French riots are muslim riots

None of the news outlets are reporting the riots as such, but when you read three to four paragraphs into each story, there it is:

Fifth night of unrest in Paris suburb following deaths of two youths

Police fired tear gas canisters and rioters hurled Molotov cocktails as violence hit a poor Paris suburb for the fifth straight night in unrest that officials said had also spread to neighbouring towns.

The local prefecture said that the levels of violence in the troubled suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois were lower than on previous nights.

However 12 people were arrested in the town, which has a large Muslim community, during a night in which a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a police station and 11 cars and trash cans were torched.

Ironically, a book I picked up recently and wrote about a week or so ago, "Our Culture and What's Left of It," has a chapter on the ghettos in which the French have stuck the majority of their immigrant Muslim population.

The essay is called, "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris." Here are some highlights:

"Reported crime in France has risen from 600,000 annually in 1959 to 4 million today, while the population has grown by less than 20 percent (and many think today's crime number is an underestimate by at least half). In 2000 one crime was reported for every sixth inhabitant of Paris, and the rate has increased by at least 10 percent a year for the last five years...Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly" (299). "A kind of anti-society has grown up in them" (301).

"There are now an estimated 8 or 9 million people of North and West African origin in France, twice the number in 1975--and at least 5 million of them are Muslims" (307).

Theodore Dalrymple, the author, explains that the French have tried to appease their own national conscience, inflamed by their segration of the immigrants in these ghettos, by creating a giant welfare state for those who live in the ghettos. Dalrymple explains that, especially for the young men in the ghettos, this only makes things worse:

Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cites...It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident" (303).

"French youth unemployment is among the highest in Europe--and higher the further you descend the social scale, largely because high minimum wages, payroll taxes, and labor protection laws make employers loath to hire those whom they cannot easily fire, and whom they must pay beyond what their skills are worth.

Dalrymple explains how the French government will not allow religious expressions such as the wearing of the hijab, or headscarve for women, "but at the same time, official France also pays a cowering lip service to multi-culturalism--for example, to the 'culture' of the cites.

"Thus French rap music is the subject of admiring articles in Liberation and Le Monde...One rap group, the Ministere amer (Bitter Ministry), won special official praise. Its best known lyric: 'Another woman takes her beating / This time she's called Brigitte / She's the wife of a cop / The novices of vice piss on the police / It's not just a firework, scratch the clitoris / Brigitte the cop's wife likes niggers / She's hot, hot in her pants.'

"This vile rubbish receives accolades for its supposed authenticity: for in the multi-culturalist's mental world, in which the savages are forever noble, there is no criterion by which to distinguish high art from low trash. And if intellectuals, highly trained in the Western tradition, are prepared to praise such degraded and brutal pornography, it is hardly surprising that those who are not so trained come to the conclusion that there cannot be anything of value in that tradition. Cowardly multi-culturalism thus makes itself the handmaiden of anti-Western extremism" (305).

Dalrymple ends with this point:

Imagine yourself a youth in Les Tarterets or Les Musiciens, intellectually alert but not well educated, believing yourself to be despised because of your origins by the larger society that you were born into, permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence and crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine that would simultaneously explain your predicament, justify your wrath, point the way toward your revenge, and guarantee your salvation, especially if you were imprisoned? Would you not seek a 'worthwhile' direction for the engergy, hatred, and violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil in the name of ultimate good?" (309)

Before we Americans get too self-righteous towards the French on this point, we should also consider how much this last statement could be applied to our treatment of the Hispanic immigrant community.