France Should Have Seen It Coming

They Were Warned…

For the past weeks I’ve been watching the spectacular TV footage of what the media insists are “disenfranchised French youths” or the children of “African and Arab descent” burning up cars and otherwise wrecking mayhem on the Paris suburbs.

You do realize that these uncivilized bastards are better described as Muslims or Islamists, right?

You also realize that these “demonstrations” are not really unorganized, spontaneous outbursts--they’re being supplied with firebombs and being directed by outside adult forces, not a bunch of pimple faced teens?

Well they are, although the NY Times, LA Times, Associated Press, et.al. just can’t bring themselves to make much mention of these realities.

In the vivid images of torched cars and buses you can see the rewards that France is reaping in return for all of their post WWII social tolerance and inclusiveness. I still think that there is something more than social unrest and hooliganism at work here.

To find out what is really going on you have to go to the foreign media outside of Paris. This Guardian story gives some good insights to the origins of the problem.

The government cannot admit it, but more and more voices in France are being raised to say that the country's worst urban unrest since the student uprising of 1968 reflects the failure of a whole model.

"The crisis is total," one leading sociologist, Michel Wievorka, said yesterday. "This is a structural problem that neither the right nor the left have dealt with for 25 years. France cannot cope with the shortcomings of its republican model. The whole system needs to be rethought."

The modèle républicain d'intégration is based on perhaps the most sacred article of all France's grand republican creed: that everyone is equal and indistinguishable in the eyes of the state. No matter where they come from, all French citizens are identical in their Frenchness.

It is a fine principle born of the ideals of the 1789 revolution. But it has practical drawbacks. For example, statistics based on ethnicity or religion are illegal in France; no one knows how many residents are of Arab or African origin, how they perform at school compared with white pupils, or what percentage are jobless or in prison. If analysing a problem is halfway to solving it, it is not a good start.

Under the model of integration, the idea that ethnic, linguistic and religious groups might enjoy rights and recognition due to their particular minority status is unthinkable. The model is defended on both political wings. When the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, suggested last year that affirmative action was needed in education and jobs, he was slapped down by both President Jacques Chirac and leftwing leaders for propagating "anti-republican" and "un-French" ideas.


Here is a little known story that has changed my view on the situation in France:

PARIS, Sept 27 (AFP) - An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as "enemy number one", intelligence officials said Tuesday.

"The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," the group's leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.

"France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community," he was quoted as saying…

Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is "at a very high level... There are cells operating on our territory."

Then Captain Ed over at Captains Quarters Blog pointed out this Washington Post article:

PARIS -- French police investigating plans by a group of Islamic extremists to attack targets in Paris discovered last month that the group was recruiting French citizens to train in the Middle East and return home to carry out terrorist attacks, sources familiar with the investigation said.

One French official said the extremists were using a virtual "underground railroad" through Syria to spirit European and Middle Eastern citizens into and out of Iraq. A senior French law enforcement official, who declined to be quoted by name because he was speaking about classified information, said French citizens had undergone terrorist training at camps in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

"There's always been an enormous jihad zone to train people to fight in their country of origin," the official said. "We saw it Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now we're seeing it in Iraq."

Of course the foreign liberal media, like our own domestic leftists, continue to claim that the underlying motives are poverty and exclusion from society.

Their solution?

Throw more money at the situation, and try to understand them better.

More money?

Hah!

More understanding?

Total BS.

I think that the French need to impose a sunset curfew, then start arresting everyone caught outside after dark and start bouncing a bullet off of the skull of anyone caught carrying a weapon or lighting anything on fire.

They’ve put up with this crap for 12 nights now and French president Chirac still wants the police to handle the situations. He needs to call out his pansy assed French Army and give them permission to shoot to kill.

And regarding Syria’s and Iran’s continuing training and support of these type of Jihadists and "insurgents," I think that President Bush should lift his middle finger to the Democrats and our domestic media, park a few extra aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and ship an extra fifty thousand troops into the region.

Then I’d like him to tell Iran to cease and desist with the nuclear bullshit and warn the little weasel running Syria that one more false step and he’ll be looking up the nose of a cruise missile.

Of course, no one asked me what I think...did they?