Paris heat not from Muslims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The riots, described as France’s worst since May 1968, have been linked to the threat of radical Islam. But both descriptions are misleading. The violent unrest is better compared to the riots that burnt down African-American ghettos across the United States in the 1960s. ‘It is nothing to do with radical Islam or even Muslims’, says Olivier Roy, research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and one of the world’s leading authorities on political Islam. He says that although many rioters are from Muslim backgrounds, ‘these guys are building a new idea of themselves based on American street culture. It’s a youth riot – they are protesting against the fact that they are supposed to be full French citizens and they are not’.”

James Burton in The Age, 8 November 2005

‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ – by Daniel Pipes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Pipes“The rioting by Muslim youth that began October 27 in France to calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ may be a turning point in European history….

“The French insurrection is by no means the first instance of a semi-organized Muslim insurgency in Europe – it was preceded days earlier by one riot in Birmingham, England and was accompanied by another in Århus, Denmark. France itself has a history of Muslim violence going back to 1979. What is different in the current round is its duration, magnitude, planning, and ferocity.

“The French press delicately refers to the ‘urban violence’ and presents the rioters as victims of the system. Mainstream media deny that it has to do with Islam and ignore the permeating Islamist ideology, with its vicious anti-French attitudes and its raw ambition to dominate the country and replace its civilization with Islam’s.

“Indigenous Muslims of northwestern Europe have in the past year deployed three distinct forms of jihad: the crude variety deployed in Britain, killing random passengers moving around London; the targeted variety in the Netherlands, where individual political and cultural leaders are singled out, threatened, and in some cases attacked; and now the more diffuse violence in France, less specifically murderous but also politically less dismissible.”

Daniel Pipes in the New York Sun, 8 November 2005

Scholar warns against putting Islamic spin on French riots

Posted on by Bob Pitt

From his current vantage point at Oxford University, Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan cautions against putting an Islamic spin to the unrest that has swept France’s downtrodden surburbs.

In an interview with AFP, Ramadan said the French authorities will need to embrace a more sophisticated approach if they want to respond effectively to the rioting that has run for a dozen nights straight.

“In all that is happening, there are of course groups who are in it for pure vandalism, for wild violence,” said the scholar, named by Time magazine as one of the leading thinkers of the 21st century but barred from the United States.

“But the phenomenon doesn’t stop there,” he added, citing “objective events” involving the relationship between those living in the grim suburban housing projects and French society as a whole.

“People (in the suburbs) have the impression that they count for nothing, that they can be looked down upon and insulted in any way.”

He added: “We’re in the process of losing a footing in the suburbs. Even so-called Muslim associations are more and more disconnected. The fracture is profound… We are seeing an Americanisation in terms of violence.”

“Above all, one must not Islamisize the question of the suburbs,” Ramadan stressed. “The question that France must answer is absolutely not a question of religion.”

Asked where the roots of the malaise lie, Ramadan said the entire political class in France has been “blind” to what has been happening in the suburbs, with their unemployed youth of Arab and African origin and bleak high-rises.

“There’s an obsession about a religious divide, but no one sees the socio-economic divide in France, with places in the process of becoming ghettos with the suburbs on one side, the better-off areas on the other.”

“There must be a struggle against this institutionalised racism. There are second-class citizens in France. That is the reality.”

AFP, 8 November 2005

California synagogue that hosted Islamophobe urged to invite Muslim speaker

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) today urged a Los Angeles synagogue that recently hosted the operator of a virulently anti-Muslim website to invite a Muslim representative who can offer a balancing perspective on Islam.

CAIR-LA has learned that Robert Spencer, who operates the “Jihad Watch” Internet hate site, spoke at Temple Shalom for the Arts during a Yom Kippur event. Spencer’s website is notorious for its depiction of Islam as an inherently violent faith that is a threat to world peace.

CAIR news release, 8 November 2005

‘Muslim groups may gain strength from French riots’ WSJ warns

Posted on by Bob Pitt

FireThe right-wing myth that the unrest in France is the result of an “Islamic uprising” has been rather undermined by the observable reality that French Muslim organisations have all intervened to oppose rioting. So some “Islamic conspiracy” theorists have found it necessary to shift their ground. Now, it seems, the real danger lies in the fact that Muslim organisations have intervened at all:

“These groups don’t preach violence, but they do advocate something that is troubling Europe’s secular democracies: that Muslims should identify themselves with their religion rather than as citizens. Effectively, they are promoting a separate society within society and that brand of Islamist philosophy is seeping into many parts of Western Europe. Countries from France and Germany to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands haven’t succeeded in integrating their Muslim minorities – and Islamic organizations have carefully positioned themselves to fill the breach.

“The riots ‘are a blessing for them because it gives them the role of intermediary’, says Gilles Kepel, a scholar who has studied and written extensively about the rise of Islam in France. That, in turn, puts them in a stronger position ‘to force concessions from the state’, such as demanding a repeal of the law France passed last year banning headscarves from public schools, he says.”

Wall Street Journal, 7 November 2005

Robert Spencer, though, has carefully considered the evidence and, on balance, prefers to stick with the view that it’s probably the result of a carefully prepared jihadist plan.

