Has France Surrendered Yet?

OK, I realize that this is a rhetorical question with an obvious answer: France has made a fine art of surrendering. What about the latest crisis in France?

According to Prime Minister and poet Dominique de Villepin (actually a man), citizens of central Paris will be secure behind the new “Maginot Line” while he has devised a new “Marshall Plan” for dealing with the suburbs where the rioters reside.

The rioting by Muslim youth that began October 27 in France to calls of "Allahu Akbar" may be a turning point in European history. What started in Clichy-sous-Bois, on the outskirts of Paris, has spread to over 300 French cities and towns, as well as to Belgium and Germany. Across France, rioters have burned about 6,000 vehicles, injured 120 police and firefighters, beat an elderly man to death, and firebombed schools, hospitals, churches and police stations.

Witnesses describe the scene as "guerrilla warfare." Philosopher Jean-François Mattei spoke of "urban barbarity." Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, declared, "A civil war is unfolding in Clichy-sous-Bois.” Michel Gurfinkiel, editor of the news magazine Valeurs Actuelles, likens France today to the Weimar Republic just before the rise of Nazism. As writer Mark Steyn writes, this may be the outbreak we have all dreaded -- a civil war for the soul of Europe.

For more than a decade the immigrant suburbs around France's cities have been out of control. Crime rates have gone through the roof in 2005: 70,000 violent crimes include the torching of more than 28,000 cars and stoning 9,000 police cars.

A particularly fearsome firsthand account of life in a Muslim slum was a bestseller in 2002. “In Gang Rape Hell” recounts the life of a courageous French Muslim teenager, Samira Bellil, who was repeatedly gang-raped, and in order to survive became a "racaille" (hooligan), beating up other girls to get protection and respect.

If President Jacques (“Iraq”) Chirac thought he was going to gain peace with the Muslim community in France by taking an appeasement line in the Iraq war, it certainly looks like he miscalculated. Chirac led the opposition to the Iraq war partly out of fear of how his Muslim population would react. This fear is a big part of why France portrays itself as America's counterweight and why it criticizes Israel at every turn and coddled the terrorist Yasser Arafat right up to his death. France is on its way to becoming a Muslim country … one armed with hydrogen bombs.

Let us hope that the French government gets this crisis under control and then adopts an American-like policy for integrating immigrants and generating jobs.

(Excerpts from Reflections on the Revolution in France by Daniel Pipes; "Paris When It Sizzles" by Olivier Guitta; "Intifada in France" New York Sun Editorial.)