Paris burning - day eight

11-05-05: I think this headline says it all:

MSNBC: France Holds Talks Over Continuing Riots

Ah, yes, what intellectuals do best --  sit around a big table, argue about how many boxes of tissue should be on the tabletop, and try to impress each other with how smart they are.  Oh, and concerned, too.  Meanwhile, Paris burns.

What to do?  Send in the police, arrest the rioters, stop the looting, put out the fires.  Some people will die, but those who die are responsible for putting themselves in the middle of a riot.  Sensible people will stay far, far away.  Put the rioters in jail for a year or two, or re-instate France's manditory military service policy and make them serve a two year hitch in the military.  And make them learn French.  Si vous ne parlez pas français, vous ne pouvez pas habiter en France.

Put an end to the isolated communities around Paris.  Again, make French manditory.  If people don't want to learn French, show them to the border.  This is probably not a bad idea anyway, since France's economy already can't provide jobs for the current number of immigrants in France.  If France couldn't support them, they shouldn't have let them into the country in the first place.  It sounds mean, I know, but what we have now, isolated communities of non-French speaking, unemployed Muslim immigrants, is much worse.

But I suppose it is much easier to talk than to act.

______________________________

(Here's a link to my previous post on the Paris riots, and a follow-up post from Nov. 7)

______________________________

"I love Paris in the springtime
I love Paris in the fall..."

... but apparently Muslim immigrants living in the suburbs of France's capital of five million don't exactly share Cole Porter's sentiments.

Today is the eighth day of riots in the city that, over the last four years, has become the symbol for elite Europe's "we know better than you do" attitude.  So what have the enlightened, intellectual, peace-loving people of Paris done to deserve this?

To start with, they have allowed Muslim immigrants from Africa to flood their city by the hundreds of thousands during the last decade.  Let me be clear -- I don't believe that Islam itself is the root of the problem, nor do I believe that immigration alone is to blame.

What has happened to Paris is a massive influx, over a very short period of time, of people whose culture, religion, and language are foreign to Europe.  The French have made no effort to assimilate these people, and the immigrants have in turn willfully (or perhaps deliberately) dropped out of native French life.  They live in crowded, Soviet-style high-rise tenement slums, they do not speak French and generally do not interact with French people, and their communities are plagued with unemployment in the 20% - 30% range.  This of course leads to shiftlessness, particularly among young males.   And it creates a poisonous "us vs. them" attitude among the isolated Muslim population, with respect to the rest of France.

Last month I wrote:

The dysfunctional and destructive habits of poor inner city blacks have been turned into high-dollar pop culture by the film and record industries.  They promote a lifestyle of gangs, sexual promiscuity, drugs, and broken families that is complete with its own language, clothing, and music.  A handful have gotten rich off the misery of millions.  Why doesn't the black leadership recognize this and work to stop it?

Cultural isolation also foments racism because it limits meaningful contact between blacks and whites.  The poor blacks living in the inner city rarely ever come in physical contact with whites, with the exception of interventions by white police officers, social workers, and the judicial system.  This only serves to perpetuate the stereotypes of whites as an evil menace whose systems serve only to punish and humiliate blacks.  Why doesn't the black leadership recognize this and work to integrate whites into black society in a meaningful way?

These are the common traits found in virtually every situation that ends in rioting.  Yet we foolishly try to find single "root causes" for riots -- the Rodney King verdict, or the presence of a white supremacist group, or FEMA, or the tragic death of two Muslim youths -- and in the US, blame is usually handed out solely on the basis of politics, with racial agitators laying blame on whites or Republicans in a blatant attempt to score political points.

But let's return to France for a moment.  How remarkable is it that an 'enlightened' nation of intellectual socialists who have proudly left behind the 'repression' of Christianity has exactly the same problems with cultural isolation, high unemployment, shiftlessness, and disparity in their urban slums as the US!   It is also interesting that generational poverty, which so often plagues poor minorities in the US, is probably not a factor in the Paris riots.    

So what are the French doing about this?  Apparently what they do best -- reminding people about laws and civility and how to treat one another nicely, promising to crack down on crime and violence, and then ordering their law enforcement basically to sit back and do nothing, perhaps in the vain hope that if they just ignore the problem long enough it will go away.  Or maybe they are hoping that if they can show the Muslims how much they are loved and tolerated by the government of France, the Muslims will in turn repay those sentiments with peace and goodwill.  Lord knows how dangerous it would be to 'destabilize' the situation any further.

