An average of 14 policemen a day are injured in bloody clashes with jobless youngsters. France's Interior Ministry said 2,500 police officers had been "wounded" this year. The head of the hard-line trade union "Action Police" Michel Thooris wrote to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to describe conditions in housing developments turned slums as "intifada." Police cruisers are pelted daily with stones and "Molotov cocktails" (gasoline-filled bottles with burning wicks that explode on impact) and Thooris said cops assigned to what was rapidly degenerating into "free fire zones" should be protected in armored vehicles.
Entire tall buildings empty into the streets to chase policemen and free an arrested comrade. "We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists," Thooris told journalists. Sarkozy, the leading center-right candidate for next year's presidential election, responded by dispatching cops in body armor, equipped with automatic weapons and rubber bullets, stun and teargas grenades into several Paris suburbs with orders to "restore control" from "organized crime." In one recent clash 250 cops dispersed a 100-strong Muslim gang armed with baseball bats.
The chaotic conditions in suburbs like Clichy-sous-Bois, Montfermeil and St. Denis have grown progressively worse since the nationwide Muslim riots in November 2005 that torched 10,000 vehicles. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin recently criticized as "overdrawn" President Bush's frequent reference to the "global war on terror." But the Iraq war did not appear to be part of the combustible mix in Muslim "ghettos" outside Paris. Despair, organized crime, and hatred of authority are its principal ingredients.
For the United States, Islamist extremism is seen as an external problem. For the Europeans, it's internal and far more complex than a war on terrorism. Muslim minorities are spawning rightwing extremism. In the Belgian port city of Antwerp a week ago, the Vlaams Belang (VB, or Flemish Interest), Europe's most extreme rightwing political formation, almost captured city hall with 33.5 percent of the vote. A Socialist coalition kept VB at bay with 35 percent. Nationwide, VB, which advocates secession of the Flanders and severe restrictions on Muslim immigration, scored 20 percent.
In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen's far right National Front appears to have opted for a can't-lick-'em-join-'em strategy, a rapprochement with France's large immigrant Muslim community -- with undertones of anti-Semitism. Le Pen's reasoning appears to be the recognition that Islamicization is in France to stay with 25 percent of France's under 20 population Muslim (40 percent in some cities), 2nd and 3rd generation North Africans. FN's tough stance on immigration is tempered by support for Arab and Islamist causes in the Middle East (Hamas and Hezbollah are two favorites). There are an estimated 6 to 8 million Muslims among France's 62 million and Islam is now France's second religion. Mosques are well attended on Fridays; churches aren't on Sundays. France's prison inmates are over 50 percent Muslim.
Le Pen's strategic advisers argue the FN must drop its founding mythology and forget about the once popular image of a modern Joan of Arc resisting the invasion of Muslim hordes. Americans and Jews are the new targets. But the party's Christian right-wingers do not agree and are defecting in large numbers. The Islamist threat is their main concern and they are finding a new political home in MPF, Mouvement Pour la France, which is anti-European Union and anti-Muslim, and given only 7 percent of registered voters in a recent poll. Le Pen's followers have dropped back from 11 percent to 9 percent.
Anti-Semitic incidents have proliferated in France in recent times, but the news seldom makes it across the Atlantic and when it does, it must still fight to be heard above the constant melodrama of constant trivia. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse attacked with Molotov cocktails; in Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish soccer team with metal bars and sticks; the bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers attacked thrice in the past 14 months, synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles and a Jewish school in Creteil firebombed in recent weeks; in Toulouse, a gunman opened fire -- all ignored in the mainstream media in the U.S. The metropolitan Paris police tabulated 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day in the past 30 days throughout the country.
The number one best selling book in France is "September 11: The Frightening Fraud," which posits no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon. A similar book in Germany sold over one million copies. One prominent Belgian businessman conceded privately "no one knows what to believe anymore." Neither multiculturalism nor integration of Muslim communities seems to be working anywhere in Europe. Moderate Muslim voices cannot rise above radical hubbub.
It should be taken as a given that France has fallen when even Le Pen's National Front has joined the Islamists. Furthemore, we are fooling only ourselves as long as we continue to preceive France as part of the Western Alliance.
It goes a long way to explain the context behind the French Foreign Minister’s remarks last summer when he suggested that Iran plays a stabilizing role in the Middle East as the Lebanon/Israel conflict raged. It is all part of the ongoing process of creating a new Islamic style Vichy government.
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