Arc de Multiculti

This cartoon is based on a suggestion from Justin Stoicovy. (NOTE: Be sure to check out our original art auction for Project Valour-IT.)

From FoxNews: State of Emergency Declared in France.

President Jacques Chirac declared a state of emergency Tuesday, paving the way for curfews to be imposed on riot-hit cities and towns in an extraordinary measure to halt France's worst civil unrest in decades after 12 nights of violence.

There have been a number of good editorials about the French riots. Here are a few:

The Kristallnacht of the Altruist Nazis; Multiculturalism and the Self-Liquidation of Europe by Robert Tracinski.

The Multiculturalists accept the vicious Nazi assumption that an individual's ideas and values are determined by his race -- but, they say, the cardinal sin is to be too racially self-assertive, that is, the worst thing you can do is to assert the uuniversal truth or superiority of your own group's culture at the expense of the ideas and values of others. "All cultures are equal" is the Multiculturalist theory. In practice, this means that we must be ready to subordinate our own culture -- the culture of Western civilization -- in order to show our "respect" for the cultures of every other group on earth, from the Eskimos and Patagonians to the culture of, say, the North African Arabs.

The meaning of Multiculturalism becomes clearest when it confronts the religion of Islam.

The Muslims also denigrate reason, not in favor of personal emotion but in favor of an equally subjective faith; in Islam, two and two make five if Allah wills it. As for the relationship of Islam to other cultures, the Koran is very clear. People of other cultures are to be forcibly converted to Islam -- under threat of death -- except for a few whose existence may be tolerated so long as they accept the status of "dhimmi," secoond-class citizens who dutifully accept a whole series of restrictions lest they offend the sensibilities of Muslims.

Multiculturalism is a program for self-imposed dhimmitude. I have already pointed this out in stories I have posted about the absurd lengths to which Western Multiculturalists are willing to go to expunge our own culture out of an obsequious respect for Muslim "sensibilities." The examples range from the trivial (removing a public sculpture of a pig in rural England, because Muslims consider the pig an "unclean" animal) to the ominous, such as Britain's proposed law making it a crime to criticize someone else's religion--essentially banning dissent against Islam.

But nowhere are the results more ominous than in France. The riots there are described as the product of France's failure to "assimilate" Muslim immigrants from North Africa, and various reasons are cited for this failure. But the most fundamental reason is that Europe has long ago lost any real interest in assimilating its immigrants. Indeed, it has rejected the very idea of assimilation. To induct others into European culture--why, that kind of cultural self-assertion would be just like the Nazis. Instead, Europe has gone out of its way to "accommoddate" other cultures -- by encouraging immigrants to live for decades sealed off in their own enclaves.

Why Paris is burning by Amir Taheri.

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. ...

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.

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

"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. ...

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 [interior minister Nicolas] Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic.

UPDATE: More from Mark Steyn: Early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war (via Little Green Footballs).

As to the "French" "youth", a reader in Antibes cautions me against characterising the disaffected as "Islamist". "Look at the pictures of the youths," he advises. "They look like LA gangsters, not beturbaned prophet-monkeys."

Leaving aside what I'm told are more than a few cries of "Allahu Akhbar!" on the streets, my correspondent is correct. But that's the point. The first country formally to embrace "multiculturalism" - to the extent of giving it a cabinet post -- was Canada, where it was sold as a form of benign cultural cross-pollination: the best of all worlds. But just as often it gives us the worst of all worlds. More than three years ago, I wrote about the "tournante" or "take your turn" -- the gang rape that's become an adolescent rite of passage in the Muslim quarters of French cities - and similar phenomena throughout the West: "Multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture - the subjugation of women -- combine with the worst attributes of Western culture -- licence and self-gratification. Tattooed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of northern England areas are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the vice-regal escort." Islamofascism itself is what it says: a fusion of Islamic identity with old-school European totalitarianism. But, whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today's ideology of choice for the world's disaffected.

UPDATE -- Nov. 14: From FoxNews: Chirac: France Riots Reflect 'Profound Malaise'.

President Jacques Chirac said Monday that more than two weeks of violence in the poor suburbs of France is the sign of a "profound malaise" and he ordered new measures to reach out to troubled youths and fight the discrimination believed to be at the root of it. ...

He said he has decided to set up a corps of volunteers to offer training for 50,000 youths by 2007. He also said the French media, which is not very ethnically diverse, need to "better reflect the reality of France today."

He told companies and unions they must encourage diversity and support employment for youths from tough neighborhoods, saying it was important to fight "this poison for society which is discrimination."

Posted by Forkum at November 8, 2005 04:09 PM