Front Page Magazine, 8 November 2005

Blame mass immigration and cultural diverity – Leo McKinstry

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“France’s experiences are hardly unique. Throughout western Europe, societies are scarred by tension. In the past week, there have been Muslim-led riots in Denmark, while in Holland the assassination of film-maker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fundamentalist last year left a legacy of racial divisions. Britain is still struggling to cope with the fact that we have home-grown Islamic terrorists in our midst….

“The growing strife points to a comprehensive failure in social and immigration policies. France and Britain should be enjoying the stability brought by decades of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Instead, we are living in the shadow of fear because of our rulers’ attachment to the twin dogmas of mass immigration and cultural diversity. Without giving us any say, they have imported wholesale the problems of the Third World – from corruption to superstition, from tribalism to misogyny – into advanced, democratic, Christian cultures. In large swathes of urban Britain and France, the indigenous people can feel like aliens…. Through our welfare systems, taxpayers of Britain and France are subsidising idleness among those who appear to despise Christian civilisation.

“With lies, twisted ideology and institutional capacity for self-loathing, the political establishment has erected this vast edifice of cultural diversity but it is the ordinary people of Europe who have to live with bombs on our trains and burnt-out cars on our streets.”

Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express, 7 November 2005

Writers like McKinstry and Melanie Phillips almost succeed in making the BNP sound moderate.

‘Why France is burning’ – Melanie Phillips explains

Posted on by Bob Pitt

French riot police (4)“Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-minded Interior Minister, has been blamed for inflaming the situation by his uncompromising language. French policy in general has been blamed for herding poor Arabs into suburban ghettoes where they have been left to fester in high unemployment and poverty. The disturbances are thus being portrayed as race riots caused by official discrimination and insensitivity.

“But this is a gross misreading of the situation. It is far more profound and intractable. What we are seeing is, in effect, a French intifada: an uprising by French Muslims against the state….

“M. Sarkozy and the police are determined to take back the streets. The Muslims are equally determined to keep territory they feel they have conquered from the French state…. For more than twenty years France’s Muslim areas have been out of control. Indeed, they only turned into Muslim ghettoes in the first place because Muslim violence and harassment forced everyone else out…. The fact is that French Muslims want to be segregated. The ghettoes are a way of ensuring a separate Islamic existence without having to assimilate into French society….

“This is all bound up with the erosion of national identities across Europe. This has affected even France, once a ferocious proponent of French culture which was imposed through a centralised schools system, a strong police force and national military service…. Banning the hijab (Islamic headscarf) in schools represented a flickering of the old national certainty as France sniffed the danger that had arisen in its midst. But it was too little, and maybe too late.

“Even now Britain, France and the rest of Europe are still in varying stages of denial over Muslim unrest. Reluctant even to admit that religion is central to this phenomenon, they look instead for ways to blame themselves and use the insult of ‘Islamophobia’ to shut down debate. The warning for us from the disturbing events in France could not be clearer. We must end the ruinous doctrine of multiculturalism and reassert British identity….”

Mad Mel rants on.

Daily Mail, 7 November 2005

For a contrary view – which is based on interviews with the youth involved in the disturbances, as distinct from Phillips generating Islamophobic fantasies out of her own head – see Molly Moore’s piece in the Washington Post, 6 November 2005

Police investigate claim that officer threw Qur’an into rubbish bin

Posted on by Bob Pitt

An investigation is under way into claims by a British Muslim man that a police officer desecrated his Qur’an by throwing it into a rubbish bin while arresting him, the Guardian has learned.

The incident is alleged to have happened last Monday in south London and the man also alleges he was assaulted while being detained at his home.

The allegation comes from Mohamed Osman, 29, who says the officer said “fuck you and your Qur’an” before grabbing the holy book and his prayer mat from him. The constable is then alleged to have thrown them into a nearby bin.

Guardian, 7 November 2005

‘Muslims are an ethnic group’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

So Alasdair Palmer claims in the Spectator, 5 November 2005

He refers to the 1983 Mandla vs Dowell Lee case, which provides the basis for Sikhs being recognised as an ethnic group entitled to protection against racial hatred under the 1986 Public Order Act. Palmer declares that on the basis of the same legal ruling “the existing legislation covers Muslims in exactly the same way that it covers Christians, Jews and Sikhs”, so the government’s argument that the racial hatred laws protect members of mono-ethnic faith groups but not those of multi-ethnic faiths is “entirely spurious”.

For the reasons why Muslims are not covered by the law against incitement to racial hatred, see here. Or for Lord Fraser’s ruling in Mandla vs Dowell Lee see here. It will be noted that, among Fraser’s criteria for qualification as a distinct ethnic group, Muslims lack a common geographical origin, descent from a small number of common ancestors or a common language.

Update:  See the reply by Sher Khan of the MCB in the Spectator, 12 November 2005

‘French violence is a warning to Europe’ fascists claim

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“It is becoming increasingly obvious to all indigenous Europeans that the multi-cultural experiment, forced upon almost every western European country in the past 40 years has well and truly failed, and all those European nations which contain a potential fifth-column of inassimilable Muslim and African immigrants, from the UK to Italy, Spain to Sweden must question just how those in charge of law enforcement are today prepared to deal with a similar situation across towns and cities in their respective nations.”

BNP news article, 6 November 2005