France Must Respond

NYT reports France must draw the consequences of two weeks of riots and respond quickly to the problems raised by the rioters

You should have drawn the consequences of the riots when they first started, and you should have called out the army immediately. To cowtow to the demands of the rioters just shows your weakness that much more, and increases the probability that the Jihadists will target France.

, President Jacques Chirac said on Thursday as a police chief warned of possible unrest in the heart of Paris. Violence in urban areas around France dropped for the third straight night following the adoption of emergency powers that allowed local officials to impose night curfews on youths behind a wave of firebomb attacks. The riots began two weeks ago after the accidental deaths of two youths apparently fleeing police, but grew into protests by poor white youths and youngsters of North African and African origin against police treatment, racism and poor job prospects. Speaking after talks with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Paris, Chirac said the government must do more to ensure all citizens received equal treatment.

That is just not going to happen. As Richard Chesnoff wrote in The Arrogance of the French "it was French, not English or German, that was the language spoken by all of the ruling families across Europe" and the French just can't stand people who do not speak French, and speak it correctly. And the Muslims from former French colonies in North Africa and Black Africa are not interested in learning French or becoming French. They don't want to go home to Africa, because they like living off the dole in Socialized France.

``We will have to draw all the consequences of this crisis, once the time comes and order has been restored, and with a lot of courage and lucidity,'' Chirac, who has said little about the crisis in public, told a joint news conference with Zapatero.

As Jack Kelly wrote in JWR As the French intifada spreads into its second week and across the country, the French government has a dilemma. To whom does it surrender?

A very good question. Surrender is all the French know. But I suspect they will learn that as bad as things might have been when the Nazis took over in WWII, living under Sharia Law will be much less pleasant.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin — whose name may one day be as synonymous with appeasement as Petain's is with collaboration — would like to make a deal.

His problem is finding Muslim "community leaders" who can stop the rioting. In communities where law and order are absent, it is thugs with guns who are in charge, not the voices of moderation, such as they are.... The news media have gone to considerable lengths to avoid mentioning the rioters are mostly Muslim, or to report that there is an anti-Western component to the violence. The rioters typically have been described as "French youths" who are upset by high unemployment and racial discrimination. But these youths are French only in the sense that most were born there. Many don't even speak French. Their alienation from the culture and mores of the country in which they live could hardly be greater.

Unemployment is high in France. At ten percent, it is double what it is in the United States, and is especially high among young people with little education who speak French with difficulty. This would seem to suggest that France's welfare state model is less desirable to follow than many American liberals believe.... "Some are even calling for areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the millet system of the Ottoman Empire," wrote Amir Taheri, who lives in Paris. "Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs."

But they would still want all of the freebies of the Socialist French economy.

A de facto millet system already is in place in parts of France, Taheri noted: "In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist hijab while most men grow their beards to the lengths prescribed by the sheiks." Unless the invertebrates in charge can grow spines, France seems poised to become what Spain was before Ferdinand and Isabella, a patchwork of principalities where Moors ruled some communities, Christians others, with constant tension between them.

The difference is that France is very secular. They are not quite as antagonistic toward Christianity as the ACLU is here, but it is close, and I can't imagine them yielding major parts of their country to an Islamic rule.

It seems inconceivable that a civilized Western nation would bargain away to a handful of thugs its democratic principles and sovereignty over much of its territory. But the Islamists may well succeed. For though what the Islamists believe in is vile and reactionary, it is something. The French believe in nothing.