just the problem.
And now beastiality?
by WtFDragon on Comments
You know, I remember debating homosexual marriage in web forums as much as three years ago, back when Nation States had cool forums that weren't populated with barely adolescent whiners and blisteringly ignorant twits (that's the nicest description I can offer, I assure you).
Anyhow, I remember back then, in my somewhat younger naivete, asking the usual question: if we legalize homosexual marriage, what stops us from later on legalizing beastiality, or pedophilia, on the same basis of sexual orientation?. Predictably, I was pounced upon by numerous debaters and mocked for making "slippery slope" arguments.
Well...courtesy of Lost Budgie, I have this to say:
Get out the sleds.
I'm sure I'll hear it before long: this means absolutely nothing, don't worry about it, we have to be more open-minded, and all the usual meaningless (and false) assurances you hear trotted out whenever something like this comes along. It's a predictable legal arc every time: first reduce the sentences, then decriminalize, then make it a protected "right". It happened with homosexuality over a period of maybe 30 years.
Four state legislators in Massachusetts have introduced a bill that would soften the crime of bestiality, a move pro-family activists say is a natural progression of the state's legalizing same-sex marriage. "They're all strongly endorsed by the state's three major powerful homosexual lobbying groups. … They're all Democrats. They're all vocal supporters of homosexual 'marriage' and whatever else the homosexual lobby bids them to do.
While the bill would keep bestiality technically illegal, it gives the option of less severe penalties. Previously, those convicted of "a sexual act on an animal" could receive up to 20 years in prison.
Explains the local weekly: "The new measure would give activist judges the option of slapping perps with a mere two and a half years in plush local jails, or even letting zoophiliacs walk with a $5,000 fine."
I'll give this new trend ten, at the outside most...ten years and someone will win a court battle and be allowed to legally marry his dog.
Coasters
by WtFDragon on Comments
Sisters are great.
Meg recently went to San Francisco to catch a concert and hang out, and from all appearences she had a fabulous time. She brought back little gifts for everyone, and being the quirky individual she is she really went out of her way to find the strangest possible gifts for everyone that still somehow related to the individual in question.
In my case, I got CD cases. But not just any CD cases, mind you.
Most computer nerds have a vernacular term to refer to those CDs that suffer a data corruption while one is attempting to "burn" data to that CD...this is usually the result of something called "buffer underrun", which is basically when the computer is feeding data to the CD burner at a lower rate than the burner is writing it. Since the CD laser during the burn process is not a "stop/start" kind of thing -- once it's on, it remains that way -- this can lead to the laser simply flaying away at the CD while carrying no data. In other words, it can create gaps in the data which ultimately corrupt the CD entirely...it is wasted.
We nerds call such wasted CDs "coasters". You've probably heard and/or used the term.
So anyhow, back to the CD cases -- these particular CD cases have little pads on top of them, decorated with circuit-board imagery. You guessed it -- coasters. CD case coasters.
Sisters are great.
Meg recently went to San Francisco to catch a concert and hang out, and from all appearences she had a fabulous time. She brought back little gifts for everyone, and being the quirky individual she is she really went out of her way to find the strangest possible gifts for everyone that still somehow related to the individual in question.
In my case, I got CD cases. But not just any CD cases, mind you.
Most computer nerds have a vernacular term to refer to those CDs that suffer a data corruption while one is attempting to "burn" data to that CD...this is usually the result of something called "buffer underrun", which is basically when the computer is feeding data to the CD burner at a lower rate than the burner is writing it. Since the CD laser during the burn process is not a "stop/start" kind of thing -- once it's on, it remains that way -- this can lead to the laser simply flaying away at the CD while carrying no data. In other words, it can create gaps in the data which ultimately corrupt the CD entirely...it is wasted.
We nerds call such wasted CDs "coasters". You've probably heard and/or used the term.
So anyhow, back to the CD cases -- these particular CD cases have little pads on top of them, decorated with circuit-board imagery. You guessed it -- coasters. CD case coasters.
Sisters are great.
Would the term ''cheese eaters'' be an ethnic slur?
by WtFDragon on Comments
Mark Steyn weighs in (again!) with a piece in the Telegraph that almost perfectly captures the disconnect from reality that the French -- and indeed, that much of the world -- seems to be suffering through in the face of its unrest...no...riots...no...brewing civil war.
