‘Violent Muslim youth riot for seventh day in Paris’

Posted on November 3, 2005 by Bob Pitt

The link is to Fox News but the headline is all Front Page Magazine’s own.

Front Page Magazine, 3 November 2005

Robert Spencer also supplies his own headline – “French Muslims riot for seventh night running” – to a Reuters report entitled “French youths riot for seventh night running”. He explains: “The difference between the Reuters headline and mine epitomizes the difficulty the French have in facing the real dimensions of this problem. For it is ultimately not a problem of disaffected youth who just need jobs and money, but of youth who consider the French government a foreign power, and one that ultimately must be replaced by a very different kind of government.” It’s suprising Robert doesn’t propose a headline reading: “Muslim rioters demand restoration of the Caliphate.”

Jihad Watch, 3 November 2005

And over at the BNP website we are told that “the scale of the violence by Muslim gangs is unprecedented and highlights the hatred and contempt for western society by the rioters”. This “demonstrates the folly of allowing a flood of inassimilable migrants into the heart of western cities”. In other words, an almost identical analysis to Robert Spencer’s.

BNP news article, 2 November 2005

For an alternative view see BBC News, 2 November 2005

Ghettos shackle French Muslims

Posted on October 31, 2005 by Bob Pitt

Rioting by youths in a Paris suburb has highlighted the discontent among sections of France’s immigrant population. The BBC News website’s Henri Astier explores the sense of alienation felt by many French Muslims.

BBC News, 31 October 2005

A useful corrective to the claim that French secularism, in contrast to British multiculturalism, counters segregation and treats members of minority communities as equal citizens.

Homa Arjomand, contre la charia au Canada

Posted on October 22, 2005 by Bob Pitt

Another boost in the liberal press for the Worker Communist Party of Iran, this time for Homa Arjomand, fresh from her successful campaign to whip up Islamophobia in Canada, in response to the supposed threat of “Sharia courts” in Ontario.

Le Monde, 21 October 2005

French Muslim servicemen discriminated against: report

Posted on September 24, 2005 by Bob Pitt

Muslims serving in the French army are routinely mocked at, discriminated against and sometimes denied their religious rights, according to a new report.

The report, entitled French Servicemen of Immigrant Origin, found that racist jokes and derogatory remarks are often played on Muslims inside the military establishment, Le Figaro reported on Friday, September 24.

French soldiers make fun of their Muslim peers by trying to mimic their native accent when speaking in French, according to the report, undertaken by the independent French Institute of International Relations (IFRI).

Though Muslim servicemen are allowed halal meals and flexible working hours during the holy fasting month of Ramadan, this is not the custom inside the army. It is done randomly and not systematic as many Muslim servicemen do not get their halal meals for days, said the report.

The military top brass are increasingly opposed to allow Muslim servicemen to practice their religion, it added.

Islam Online, 24 September 2005

Why multiculturalism has failed Britain (according to Gilles Kepel)

Posted on August 22, 2005 by Bob Pitt

Gilles Kepel “France, ridiculed when Bernard Stasi and his commission first recommended a ban on all religious symbols in schools, has since excited the interest of those who note that this is, nevertheless, the country with the largest number of Muslims, with a population far greater than either Germany or the UK. The social control, they also remark, exerted by the combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy has led – according to the inverse terms of multiculturalism – to France being spared from terror attacks for the past decade.”

Gilles Kepel in the Independent, 22 August 2005.

Note the use of “the past decade” as the period of comparison. This has presumably been chosen so as to exclude the Paris Metro and other bombings of 1995. The “combined results of secularism, conscious integration and a preventative security policy” didn’t seem to have much effect then, did they? At that time, as I recall, the London Underground was, by contrast, spared any terrorist attacks by Islamist extremists, despite Britain’s commitment to multiculturalism.

Is it stating the obvious to point out that in both cases the bombings were provoked by the foreign policy of the country under attack – in 1995 by French support for the Algerian government’s brutal suppression of the FIS (which had been about to win a democratic election) and in 2005 by Blair’s participation in the bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq?

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‘Pakistanophobia’ spiralling in France

Posted on August 14, 2005 by Bob Pitt

The July 7 London attacks perpetrated by four British Muslims, including three of Pakistani origin, are having domino effects on the Pakistani minority in France, sparking an unprecedented Pakistanophobia.

“This close media and security scrutiny is really playing on the nerves of the Pakistanis in France,” Abdel Rahman Quraishi, the chairman of the Federation of Pakistani Organizations in France , told IslamOnline.net.

