Sign of Christian Decline vs.
Rise of Islam – The French Intifada
November 10, 2005
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
The rise of the spirit of Islamic Jihad today had its beginnings in the central zone of the Arab states with Yassar Arafat and
in the fall of the Shah of Iran, followed by the
rise of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
It is now on a worldwide spread among the Muslim populations dispersed in pockets in many countries. The most recent demonstration of the internal spirit of Jihad in the Middle East itself has just been manifested by the suicide bombing of three American owned hotels in Amman, Jordan, while the most recent European event, manifesting a spirit of Jihad, has been the emotional outbreak of destruction that has raked France for the last two weeks.
The following article by Daniel Pipes in the Jerusalem Post, titled “The Context,” does indeed put the French riots in context better than any article I have read on the subject. I hope you will read it.
What is now happening in France is the harbinger to a trend that will grow in fever in Muslim communities across Europe, and will most assuredly be used as a tool of fear by Islamic extremists.
When the current fire is doused with appeasement by the French, its success will cause other Muslim communities to become more active in Islamic pursuits across central Europe and Great Britain.
BEGIN JERUSALEM POST ARTICLE
France: The Context
By Daniel Pipes, THE JERUSALEM POST
November 9, 2005
The rioting by Muslim youth that began October 27 in France to calls of “Allahu Akbar” m ay be
a turning point in Europe
an history.
What started in Clichy-sous-Bois, on the outskirts of Paris, by its eleventh night had spread to 300 French cities and towns, as well as to Belgium and Germany. The violence, which has already been called some evocative names – intifada, jihad, guerrilla war, insurrection, rebellion, and civil war – prompts several reflections:
End of an era: The time of cultural innocence and political na vet , when the French could blunder without seeing or feeling the consequences, is closing. As in other European countries (notably Denmark and Spain), a bundle of related issues, all touching on the Muslim presence, has now moved to the top of the policy agenda in France, where it will likely remain for decades.
These issues include a decline of Christian faith and the attendant demographic collapse; a cradle-to-grave welfare system that lures immigrants even as it saps long-term economic viability; an alienation from historic customs in favor of lifestyle experimentation and vapid multiculturalism; an inability to control borders or assimilate immigrants; a pattern of criminality that finds European cities far more violent than American ones; and a surge in Islam and radical Islam.
Not a first: The French insurrection are by no means the first instance of a semi-organized Muslim insurgency in Europe – it was preceded days earlier by one riot in Birmingham, England and was accompanied by another one in rhus, Denmark. France itself has a history of Muslim violence going back to 1979.
What is different in the current round
is its duration, magnitude, planning, and ferocity.
Media denial: The French press delicately refers to the “urban violence” and presents the rioters as victims of
the system.
Mainstream media deny that it has to do with Islam and ignore the permeating Islamist ideology, with its vicious anti-French attitudes and its raw ambition to dominate the country and replace its civilization with Islam’s.
Another method of jihad: Indigenous Muslims of northwestern Europe have in the past year deployed three distinct forms of jihad: the crude variety deployed in the United Kingdom, killing random passengers moving around London; the targeted variety in the Netherlands, where individual political and cultural leaders are singled out, threatened, and in some cases attacked; and now the more diffuse violence in France, less specifically murderous but also politically less dismissible. Which of these or other methods will prove most efficacious is yet unclear, but the British variant is clearly counterproductive, so the Dutch and French strategies will probably recur.
SARKOZY VS. VILLEPIN: Two leading French politicians and probable candidates for president in 2007, Nicholas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin, have responded to the riots in starkly contrasting ways, with the former adopting a hard line (proclaiming “tol rance z ro” for urban crime) and the latter a soft one (promising an “action plan” to improve urban conditions).
Anti-state: The riots started eight days after Sarkozy declared a new policy of “war without mercy” on urban violence and two days after he called violent youth “scum.” Many rioters see themselves in a power struggle with the state and so focus their attacks on its symbols. A typical report quotes Mohamed, 20, the son of a Moroccan immigrant, asserting that “Sarko has declared war… so it’s war he’s going to get.” Representatives of the rioters have demanded that the French police leave the “occupied territories”; in turn, Sarkozy partially blamed the riots on “fundamentalists.”
The French can respond in three ways. They can feel guilty and appease the rioters with prerogatives and the “massive investment plan” some are demanding.
Or they can heave a sigh of relief when it ends and, as they did after earlier crises, return to business as usual.
Or they can understand this as
the opening salvo in a would-be revolution and take the difficult steps to undo the negligence and indulgence of past decades.
I expect a blend of the first two reactions and that, despite Sarkozy’s surge in the polls, Villepin’s appeasing approach will prevail. France must await something larger and more awful to awake it from its somnolence. The long-term prognosis, however, is inescapable: “the sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced,” as Theodore Dalrymple puts it, “by the nightmare of permanent conflict.”
END JERUSALEM POST ARTICLE