November 04, 2005
So what happens next?
I'm predicting that the French will eventually lose patience with their Muslim underclasses and that there will be a bloodletting, and not a small one. If there's a more self-righteous culture in Europe, I don't know what it is. Americans may be egotistical about our culture, but we don't have laws on the book that refer to "Americanness" the way the French have legal proctections for "Frenchness". We also don't restrict the wearing of religious clothing the way the French do. I say again, America may have race problems, but we can't hold a candle to France.
And what's going to happen is that if the government can't restore order in the next few days, roving bands of Muslim youth are going to be met by roving bands of French youth, and it will be man to man in the arrondissements. And though the Muslim population in France is significant, they're still only 10% of the population. Only one in ten young Frenchmen needs to show up with a lead pipe for there to be a brawl worth writing home about.
This is gonna get messy. The Muslims don't seem to have any problems procuring firearms either. The French police have already used the term "civil war", and if the Islamic leadership gets involved, the term might not be hyperbolic.
The riots in France say all kinds of bad things about their covert racial intolerance and flawed economic structure. But I think that in conflicts of this nature the notorious French cultural arrogance may actually be an asset which Americans will some day have cause to envy. While the ban on religious clothing is highly questionable at best, it does indicate a willingness to establish general parameters of behavior for civic life which do not kowtow to the dicta of political correctness. In America, of course, every incident of Islamofascist violence is greeted by government leaders with equal parts "We will fight them on the beaches" Churchillian hyperbole and craven infomercials for the "Religion of Peace." The American socioeconomic structure may be accomodating enough for us to avoid street riots of this kind indefinitely. But if tensions escalate we are going to need the courage to declare certain cultural behaviors - systematic misogyny, much of sharia law, the suppression of religious free speech - intrinsically inferior. On that front, the French are light years ahead of us.
Posted by: Julian at November 5, 2005 12:05 PM