America has suffered race riots, too. Nobody who remembers Watts and Detroit (where I happened to have a summer job during the 1967 turmoil) will be smug about what is already being called the “Paris Intifada”. On the other hand, our urban black ghettos in the 1960’s were havens of law, order and prosperity next to the Moslem slums surrounding contemporary Paris, where violence has was already routine before last week. In those areas, according to the Associated Press,
Since the start of the year, 9,000 police cars have been stoned and, each night, 20 to 40 cars are torched, [Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy said in an interview last week with the newspaper Le Monde.
As was the case during the U.S. race riots, there are two schools of thought about how the government should react:
Sarkozy on Monday ordered a permanent increase in police and undercover agents to identify troublemakers in difficult neighborhoods. However, the law-and-order minister’s tough talk drew growing criticism Tuesday — even from within his own government.
Sarkozy recently referred to troublemakers in the suburbs as “scum” or “riffraff” and in the past vowed to “clean out” the suburbs.
Such “warlike” words won’t bring calm, Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag said in an interview published in the daily Liberation newspaper.
He told the paper that he “contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics.”
While re-establishing order demands firmness, “it is in fighting the discrimination that victimizes youths that order is re-established, the order of equality,” said Begag, who was raised in a low-income suburb of Lyon.
U.S. experience, in the unlikely event that the French were willing to pay any attention to it, is not very pertinent here. Except among a communist fringe, alienation of blacks from American ideals was negligible; to the extent that the 1967 and 1968 riots had an ideological element, it was a demand to be treated like other Americans. French Moslems, including many who have no intention of stoning police cars, appear to regard themselves as a separate nation that must be treated differently from other Frenchmen, a delusion to which the authorities have over the years reacted with a stumbling combination of accommodation and repression. Dire as the thought is, Islamofascist terrorists, losing ground in Iraq, could decide that France is an attractive new battlefield. No doubt their bien pensant chatterers will blame George W. Bush.
Addendum: I’m not sure whether Rod Dreher is optimistic or frightened:
I got an e-mail today from a friend in Paris subject-lined, “It’s started.” He was referring to the Muslim riots in the Parisian suburbs. This is something that the French have anticipated for a long time, and planned for. I don’t think the French authorities are going to put up with this for much longer, and I would guess that if things don’t settle down in a couple of days, we will see the authorities move in with serious force. The rest of Europe has got to be watching all this amid shudders. We all shouldbe. . . . [E]lites in this country – especially those of us who work in the MSM – refuse to ask the hard questions about Islam and the West because we are afraid that the answers will shatter the icon of multiculturalism. As the Dutch learned one year ago today, when Theo van Gogh was ritually slaughtered by a Muslim extremist on an Amsterdam street, reality eventually has a way of grabbing one by the scruff of one’s neck and rubbing one’s nose in it.
Comments