The police station was torched. Over 50 cars burned. Perhaps two hundred people participated in the orgy of flame and destruction that whipped through the town. That's okay...just don't take our cheese!
Over at the Place de la Mairie, M le Maire himself, Jean-Louis Debré, seemed affronted by the very idea that un soupçon de carnage should be allowed to distract from the cheese-tasting. "A hundred people have smashed everything and strewn desolation," he told reporters. "Well, they don't form part of our universe."
Maybe not, but unfortunately you form part of theirs.
One wonders if there is a school to which one must go to achieve such mastery in the field of unreality?
Also, don't miss this line of Steyn's:
The media -- and perhaps many in France, especially her government -- cling to a desperate illusion that the causes of these riots is "anger", or some form of social disparity: poverty, joblessness. There seems to be almost a rush to deny what is probably -- actually -- happening. A cursory glance over a typical Associated Press release builds to its inevitable conclusion: the words "neglected" and "Arab" appear in the same paragraph, but guess one which comes first?
In Normandy, it's not just the cheese that's soft and runny.
But as Steyn points out, it's really not the rage that's being felt, or observed:
Chirac deplored the "ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin" and recognized "the incapacity of French society to fully accept them," said Vike-Freiberga.
France "has not done everything possible for these youths, supported them so they feel understood, heard and respected," Chirac added, noting that unemployment runs as high as 40 per cent in some suburbs, four times the national rate, according to Vike-Freiberga.
Unfortunately for Mr. le President, France has done pretty much everything it was ever going to do for these "youths", and for their siblings, and for their families. In the name of tolerance, it has chosen not to assimilate their culture into its own...but how then does one deal with the fact that the two cultures are not really capable of co-existing within the same region? Ahh...clever solution, mon amis...we'll give them their own municipalities where the richness and diversity of their cultural heritage can be preserved!
In fact, "rage" seems the least of it: it's the "glee" and "contempt" you're struck by. And "rage" in the sense of spontaneous anger is a very slapdash characterisation of what, after two weeks, is looking like a rather shrewd and disciplined campaign. This business of car burning, for example. In Iraq, the "insurgents" quickly got the hang of setting some second-hand Nissan alight at just the right moment so that its plume of smoke could be conveniently filmed from the press hotel balcony in time for NBC's Today show and Good Morning, America...What the Aussie pundit Tim Blair calls the nightly Paris car-B-Q looks great on television, but without being sufficiently murderous to provoke the state into forcefully putting down the insurgency.
When you put it like that, it can't possibly be a bad thing, right?
Well...yes, unfortunately...it can be. And, if the riots in France have proven us anything, it is that it is a very bad thing indeed. I'll be the first to argue that there is definitely merit to allowing cultural groups to preserve aspects of their culture -- but what has happened in France has taken that concept to extreme, so much so that within the confines of those municipalities the French government has abdicated its right to administer French law. If this is an invasion -- which, from the rhetoric of the rioters, it most certainly is -- then the French themselves must bear some of the blame: in a sense, they have donated the beach-heads to the landing force, in the hopes that the Marines will be content to frolic in the sand.
And what little the French seem to be doing to quell the riots is almost laughable in its simplicity. Their latest idea is to impose curfews. I, for one, will admit surprise if the measure works -- the rioters have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to use force against emergency personnel, and have already traded gunfire with police. Oh, and apparently there is some plan to conduct raids if sufficient evidence is found to cast suspiscion of being an arms cache or bomb factory on a residence or other building. So in a sense, Steyn is proven "wrong", in that France has declared a state of emergency. But in the larger sense, he is proven right, because while they may have made the declaration, they don't seem to be trying to do anything substantial to address the actual emergency. Calling out the army...might that be better?...does France even have an army anymore?
Oh, right...and its acronym is "U.S.M.C.", isn't it?
