With the Eurabian Intifada still going strong, pundits and politicians are undergoing strenuous intellectual contortions in an effort to ignore the obvious. France’s Prime Minister, Dominic de Villepin, has proclaimed that the rioting in that country is secular in nature, not religious, despite evidence that the rioters are almost exclusively Muslims. In his proclamation, De Villepin promises the French government will do more of what it has been doing to bring about the riots in the first place--namely spend more money on social programs and welfare.
President Jaques Chirac went one further and blamed the whole thing on racism, calling for a collective effort to help stamp it out. "We can build nothing lasting if we allow racism, intolerance and abuse," he told a television audience. "We can build nothing lasting unless we fight this poison for society that is discrimination." That’s the moral equivalent of surrendering, something for which the French seem to have somewhat of a reputation.
What Mr. Chirac fails to understand when he calls for giving jobs to individuals who have "non-French names, a suburban postal code, or the wrong skin color", is that France isn’t capable of giving these people jobs because their economy has tanked due to confiscatory taxation, prohibitive payroll taxes and overregulation.
While there is almost no mention of the concomitant Intifada in Denmark by the former mainstream media, that country has also seen nearly two weeks’ worth of nightly rioting along with the attendant mayhem and arson. The Danish rioting was sparked by the publication of a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in the Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper. The reason the paper published these cartoons in the first place was the result of a Danish author complaining that he could find no artists that would illustrate his book about Mohammed. Consequently the Jyllands-Posten sent out requests to 40 Danish illustrators to submit illustrations of Mohammed. Of the 40 only 12 sent in drawings that the paper subsequently published.
The result was outrage among the Muslim community and 5,000 took to the streets in protest against the publication. The protests were followed by nights of rioting by mostly Muslim youth in aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city.
"This land belongs to us." The rioters screamed, driving police and firefighters away from the RosenhØj Mall, which was the scene of the worst rioting. Fires were set by Molotov cocktails and special police had to escort fire trucks to the scene so that the fires could be fought.
Rioters used cobblestones to smash store windows, while the police reported that the rioters showed up with the cobblestones in their bags. Clearly these riots were pre-planned and well co-ordinated. During media interviews the apparent leaders of the riots said "We have planned this for three weeks. That’s why only two were arrested on Saturday. Police tried to block us in, but we know how to get out."
In Holland, filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, a relative of the famous artist, was gunned down in the street and then had his throat slashed by an irate Muslim who objected to Van Gogh’s film about the treatment of Muslim women under Islamic law.
Then there are the infamous 7/7 terrorist subway and bus bombings in London, which killed 56 people and the notorious 3/11 commuter train bombings in Spain.
What do all these events as well as numerous others have in common? They are all perpetrated by Muslim immigrants or their offspring who object to Western culture and mores. The other thing they have in common is that these actions are glossed over by media and politicians who are fearful of rocking the boat. They would rather blame the victims of this violence rather than its perpetrators in their efforts to maintain their status as being politically correct.
Denmark’s Prime Minister andres Fogh Rasmussen was quick to absolve the rioters of the label "terrorists", and Danish police said they had no plans to stop the rioting other than to initiate "dialogue and peaceful negotiations" with the rioters.
Numerous pundits around the world have opined that the disturbances in Eurabia are not "revolutionary" in nature, but are brought about through frustration and despair due to poverty and discrimination. One pundit I read in one of the weekend papers posited that these disturbances are more in line with what anthony Burgess described in his book a Clockwork Orange. His thesis was that these were basic hooligans who are behaving like Burgess’s Droogs, instead of the harbingers of a Muslim revolution.
In my opinion, the pundits and politicians who make excuses for the civil unrest are as big a part of the problem as the perpetrators of the unrest. In their desire to lay the blame at society’s feet, they fail to confront the ugly truths now facing the West and Europe in particular. as time progresses, the civil unrest will only get worse, not better.
Currently the population of France is about 10% Muslim, which on the surface is a clear minority. This trend is pretty well consistent throughout the rest of Europe where unassimilated Muslim immigrants are a clear minority. However, the average age of the majority is somewhere in the late 40s while that of the minority is in the early 20s. In addition, indigenous Europeans have ceased to reproduce and each year as their numbers shrink due to attrition, those of the unassimilated immigrants grow because they have a vibrant birth rate.
What we are seeing today in France and Denmark is the harbinger of a larger conflagration that will consume Europe and forever change its face. The solutions offered by the "poet" Prime Minister of France would only accelerate that process, as it will do nothing to integrate their immigrants into the mainstream. On the contrary, it appears that France now has its own two "solitudes". Native Frenchmen fear their immigrants as being "uncivilized fanatics" and Muslim immigrants have no use for French culture, as it runs contrary to all their social and religious traditions.
What they need in Europe isn’t "more tolerance and less racism". How tolerant can one get? What’s really needed are more cops and prisons to convey the message that equality under the law means just that whether you’re white, black, Christian or Muslim.
Two weeks ago I wrote in these pages that the rioting in Europe essentially proved that multiculturalism was a truly bad idea. I closed my article with the following:
"If we want to see what Toronto or Montreal will look like in 15 to 20 years, I would suggest a visit to Paris, the City of Light. The light you’ll find is likely that thrown off by burning automobiles."
I received several emails from readers who took issue with my point of view. The essential arguments being that Canada is different from Europe, we’re better than they are, we can absorb more immigrants, we’re nicer people, you’re racist (Orientalist, actually) and don’t worry, be happy.
Turning a blind eye to the perils that confront us will make them no less perilous. Instead of pretending that Europe’s problems aren’t really problems, we might be well advised to see what we can learn from them.