Thomas Fleming: Rioting For Fun and Allah

Wednesday, November 09, 2005
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org

I was sitting at my desk about 5:00 pm the 8th, wondering whether to start work on a new project or to pack up a few books and go home for a Martini. The telephone rang. It was a friend who lives in Metz, a long train ride away from Paris, a quiet town without a great deal of either night life or ethnic strife. “I’m looking out my window,” he said, ”watching an apartment building going up in flames. A police helicopter is going back overhead but nothing is being done to stop the rioters.”
I asked him how long the rioting had been going on in Metz. “It’s night after night. Not so bad as in Toulouse or in the Paris suburbs but bad enough.”

I had been watching the news since the disturbances broke out, and on All Saints I noted that of nearly 300 stories on Google mentioning France and Interior Minister Sarkozy, only one was an American reference to the violence—a few seconds on FOX news. When the Washington Post and the New York Times finally made up their minds that the news could not be suppressed—always a painful decision for them to have to make—we quickly learned about French racism and the plight of the poor Arabs and Africans. Time after time on NPR I heard a comparison with America’s own civil rights struggle in the 1960’s. Apparently, people who work for NPR or the Post are under the impression that the Watts riots had something to do with civil rights. Some day they should read Edward Banfield’s The Unheavenly City, particularly the chapter on “Rioting for Fun and Profit.”

If Muslim young men in Paris are rioting, raping, setting buildings and women on fire, all for better jobs, what explains their behavior everywhere else in the world? In Egypt, where they riot to protest a secular government. In Pakistan, where they stage cross-border raids into India for the sole purpose of killing non-Muslims. In New Jersey, where they slaughtered an Egyptian Christian family because the father was too critical of Islam and where they went out into the streets to celebrate their victory on September 11.

To take the argument back to the source, how do we explain the actions of Mohamed and his followers, who looted, murdered, and raped their way across Arabia and the Middle East? Yes, it is true, an Islamic state, after a few decades of grotesque brutality, will generally let Christians and Jews alone. They need people to pay the taxes, handle the trade, and staff the bureaucracy—talents that are traditionally hard to find in Islamic states. Naturally, the success of non-Muslims will periodically arouse the righteous indignation of the “youths” who spend their time loafing on street corners, and a pogrom a decade is a small price to pay for living under George Bush’s religion of peace.

In fact, the non-Muslims of France are now experiencing what some of their ancestors endured in the days before Charles Martel beat the Muslims back into Spain. Do not expect French politicians (apart from the “extreme right”) to use such language. Interior Minister Sarkozy, after describing the rioters as scum, now declares his government’s eagerness to promote civil rights. France, like the countries of North America and Western Europe, is a leftist country, where so-called conservatives talk only of free markets, equality, and economic growth. Only a fascist beast like Jean-Marie Le Pen or Charles de Gaulle would waste time talking about the French nation. Nations, in the eyes of liberals—whether of the Marxist or libertarian stripe (not much difference, actually), are an optical illusion. There is no forest, only trees, and if an entire forest of trees were to disappear while they were not looking, then nothing would happen unless they happened to have an investment—political in the case of Marxists, financial in the case of libertarians—in the place.

To make things worse, the Arab youths, as victims of discrimination, are behaving exactly as leftists think they ought to behave. Imagine you are a French intellectual approaching 60, forever dwelling on the glory days of the student riots in which you and your pals burned cars in 1968. Isn’t this the same scenario? Dispossessed people struggling for freedom and dignity?

In a sense, yes. The riots of ‘68 and ’05 are both outbursts of hooliganism that need to be repressed by the most violent means at the French government’s disposal, but there is a difference. The Marxist students believed in the political violence for the sake of revolution; the Islamic youths believe in violence against infidels for its own sake, as a divinely sanctioned method of dealing with pigs and cattle. I have not talked to Jean Raspail in years, but these riots are, in miniature, the unfolding of his scenario in Camp of the Saints: violent and licentious Third-Worlders whose attacks meet with no resistance from the demoralized self-hating West.

At the heart of the problem is not the teachings of a wicked and stupid religion but the stupid leftism—in both Marxist and classical liberal forms—taught in schools, preached in churches, and blathered endlessly in the media. If you do not believe that there are such things as societies or nations, that only contract-making individuals matters, then you will not object when your country is flooded with immigrants who bring an alien and hostile religion. Religion is all bunk, after all, so what difference can a few million Muslims make?

Large nation states, it is true, are the constructs of post-Medieval (dare I say post-Christian?) man, and it is more wholesome to feel a deeper allegiance to Brittany than to France, to South Carolina than to the United States. Nonetheless, in the world in which we find ourselves, nation-states are one of the last bulwarks against a globalism that is bent on destroying all distinctions between man and man (to say nothing of man and woman and man and beast). The result will be a world in which there is no place for us, either as Christians or as people of the West, and there is small consolation in the fact that the liberal-libertarians, whose moral, social, and cultural anarchy got this ball rolling, will be among the first to be eliminated.

Even before there was a France, there were Franks. They had stolen Gaul from the Romans fair and square, and they were not going to allow the land that fed their children to be taken away and given to feed the children of aliens. Until the French become Franks once again, until we Americans discover and defend our own identity, you can expect these pathetic hooligans to continue on their path, destroying every symbol of a West they envy and hate.

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