By Paul Belien
Thursday, November 10, 2005France was quiet last night. Only one school was torched and the number of "car-becues" was down to 400. Two more nights and we will be back at the normal pre-riot level of 100 car fires per night. ah, didn’t Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy say earlier that "20 to 40 cars torched each night" was the normal rate?
Yes, he did, but the official figures are generally understood to be underreported. as this discussion (in French) between firemen shows, when one car is set alight but two cars next to it are destroyed in the same fire, the statistics count it as only one case of car torching, not three. and when a car is set alight, but is not damaged beyond repair, it is not included in the statistics either. Hence doubling or tripling the official figure is not considered to be unrealistic. Some people even put the number at 50,000 "car-becues" per year. This is almost 140 in a "normal" night.
In Brussels, ten cars and one truck were set ablaze last night. The authorities do not want to publicise this too much because they fear copycat acts. This is also the reason why the French television network France 3 has decided no longer to disclose the numbers involved in vehicle burning.
It says a lot about the degeneration of a society when the authorities do not dare to talk about acts of vandalism and violence for fear that groups of people, instead of being appalled, will start copying the same type of lawless behaviour. apart from the mentally instable, such as pyromaniacs, everyone is responsible for his own behaviour. People will only copy something if that is what they want to do.
apparently France (and Belgium) have many people living within their borders who would rather change the creed of the republic "Libert™, Egalit™, Fraternit™" by another one: "Brl™, Fum™, Explos™" (Burned, Fumed, Exploded).
Earlier this week Daniel Pipes wrote:
Indigenous Muslims of northwestern Europe have in the past year deployed three distinct forms of jihad: the crude variety deployed in Britain, 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.
Though Pipes thinks that the "Dutch and French strategies will probably recur" because "the British variant is clearly counterproductive" for the jihadists, one can only hope that the copycat has not been to London. I do not think, however, that it is possible to detect regional varieties of jihadism which can be labelled British, Dutch or French. The Muslim radicals will continue to use the three strategies and they will not make regional distinctions. Random, crude bombing (the so-called British variety) cannot be excluded in amsterdam, Paris or Washington; targeted killing (the Dutch variety) cannot be excluded in London or Paris or Washington; diffuse violence (the French variety) cannot be excluded in amsterdam or in London, but it can in Washington. This is the only form of jihad warfare that will only be experienced by those who have foolishly opened their borders to invite the enemy in.
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