I'm entirely with Steyn on this one -- even if the riots are put down, it seems highly unlikely that the French will grow the necessary balls in order to assimilate these cultural groups and integrate them into French society. Leaving aside the fact that in Islam, there is no real room for compromise -- unless the dhimmis are the ones doing the compromising -- it seems unlikely that France would ever so debase itself from its current stance of hypermulticulturalist segregationism as to do anything so impertinent as suggest that the likes of Ahmed and Farouk put down the baseball bats, stop pouring petrol on that Citroen, and obey the laws of France instead of the lawlessness of Palestine.
Lost Budgie is on a Roll!
by WtFDragon on Comments
The Budgie might be recovering from dental surgery, but his wit and incisiveness in undiminished, and he has published a pair of excellent pieces. The first, a couple days ago, dealt with the token -- and largely ineffectual -- fatwa that was issued by some Muslim organization in France, and which was worded in this way:
To which the Budgie comments thus:
France's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree. It forbade all those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others."
His analysis continues from there, and it is scathing in places, because he is very right: a fatwa that is so exclusive is no fatwa at all. When one considers that the rioters appear to be operating with much coordination, one quickly loses illusions that their actions are "blind". "Pre-planned"? Yes. "Orchestrated"? Definitely. "Blind"? Not bloody likely.
This sounds very nice on the surface - but why must these "peaceful" fatwas always have some sort of wiggle room or escape clause?
The latest French fatwa advises rampaging Muslims not to take part in any action that "blindly strikes private or public property..."
"Blindly" ?
That doesn't sound like a wholesale prohibition against violence to me. The use of the word "blindly" offers an exception; a condition under which a Muslim in France could strike against private or public property or harm others and not be in violation of this fatwa. If a Muslim is striking with thoughtful consideration of the verses in the Koran, would he be striking "blindly" ?
Weasel Words. Always Weasel Words.
A second piece at Lost Budgie looks at the terminologies used in talking about the rioters, and about the general slowness of the media in delivering news on the matter -- I for one can say in confidence that by the time I'd heard about these riots on the news and seen pictures in the paper, I'd been reading blog entries about them for a couple of days already.
Although it appears now, according to Budgie, that Fox News is now using the term "Muslim riots" to describe these events.
Meanwhile, around the mainstream media (MSM), the runny cheese word "Unrest" has now been replaced with other terms as the MSM finally gets the picture that there might be something happening...
Reuters is finally using the "R" word as in "riots" - as is Bloomberg.
CNN however, continues to use the word "unrest" in its website tickler but is moving to the term "riot" in the story headlines - even declaring that the "Fear of Rioting Spreads Across Europe."
Earth to CNN: We are way beyond the "fear" of rioting spreading across Europe.
As those of us who have been following the "unrest" from the first night have seen, the mainstream media has often been days behind the internet in reporting the extent and details of the French civil war. Four days ago, we saw rioting in Denmark and Germany. The MSM was about 48 hours behind. Even now, I am hearing stories on television that were old news on the Internet two and three days ago.
Twelve days later.
Thank goodness for bloggers -- truth and expediency seem to have abandoned the mainstream television channels and daily papers.
Don't Mention the War!
by WtFDragon on Comments
Europe continues its descent into war. The "Immigrant Unrest" in France has reached Paris. Rioting has affected some 40 other districts/areas of France, and over 300 towns, in a series of suburbs that basically forms a ring around Framce, with Paris basically at the centre -- politically speaking, if not so much geographically.
Wikipedia provides a handy reference image.
There is an ever-increasing degree of coordination among the rioters -- one is tempted to call them "invaders" now -- as they make use of cell-phones and text-messaging to communicate with each other to more efficiently create disturbance. A cursory glance at the Wikipedia notice on the coordination of these riots adds more detail:
Yeah, right. And when the Iranian president said Israel should be "wiped out", we've misunderstood him -- he actually said that Israel needs to be "wiped clean", because the last time he was there he found that the maids had been lax in dusting the counter tops.
Also, take note of the extremely French names in the above quote -- none of those silly foreign names like Marcel or Francois.
And, as has been pointed out at Small Dead Animals, the fact that they are coordinating via cell-phones and text messages itself puts lie to the claim that there is no coordination -- wouldn't they need to know each others' contact info and blog URLs?
