The ongoing Civil War in Europe – Muslims want autonomous territory, not better integration

From the desk of The Brussels Journal, 10.2006

Radical Muslims in several of France’s local communities are waging an undeclared “intifada” against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day. As the interior ministry said that nearly 2, 500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were “in a state of civil war” with Muslims in the most depressed “banlieue” estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin.

It said the situation was so grave that it had asked the government to provide police with armoured cars to protect officers in the estates, which are becoming no-go zones. The number of attacks has risen by a third in two years. Police representatives told the newspaper Le Figaro that the “taboo” of attacking officers on patrol has been broken [also in the Netherlands].

[...] [Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the Action Police trade union, ] said yesterday: “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails. You no longer see two or three youths confronting police, you see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their ‘comrades’ free when they are arrested.”

[...] However, Gerard Demarcq, of the largest police unions, Alliance, dismissed talk of an “intifada” as representing the views of only a minority. Mr Demarcq said that the increased attacks on officers were proof that the policy of “retaking territory” from criminal gangs was working.

A quote from Paul Belien at The Brussels Journal, 6 November 2005:

To understand what is going on one cannot look at today’s events from a Western perspective. One has to think like the “youths” in order to understand them. Not imagine oneself in their shoes, but imagine their minds in one’s own head. The important question is: how do these insurgents perceive their relationship with society in France?

Unlike their fathers, who came to France from Muslim countries, accepting that, whilst remaining Muslims themselves, they had come to live in a non-Muslim country, the rioters see France as their country. They were born here. This land is their land. And since they are Muslims, this land, or at least a part of it, is Muslim as well. [...] West Europeans cannot blame the Muslim “youths” for looking at the world the way they do. Europe willingly opened the door to the Muslims, not just by allowing large-scale immigration on an unprecedented level, but also by encouraging the newcomers to retain their culture.

[...] Those media that tell us that the rioting “youths” want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs. The violence in France is in no way comparable with that of the blacks in the U.S. in the 1960s. The Paris correspondent of The New York Times who writes that this a “variant of the same problem” is either lying or does not know what he is talking about. The violence in France is of the type one finds when one group wants to assert its authority and drive the others out of its territory. [...] The Muslims resent the outsiders paternalising them and interfering with their way of life in the suburbs of all Western Europe’s major cities. Their message is: get out of our way, get out of our territory, and: you act like you think you’re the boss but we’ll show you who really is.

A quote from Paul Belien in The American Conservative, 5 December 2005:

It is easy to understand why the “youths” in the suburbs turned so violent when [French Interior Minister] Sarkozy tried to establish law and order there. The “youths” have held sway there, unchallenged, for decades. If they allow the French authorities to reassert their authority, they lose their own power base. Unlike the Western intellectuals, they realise that everything boils down to the question of who wields power over a specific territory. The police and the gangs fight over whose laws will apply in the neighbourhood: the laws of the French Republic or the laws of Eurabia.

[...] Sarkozy, who deployed only policemen in his war, was unable to prevail because he did not have the weapons to win a territorial conflict. After two days of rioting, police officers warned that they did not have the means to win what they (correctly) described as a “civil war.” [...] The poor natives who live in the immigrants’ neighbourhoods know better, however. They know that the generals of Eurabia, the leaders of the “youths, ” drive BMWs and Mercedes (which no-one dares to set alight), and that they use mobile phones and PCs to instruct their highly mobile troops. The war in France is not about social injustice, but about territory.