dimanche, novembre 06, 2005

what i think of the events dans les quartiers" ne peux pas entrer"

So in the first comments section one may read the two articles that were sent to me which I find highly interesting. One would like to wish and hope that this is not true, but oddly, for some horrendous reason it appears that the wave of Islam is indeed taking over. I recall one journalist making doomsday predictions that Europe for all of her posturing against Israel and for Israel to leave Gaza and the West Bank saying that Europe was only doing so to protect herself at home. A friend of mine remarked they had no choice but to stand against Israel politically, because she feared the Arabs who would riot would become more out of hand. The French have stood by silently while Jewish offices, businesses, buildings were damaged or looted. They have hoped much as Neville Chamberlain did that appeasing the demanding monster would put an end to the difficulties. While I still love France and even have sympathies for the French, I feel very sorry for the situation they are in, I have to admit that there is a reason we speak more respectfully of Winston Churchill than of Neville Chamberlain. France, gloriously beautiful and sweetly cultural country that it is, has indeed been weak --and to Arabs, such weakness is a weakness to be exploited.

A fellow I know in the USA has been talking quite a bit about how the Muslims are taking over the US with their investments of money and their hope to turn the world into an Islamic world without the privileges we call "democratic." People have laughed at him, but I would wonder greatly now, whether we are watching the world slowly become entirely Muslim. As I think about this, I know despite my desire to enter the hallowed Ivy tower walls and sit contemplating literature, culture, and trends, that I feel compelled instead to continue my work in applying science to the problems we have today. Inherently, I think that there is a great need for people to build this world today in such a way that medical, scientific, and social progress be met in as many countries as possible. The craft of words and colors is sadly a leisure time pursuit. I fear that time for such pusuits which impart joy to the mind and heart simply for the tickled pleasantness of it will be greatly missing from us in the years to come. It is a very very needy world that meets our gaze when we look out of our windows. We must educate our peoples, ourselves, and never stop growing and expanding our minds. It is vital that to meet the needs of the world today, that we be prepared to do what is needed.

posted by Meowmix Chatul at dimanche, novembre 06, 2005

1 Comments:

Blogger Meowmix Chatul said...

The New York Post
November 4, 2005

WHY PARIS IS BURNING?
by Amir Taheri

'The Chirac administration...appears to be clueless about how to cope
with... a "ticking time bomb."

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/postopinion.htm

November 4, 2005 -- AS THE night falls, the "troubles" start - and the
pattern is always the same.

Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break
shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and ransack
cinemas, libraries and schools. When the police arrive on the scene, the
rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats.

The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank
shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back - with real bullets.

These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly
close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the
intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control.

The troubles first began in Clichy-sous-Bois, an underprivileged suburb east
of Paris, a week ago. France's bombastic interior minister, Nicholas
Sarkozy, responded by sending over 400 heavily armed policemen to "impose
the laws of the republic," and promised to crush "the louts and hooligans"
within the day. Within a few days, however, it had dawned on anyone who
wanted to know that this was no "outburst by criminal elements" that could
be handled with a mixture of braggadocio and batons.

By Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of "an unprecedented crisis." Both
Sarkozy and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel
foreign trips to deal with the riots.

How did it all start? The accepted account is that sometime last week, a
group of young boys in Clichy engaged in one of their favorite sports:
stealing parts of parked cars.

Normally, nothing dramatic would have happened, as the police have not been
present in that suburb for years.

The problem came when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned
the police and reported the thieving spree taking place just opposite her
building. The police were thus obliged to do something - which meant
entering a city that, as noted, had been a no-go area for them.

Once the police arrived on the scene, the youths - who had been reigning
over Clichy pretty unmolested for years - got really angry. A brief chase
took place in the street, and two of the youths, who were not actually
chased by the police, sought refuge in a cordoned-off area housing a power
pylon. Both were electrocuted.

Once news of their deaths was out, Clichy was all up in arms.

With cries of "God is great," bands of youths armed with whatever they could
get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.

The French authorities could not allow a band of youths to expel the police
from French territory. So they hit back - sending in Special Forces, known
as the CRS, with armored cars and tough rules of engagement.

Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the
issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the
French police leave the "occupied territories." By midweek, the riots had
spread to three of the provinces neighboring Paris, with a population of 5.5
million.