The rioters have been shooting bullets at police -- very few news reports I've read have mentioned that as a result of this, we must infer that the rioters are therefore in possession of firearms, and indeed it seems likely that given the widespread use of these weapons, there were probably caches being kept available for just such an occasion as this. Certainly, there seems to be at least one central bomb-making factory, and quite probably more than just one...use of gasoline explosives in the rioting has been as widespread as the riots themselves, and it seems improbable (at best) that one manufacturing depot could provide the entire supply of bombs.
And attempts by some Muslim leaders to re-establish order and civility -- even the issuing of a fatwa condemning the violence -- are themselves causing further strife and almost provoking more violence. The rivalry that exists between different Muslim authorities in France rivals that of the clash experienced in the Catholic Church during the Great Schism, where the three Popes denounced and excommunicated each other. And even though the fatwa was issued, it seems that nobody cares to listen.
The riots have even claimed their first fatality:
An alternate way of life -- nations within a nation -- that has now exploded outward and is taking ground, causing havoc, and demanding recognition.
This is an invasion. This is a civil war. One hopes that the French will show up for it...because as in history, the only way to combat certain forms of aggression is with steadfastness and the resolve to assert order and national law, even if doing so means calling in the army and using a little bit of muscle.
I find it interesting that both Mark Steyn and David Warren have -- seemingly independently -- come to the example of 732 A.D. (none of that "Common Era" crap here!) and the defeat of the advancing Moorish armies by Charles Martel.
Steyn writes:
We recognize that history is cyclical, and we make the almost cliched observation that those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. But equally so, I submit: those who do not learn from the successes of history are doomed to fail in any attempt to repeat them. There was a time, long ago, when the French were facing a Muslim invasion, and they stood up to that foe and threw him down, defeated him utterly. Some 1300 years later, they are facing another invasion by the same foe...and it seems that they, themselves, are being thrown down. But in a nation which re-invents itself with each passing generation, and spits on much of its history (especially its Catholic history), who can be surprised? The French have not necessarily forgotten their failures, but they have completely forgotten their triumphs, and with each passing night and the torching of another 300 cars, it seems less and less likely that in this war, they will topple the invading Moor.
Wikipedia provides a handy reference image.
There is an ever-increasing degree of coordination among the rioters -- one is tempted to call them "invaders" now -- as they make use of cell-phones and text-messaging to communicate with each other to more efficiently create disturbance. A cursory glance at the Wikipedia notice on the coordination of these riots adds more detail:
Of course, the assertion that there "appear[s] to be no coordination" is put to lie when one reads what Der Spiegel has to say. Robert at Jihad Watch quotes:
French national police spokesman, Patrick Hamon, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that there appeared to be no coordination among gangs in different areas. But he said youths in individual neighborhoods were communicating by cellphone text messages or email -- arranging meetings and warning each other about police operations. According to the Guardian, (November 6, 2005), Hamon said, "what we notice is that the bands of youths are, little by little, getting more organized, arranging attacks through cell phone text messages and learning how to make gasoline bombs." The police have found a gasoline bomb-making factory in a derelict building; Justice Ministry official Jean-Marie Huet told The Associated Press that gasoline bombs "are not being improvised by kids in their bathrooms." The apparent role of the Internet in helping to coordinate and cause unrest was also noted.
Operation what? I can only assume that midnight sun in somewhat refers to some attempt to create a fire so huge that the night sky burns as day, but what do I know? Perhaps they're planning to buy everyone puppies instead, and I'm being paranoid.
But just as the Internet has proven useful to those wanting to vent their frustration and anger at the violence enveloping France, others -- those involved in the violence -- have found the Internet a useful organizational tool. Plans for further attacks have made their appearances in different blogs -- like that from "Brahim." "Nice work people," he writes. "The cops are petrified of us, everything must burn, starting Monday, the operation 'Midnight Sun' starts, tell everyone else, rendezvous for Momo and Abdul in Zone 4 ... jihad Islamia Allah Akhbar."
Yeah, right. And when the Iranian president said Israel should be "wiped out", we've misunderstood him -- he actually said that Israel needs to be "wiped clean", because the last time he was there he found that the maids had been lax in dusting the counter tops.
Also, take note of the extremely French names in the above quote -- none of those silly foreign names like Marcel or Francois.