The bottom line to this story, I believe, is that the French, and perhaps Europeans in general, have done a pitiful job of dealing directly with the most troubling aspects of poverty and immigration. Last week Peggy Noonan noted a troubling bifurcation between cultural elites -- policy wonks, professors, authors, journalists, etc. -- and the rest of us:

I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

What a stark contrast to the teachings of Christianity.  Read the words of the Apostle Paul:

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. ⁴Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.  ⁵Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
⁶Who, being in very nature God,
      did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
⁷but made himself nothing,
      taking the very nature of a servant,
      being made in human likeness.
⁸And being found in appearance as a man,
      he humbled himself
      and became obedient to death—
         even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:3-8, NIV)

I don't want to gloat -- we in the US have failed in our efforts to address many of these same problems.  But what I want to emphasize is that the secularists of Europe have done no better.  Or maybe what I'm trying to say is that the bloated, impersonal, and sterile bureaucracies that mankind creates to deal with suffering, perhaps because individuals aren't willing to soil their own hands, are doomed to fail.

It is only when people decide to properly confront evil and suffering, by sacrificing what is 'theirs' and giving of themselves in order to enrich the lives of others, that humanity makes real progress.  And that spirit is directly from the heart of Christianity, not the Humanist Manifesto.  That is a truth that post-Christian Europe needs to learn before it is too late.

_____________________________________

Today's piece in the New York Post by Amir Taheri is a must-read.

Michelle Malkin notes that mainstream news outlets have been deliberately downplaying the fact that the Paris rioters are Muslim immigrants.  As always, she has a good blogging roundup.

LaShawn Barber wonders if the prohibitions of personal freedom inherent in radical Islam are fueling the riots.  Double Toothpicks responds. (LaShawn has a good roundup of news sources and comments.)

TelChai Nation is also concerned about the absence of "Muslim" and "Islamic" from descriptions of the Paris rioters.  He also has a good blog roundup.

Here's the latest post from Gateway Pundit.

Weapons of Mass Destruction notes:

The French must first stop the riots and restore order to the affected areas.  Assuming that can be accomplished, the government and people of France (Muslim and non-Muslim) will need to hold a long overdue discussion about life, opportunity, and citizenship in France.  I do not envy them in the least - they are way behind and the clock is ticking.

And this:

There has been a lot written about the issue of immigrant assimilation in France and Germany as opposed to the US. In both Germany and France, citizenship is a much more fixed concept tied to a particular group - German or French. You are a citizen because you live there and were born there as were your ancestors. People can live in Germany (Jews for example) for generations and still not be considered by many as German...

Thus, an immigrant can live the majority of his or her life in such a country and never belong.  It matters not whether the person is first generation, second generation, or third generation.  By virtue of ancestry, he or she will always be an outsider.

He has another very good blogger roundup.  Right now, blogs are by far the best source for coverage and commentary on this story.

On a frightening note, Captain Ed observes:

As the Nazis started falling back in France, Hitler devised an insane plan to burn Paris to the ground before any possible withdrawal. He put General von Choltitz in charge of the city, who stalled Hitler for as long as possible before surrendering the city intact to invading Free French forces.

... The French still dither when they should act instead, sending the message even more clearly that they will not act in their own defense. The Muslim Uprising will soon become an al-Qaeda rallying point; not an intifada, as some have surmised, but an actual military front in AQ's war on the West. They intend to turn the sink estates into holy land and ensure that their bloody rule cannot be dislodged.  If the French do not act quickly, they may soon find out what happens when fascists without the humanity of a von Choltitz will do to their beloved Paris once they have enough power.

My blogging friend Stephen Adams doesn't have a lot of kind things to say about France.

B Relevant excerpts Hugh Hewitt's Thursday night radio interview with the great Mark Steyn, who notes:

... the one advantage North Americans have is that Europe is ahead of you in the line. And you have to learn what's happening. You have to confront honestly what's happening with these disaffected Muslim populations in Europe. I mean, most of the September 11th bombers, the Millennium bomber, a lot of these people all passed through various parts of the European welfare state. It's relevant to U.S. security, too.