What the uprising generation wants
By Charles Krauthammer
The gendarmes have weapons. The kids they face in the street have mostly stones and Molotov cocktails. It is a mismatch. But it’s the cops who are the heavy underdogs – the cops and the France that the cops alone represent in those burning godforsaken ghettos where most Frenchmen dare not go.
On the one side are the protester-arsonists, many if not most of them Muslim, whom the Interior Minister called racaille (rabble) – young, restless, violent, vibrant, angry, jobless, envious and fecund. And on the other side is an aged and exhausted civilization, the hollowed-out core of European Christendom, static, aging, contented, coddled, passive and literally without faith. Who would you think will win in the end?
If you needed a snapshot of the balance of forces in this civilizational struggle taking place in France, consider only the incomprehension and inertness of the official French response. The President didn’t say a word for 10 days. The state of emergency wasn’t declared until Day 13. Meanwhile, the Interior Minister and Prime Minister offered dueling slogans and empty promises, with an eye more on their upcoming presidential contest than on the fire this time.
The best way to know the future is to look at simple demographics. There are an estimated 5 million Muslims in France. Of course, no one knows for sure, not just because of the uncounted illegal immigrants but because in France the government is prohibited by law from even asking about ethnicity and religion. It is not surprising that you don’t deal with a problem whose very contours you refuse to see or even inquire about.
France thus is approaching 10% Muslim. But things do not stand still. Even if there were no further immigration, which is a pipe dream, birth rates alone will soon drastically alter the balance. Muslims have the highest birth rate – three times the rate of non-Muslims – of any demographic group in Europe. The most common name for a newborn in neighboring Brussels is Mohammed. Childbearing rates among non-Muslim Frenchmen are well below replacement levels. The old French, like the rest of Europe, are literally disappearing.
“With current trends,” Professor Bernard Lewis has said, “Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century.” The future? “Europe will be part of the Arab west, of the Maghreb [Muslim northwest Africa].” Today’s rioting youth are just a bit ahead of their time in claiming their upcoming patrimony.
“… there have been whole legions of pundits wheeled out to offer an explanation. It’s deprivation, a lack of integration, poverty, unemployment, incipient French racism and so on. But the dreaded ‘M’ word has scarcely been mentioned at all; these were ‘young’ rioters or sometimes ‘immigrant’ rioters – they were never Muslim rioters. Islam was almost never mentioned … the suspicion persists that it is the North Africans who do not wish for integration – much as they might whine about a lack of employment opportunities – even more than the indigenous French…. It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam which gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d’être.”
“Analysts and commentators often seek to find evidence to support their well-established ideas in any given event…. But little compares with the extraordinary way in which the disturbances of the last two weeks have been hijacked by those who appear set on either finding, or creating, a ‘clash of civilisations’ between Islam and the West. Take one particularly egregious example. Melanie Phillips, writing in the Daily Mail, described the riots in France as ‘a French intifada, an uprising by French Muslims against the state’.”
Doha-based religious scholar Dr Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi yesterday expressed his sorrow over the riots in Paris suburbs and other French cities having Muslim and African communities.
“The rioting by Muslim youth that began October 27 in France to calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ may be a turning point in European history….