But who lives in the affected areas? In Clichy itself, more than 80 percent
of the inhabitants are Muslim immigrants or their children, mostly from Arab
and black Africa. In other affected towns, the Muslim immigrant community
accounts for 30 percent to 60 percent of the population. But these are not
the only figures that matter. Average unemployment in the affected areas is
estimated at around 30 percent and, when it comes to young would-be workers,
reaches 60 percent.

In these suburban towns, built in the 1950s in imitation of the Soviet
social housing of the Stalinist era, people live in crammed conditions,
sometimes several generations in a tiny apartment, and see "real French
life" only on television.

The French used to flatter themselves for the success of their policy of
assimilation, which was supposed to turn immigrants from any background into
"proper Frenchmen" within a generation at most.

That policy worked as long as immigrants came to France in drips and drops
and thus could merge into a much larger mainstream. Assimilation, however,
cannot work when in most schools in the affected areas, fewer than 20
percent of the pupils are native French speakers.

France has also lost another powerful mechanism for assimilation: the
obligatory military service abolished in the 1990s.

As the number of immigrants and their descendants increases in a particular
locality, more and more of its native French inhabitants leave for "calmer
places," thus making assimilation still more difficult.

In some areas, it is possible for an immigrant or his descendants to spend a
whole life without ever encountering the need to speak French, let alone
familiarize himself with any aspect of the famous French culture.

The result is often alienation. And that, in turn, gives radical Islamists
an opportunity to propagate their message of religious and cultural
apartheid.

Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the
population to be reorganized on the basis of the "millet" system of the
Ottoman Empire: Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to
organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its
religious beliefs.

In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place. In these
areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist "hijab" while
most men grow their beards to the length prescribed by the sheiks.

The radicals have managed to chase away French shopkeepers selling alcohol
and pork products, forced "places of sin," such as dancing halls, cinemas
and theaters, to close down, and seized control of much of the local
administration.

A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of
Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The
French authorities should keep out.

"All we demand is to be left alone," said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local
"emirs" engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the
police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood,
to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

President Jacques Chirac and Premier de Villepin are especially sore because
they had believed that their opposition to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in
2003 would give France a heroic image in the Muslim community.

That illusion has now been shattered - and the Chirac administration,
already passing through a deepening political crisis, appears to be clueless
about how to cope with what the Parisian daily France Soir has called a
"ticking time bomb."

It is now clear that a good portion of France's Muslims not only refuse to
assimilate into "the superior French culture," but firmly believe that Islam
offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire.

So what is the solution? One solution, offered by Gilles Kepel, an adviser
to Chirac on Islamic affairs, is the creation of "a new Andalusia" in which
Christians and Muslims would live side by side and cooperate to create a new
cultural synthesis.

The problem with Kepel's vision, however, is that it does not address the
important issue of political power. Who will rule this new Andalusia:
Muslims or the largely secularist Frenchmen?

Suddenly, French politics has become worth watching again, even though for
the wrong reasons.
____________________________________________________________

The Chicago Sun-Times
November 6, 2005

Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands
by Mark Steyn

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn06.html

Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's
about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots
and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western
Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of
my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in
London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night
as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of
urban unrest.''

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse?
Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French
Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover
that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'':
They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the
broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to
an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to
find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally
that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in
Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up
trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as
complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething
unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city,
would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting
alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been carrying
on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools,
etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of
these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have
lost that battle. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street
correctly identified Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a
sign of weakness.

The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32
Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732
A.D. -- as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had
advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern
France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd
al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but
they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St.
Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met
a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held
its ground ''like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,'' as the Chronicle of
Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were
heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the
surname ''Martel'' -- or ''the Hammer.''

Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It
was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they'd won, they'd have found
it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. ''Perhaps,''
wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, ''the
interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford,
and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and
truth of the revelation of Mahomet.'' There would be no Christian Europe.
The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers,
said Gibbon, was ''an encounter which would change the history of the whole
world.''

Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French
government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim
advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They're in
Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking
coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance
drivers will not go without police escort. It's way too late to rerun the
Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots,
9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the beginning
of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night.
''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' said
Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We can no
longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the
equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.''

What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned down
a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the
''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America never
requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior
minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as
''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those who
feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a spirit of
dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they seem to
see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential
ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect
that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and
Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of
traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than
their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de
Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why,
everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a
problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.

If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad
impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their
opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the
'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and
again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a
piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe:
''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by
the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new
Dark Ages.

dimanche, novembre 06, 2005 1:49:00 PM  

Enregistrer un commentaire

<< Home