Amir Taheri’s account of the French intifada is chilling. We were half-joking when we used the term intifada, but it is no joke:

Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. When the police arrive on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats. The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back — with real bullets. These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control…..

Clichy was all up in arms. With cries of “God is great,” bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee. The French authorities could not allow a band of youths to expel the police from French territory. So they hit back — sending in Special Forces, known as the CRS, with armored cars and tough rules of engagement. Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the “occupied territories.” By midweek, the riots had spread to three of the provinces neighboring Paris, with a population of 5.5 million.

Taheri gives us shocking statistics on the scale of the crisis faced by the French, the legacy of a problem neglected for far too long:

[W]ho lives in the affected areas? In Clichy itself, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants are Muslim immigrants or their children, mostly from Arab and black Africa. In other affected towns, the Muslim immigrant community accounts for 30 percent to 60 percent of the population. But these are not the only figures that matter. Average unemployment in the affected areas is estimated at around 30 percent and, when it comes to young would-be workers, reaches 60 percent…..

The French used to flatter themselves for the success of their policy of assimilation, which was supposed to turn immigrants from any background into “proper Frenchmen” within a generation at most. That policy worked as long as immigrants came to France in drips and drops and thus could merge into a much larger mainstream. Assimilation, however, cannot work when in most schools in the affected areas, fewer than 20 percent of the pupils are native French speakers…. In some areas, it is possible for an immigrant or his descendants to spend a whole life without ever encountering the need to speak French, let alone familiarize himself with any aspect of the famous French culture.

Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the “millet” system of the Ottoman Empire: Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs. In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place. In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist “hijab” while most men grow their beards to the length prescribed by the sheiks. The radicals have managed to chase away French shopkeepers selling alcohol and pork products, forced “places of sin,” such as dancing halls, cinemas and theaters, to close down, and seized control of much of the local administration.

A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.” All we demand is to be left alone,” said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local “emirs” engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

We’ve been looking at the leading French newspapers over the last week, our poor language skills stretched beyond the snapping point, but we have seen no comparable account of the societal madness gripping France. Instead, we see calls for the resignation of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, because his hurtful words have contributed to the rioting:

Le député-maire de Bègles (Gironde) estime que le ministre «porte une lourde responsabilité dans l’explosion des banlieues», s’étant comporté «comme un véritable pyromane, un chef de guerre, en prononçant des mots qui blessent et qui stigmatisent». Il veut «gagner des voix sur sa droite, mais il est allé trop loin», a-t-il ajouté.

This looks to us like a moment of truth for France. They have nowhere to retreat to if they do not stand up now. On the other hand, there was nowhere to retreat to in June 1940.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 4th, 2005 at 9:11 am and is filed under General, Religion, War, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.