“A right-wing newspaper, for instance, launched a ferocious campaign against Pakistanis in France and placed them in one basket, calling them a ‘cause for concern.’”

Quraishi, who is also the imam of the main Pakistani mosque in Saint Denis, northern Paris , said the federation is planning to take legal action against the newspaper.

“A delegation representing the Pakistani minority went to the British embassy in Paris immediately after the attacks and offered heartfelt condolences,” he recalled.

Islam Online, 14 August 2005

‘Muslims are not cockroaches’

Posted on August 11, 2005 by Bob Pitt

It may like to call itself proudly the “birthplace of human rights”, but when it comes to dealing with Islamist clerics, France is rarely reluctant to set such scruples aside.

The country waited only days after the London bombings before summarily expelling its first two radical preachers. It has since sent two more packing and plans to deport a total of some two dozen by the end of this month.

Underlining a longstanding difference in approach between London and Paris, an interior ministry official said France had “no problem whatsoever” in deporting anyone accused of inflaming anti-western feeling – even if they had French citizenship and were formally recognised as preachers by the Muslim community.

The planned arrests and expulsions follow repeated statements by the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, since the July 7 London attacks that France “must and will act against radical preachers capable of influencing the youngest and most weak-minded”.

Fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, that in Britain have, until very recently, protected the controversial clerics, count for precious little in France when the speech concerned is considered an incitement to hatred or violence.

Guardian, 11 August 2005

‘When will you Brits wake up?’ French journalist asks

Posted on July 29, 2005 by Bob Pitt

“In the ten years I have lived in London, I often wondered when it would happen. I don’t mean when British-born suicide bombers would blow themselves up, killing dozens of their fellow citizens – I would never have thought that possible – but rather, when British multiculturalism would finally show its inherent weaknesses.

“France and Britain have always had opposite views and policies about foreigners and their integration into society. British people often fail to understand the underlying principles of the French approach, prefering to brand it as intolerance, or even blatant racism – as, for example in the recent headscarf ban.”

Agnes Poirier of the French “leftist” newspaper Libération – who goes on to argue that “The message to Muslims has been, in effect, that it is all right for them to be a separate country-within-a-country” – joins the right-wing campaign to blame the London bombings on multiculturalism.

Evening Standard, 29 July 2005

Weak Brits, tough French

Posted on July 13, 2005 by Bob Pitt

“The British have seemingly lost interest in their heritage while the French hold on to theirs: As the British ban fox hunting, the French ban hijabs. The former embrace multiculturalism, the latter retain a pride in their historic culture. This contrast in matters of identity makes Britain the Western country most vulnerable to the ravages of radical Islam whereas France, for all its political failings, has held onto a sense of self that may yet see it through.”

Daniel Pipes offers a comparative analysis of British and French attitudes towards Islam.

New York Sun, 12 July 2005

Muslims in France: a ticking time bomb?

Posted on July 1, 2005 by Bob Pitt

ticking Jamie Glazov poses the question: “France’s Muslim population is exploding and fundamentalist Islam is gaining control over it. French society remains almost completely oblivious. Does this phenomenon entail a ticking time bomb? What consequences does it pose to the West?”

Unfortunately some of the answers in the ensuing discussion don’t meet with Glazov’s approval. One participant in the symposium, organised by Front Page Magazine, even goes so far as to express concern that Muslims in France would suffer from a racist backlash in the event of a French equivalent to the Van Gogh murder. Glazov explodes:

“… this interpretation implies a theme that gets my blood boiling. It reminds me of the lefties here in America who, after the 9/11 attacks, instead of being sympathetic to the victims and their families and angry at the perpetrators, and supporting revenge against those who committed the crimes and those who harboured them, instead were agonizing about how Arab and Muslim rights were now going to be violated….

“Sorry, but when I think of the problem of the growing presence of Muslims in France, the first thing that comes to my mind is the heart-breaking reality of forced marriages and honor killings being perpetrated on Arab-Muslim girls on French territory. I think of forced veiling. I think of the gang-rapes of Muslim and non-Muslim girls who are not veiled in Arab-Muslim ghettoes. I think of female genital mutilations. I think of the growing radical element that might perpetrate another 9/11 over there. I think about all we can possibly and hopefully do to crush these forces. Needless to say, that is what is on my mind, not sitting around worrying what will happen to someone else afterwards, someone that is not even a victim of the huge crime that is perpetrated….”