And, as has been pointed out at Small Dead Animals, the fact that they are coordinating via cell-phones and text messages itself puts lie to the claim that there is no coordination -- wouldn't they need to know each others' contact info and blog URLs?
The rioters have been shooting bullets at police -- very few news reports I've read have mentioned that as a result of this, we must infer that the rioters are therefore in possession of firearms, and indeed it seems likely that given the widespread use of these weapons, there were probably caches being kept available for just such an occasion as this. Certainly, there seems to be at least one central bomb-making factory, and quite probably more than just one...use of gasoline explosives in the rioting has been as widespread as the riots themselves, and it seems improbable (at best) that one manufacturing depot could provide the entire supply of bombs.
And attempts by some Muslim leaders to re-establish order and civility -- even the issuing of a fatwa condemning the violence -- are themselves causing further strife and almost provoking more violence. The rivalry that exists between different Muslim authorities in France rivals that of the clash experienced in the Catholic Church during the Great Schism, where the three Popes denounced and excommunicated each other. And even though the fatwa was issued, it seems that nobody cares to listen.
The riots have even claimed their first fatality:
Advance planning, coordination, and explosives-manufacturing facilities. Nationalistic rhetoric -- rioters declaring themselves to be "100% Palestinian" (despite living in France) and further declaring that the suburd in which they live belongs not to France, but to its unassimilated population who claims foreign nationality. Large-scale rejection of police and other national authorities within the confines of those same suburbs -- what policing is done therein is done by the people who live there, according to (we can assume) a local flavour of Sharia law or equivalent. It's no secret that polygamy, arranged marriages, and even honour killings are all practiced within these segregated communities.
A man who was beaten by an attacker while trying to extinguish a trash can fire during riots north of Paris has died of his injuries, becoming the first fatality since the urban unrest started 11 days ago, a police official said Monday. Youths overnight injured three dozen officers and burned more than 1,400 vehicles.
An alternate way of life -- nations within a nation -- that has now exploded outward and is taking ground, causing havoc, and demanding recognition.
This is an invasion. This is a civil war. One hopes that the French will show up for it...because as in history, the only way to combat certain forms of aggression is with steadfastness and the resolve to assert order and national law, even if doing so means calling in the army and using a little bit of muscle.
I find it interesting that both Mark Steyn and David Warren have -- seemingly independently -- come to the example of 732 A.D. (none of that "Common Era" crap here!) and the defeat of the advancing Moorish armies by Charles Martel.
Steyn writes:
Warren doesn't go as deeply into the history, but invokes the powerful meaning behind it:
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.''
France has been attempting, since the collective series of riots and rebellions that was the French Revolution, to re-invent itself as a secular -- indeed an atheist -- nation, apart from its Catholic heritage and that which gave it courage, honour, and...heck..."balls". There was a time when a few thousand Frenchmen held the line against the advance of a fundamentally incompatible ideology and threw it down into the dirt, forever altering the course of history. However, in the last thousand years -- interrupted only by the various and only briefly successful follies of Napoleon -- the French have performed in exactly the opposite way: the derogatory term cheese-loving surrender monkeys is spiteful, but apart from the simian comparison it is also accurate, by and large.
The solution of the old Catholic France was, over the centuries, that of Charles Martel: victor at Tours in 732 A.D., where the advance of Islam on Western Europe was stopped. It consisted in a frank realization that two civilizations were clashing, where only one could prevail. The choice was relatively simple: victory over the invaders, or death and servitude.
We recognize that history is cyclical, and we make the almost cliched observation that those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them. But equally so, I submit: those who do not learn from the successes of history are doomed to fail in any attempt to repeat them. There was a time, long ago, when the French were facing a Muslim invasion, and they stood up to that foe and threw him down, defeated him utterly. Some 1300 years later, they are facing another invasion by the same foe...and it seems that they, themselves, are being thrown down. But in a nation which re-invents itself with each passing generation, and spits on much of its history (especially its Catholic history), who can be surprised? The French have not necessarily forgotten their failures, but they have completely forgotten their triumphs, and with each passing night and the torching of another 300 cars, it seems less and less likely that in this war, they will topple the invading Moor.
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