FULL SPECTRUM CULTURE

Paris is burning, rocked by those who the Parisians simultaneously coddled and despised. And now the country’s hip-ocracy is wondering exactly what to do. It took only two weeks for them to surrender to the Germans the first time. How long will it take for them to surrender to those who assault them now? Or have they already? Amir Taheri writes about the spark in the New York Post [so the NYP won't bug you]:

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.

the New York Sun editorializes about the spreading conflagration:

It turns out that France’s Muslim community lives in areas rampant with crime, poverty, and unemployment, much the fault of France’s prized welfare system. There are those of us who spent part of the 1980s in Europe, supporting the idea, among others from the Reagan era, that immigration was a virtue for a country and that the racial or religious background of the immigrants did not matter. We maintain that view. But immigration into a country with a dirigiste economy is a recipe for trouble, which is why supporters of immigration into France have long warned of the need for liberalization. Part of France’s problem is that it has defaulted on those measures. The lack of labor market flexibility and other socialist policies have created unemployment at nearly 10%, most of which falls among immigrants. And part stems from the fact that France’s estimated 5 million Muslims, out of a population of 60 million, are led by mostly foreign radical imams. Only belatedly has the French state started taking action, pressing for clerics to be taught in France. All this is compounded by the image France projects of itself to its Muslims, which one can surmise is the reason why Muslims see rioting as the solution to any grievance.

…and Theodore Dalrymple let us all know three years ago in the City Journal how the French wood got so dried out:

The state, while concerning itself with the details of their housing, their education, their medical care, and the payment of subsidies for them to do nothing, abrogates its responsibility completely in the one area in which the state’s responsibility is absolutely inalienable: law and order. In order to placate, or at least not to inflame, disaffected youth, the ministry of the interior has instructed the police to tread softly (that is to say, virtually not at all, except by occasional raiding parties when inaction is impossible) in the more than 800 zones sensibles—sensitive areas—that surround French cities and that are known collectively as la Zone. But human society, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and so authority of a kind, with its own set of values, occupies the space where law and order should be—the authority and brutal values of psychopathic criminals and drug dealers. The absence of a real economy and of law means, in practice, an economy and an informal legal system based on theft and drug-trafficking…

…But among the third of the population of the cités that is of North African Muslim descent, there is an option that the French, and not only the French, fear. For 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 energy, hatred, and violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil in the name of ultimate good? It would require only a relatively few of like mind to cause havoc. Islamist proselytism flourishes in the prisons of France (where 60 percent of the inmates are of immigrant origin), as it does in British prisons; and it takes only a handful of Zacharias Moussaouis to start a conflagration.

There you have a horribly perfect example of a culture that pushes out all healthy faith in anything greater than the State. The state, without any moorings in any sense of right and wrong or justice and dignity, interferes in what it shouldn’t — in the Market, in the Church, in the Neighborhood — and neglects it proper duties. When a government does not protect the innocent and punish the guilty, it will eventually harbor within its jurisdiction the seeds of its own downfall. Will France pull out of its materialist, socialist tailspin, or will we all be confronting a nuclear-tipped Islamic Republic of France sometime in the near future? Only time will tell. God have mercy on France, the rest of Europe, and all us poor puny mortals. He who has ears, let him hear.