This is the cover to the current issue of the Spectator, for which editor Boris Johnson has commissioned several articles responding to the conflict in the French banlieues. (“Eurabia” refers to the demented “Muslim takeover” conspiracy theory invented by Bat Ye’or – a sort of present-day Islamophobic equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.)
Rod Liddle (“The crescent of fear“) writes: “… 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.”
Mark Steyn (“It’s the demography, stupid“) concedes that all Muslims are not the same: “… it’s true there are Muslims and there are Muslims: some blow up Tube trains and some rampage through French streets and some claim Mossad’s put something in the chewing gum to make Arab men susceptible to the seduction techniques of Jewesses. Some kill Dutch film-makers and some complain about Piglet coffee mugs on co-workers’ desks, and millions of Muslims don’t do any of the above but apparently don’t feel strongly enough about them to say a word in protest. And it’s also true that it’s better to have your Peugeot torched than to be blown apart on the Piccadilly Line. But what all these techniques – and those of lobby groups who offer themselves as interlocutors between bewildered European elites and ‘moderate’ Muslims – have in common is that they advance the Islamification of Europe.”
Right-wing Christian evangelist Patrick Sookhdeo (who was given a platform by Johnson earlier this year to denounce “The myth of moderate Islam“) poses the question “Will London burn too?” He thinks it likely: “A book published in 1980 by the Islamic Council of Europe gives instructions for how Muslim minorities are to work towards achieving domination of European countries through a policy of concentration in geographical areas.”
“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.