The French Intifada

You probably remember the 'riots' from last summer in France. The BBC gives a timeline of the riots and is the source of the image to the right. There were thousands of cars burned and lots of rocks thrown. But they were no big deal, right? Burning cars is just a rite of passage for youth. Who hasn't thrown a Molotov cocktail or two at parked cars in their neighborhood. These 'riots' were just a sowing of the oats, as it were, for these french youths. These youths are obviously just dissatisfied with the unemployment rates. Just a rebellion of the underclass. According to the media, the spark that set off the inferno was the accidental electrocution of 2 'youths' that were running from police.

Let's get back to reality. The amount of violence was amazing. The number of cars burned per day for the first 11 days of the riots last fall are discussed here, including this chart.


That is a lot of cars! The violence lasted about a month in October and November of 2005. You haven't heard much about any violence since then, so it's easy to assume that things have died down. They haven't.

An average of 112 cars per day have been burned this year in France. Burning cars has become passe, so they have moved on to burning buses (and people). And this from Forbes: The police are being ambushed.

On a routine call, three unwitting police officers fell into a trap. A car darted out to block their path, and dozens of hooded youths surged out of the darkness to attack them with stones, bats and tear gas before fleeing. One officer was hospitalized, and no arrests made.

The recent ambush was emblematic of what some officers say has become a near-perpetual and increasingly violent conflict between police and gangs in tough, largely immigrant French neighborhoods that were the scene of a three-week paroxysm of rioting last year.

One small police union claims officers are facing a "permanent intifada." Police injuries have risen in the year since the wave of violence.

National police reported 2,458 cases of violence against officers in the first six months of the year, on pace to top the 4,246 cases recorded for all of 2005 and the 3,842 in 2004. Firefighters and rescue workers have also been targeted - and some now receive police escorts in such areas.

On Sunday, a band of about 30 youths, some wearing masks, forced passengers out of a bus in a southern Paris suburb in broad daylight Sunday, set it on fire, then stoned firefighters who came to the rescue, police said. No one was injured. Two people were arrested, one of them a 13-year-old, according to LCI television.

It doesn't seem that the violence has ended.

Let's talk about what is really going on in France. It is serious and it has implications for the rest of Europe (which has similar policies and problems). These are also important lessons for the US to learn from France. (I finally found something where I agree that we can learn from France. This, and nuclear power policy, but that's another post.)

I will be referring often to this article by Michel Gurfinkel in the Weekly Standard. Any unreferenced quotations are from his article.

The problem boils down to this. The French government has allowed the formation of large, autonomous muslim-controlled zones throughout France. There are a large number of these no-go zones, helpfully listed here by the French government. As an example, here is a map of one of the no-go zones where the government and police have abdicated control. This map is of a suburb of Calais, one of two suburbs of Calais on the list.


How could this have happened? First, large groups of muslim immigrants moved into the suburbs.

Ethnic criminal gangs took over, as often happens under such circumstances: They forced the last native French or European inhabitants out, and made it increasingly difficult for the police to enter and monitor the projects. Later, fundamentalist Islamic brotherhoods asserted themselves in the projects, or cités, as they are called.

The government was unwilling to 'oppress' the immigrants by reasserting control over their country. The apparent approach was to ignore the immigrants and hope that nothing bad would happen. In fact, the police were told to stay out of the muslim enclaves.

One police source confided to Le Monde that security forces were actually "discouraged" from making incursions into those neighborhoods, except on rare occasions. The source went on: "It is a terrible mistake. Since we avoid going inside, where they are, they attack us outside, where we are."

The fact that immigrants tend to settle together in small communities is not unusual. We still have 'chinatowns' and 'little italies' in many cities in the US. The difference here is a dangerous dynamic that has developed between criminal gangs and radical muslims. These two groups have formed a codependent partnership. The criminals have agreed to limit the crime within the muslim areas, and the extremists have agreed to offer a safe haven for the criminals.

A complex relationship seems to have arisen between these two power centers. On the one hand, the fundamentalists intended to protect the immigrant community against everything the gangs stood for: drugs, alcohol, sexual promiscuity, easy money from crime. On the other hand, they derived benefits from the ethnic enclave status the gangs had secured. A tacit or not so tacit agreement was reached: The brotherhood would ignore, and at times condone as "holy war," the activities of the gangs outside the neighborhood; the gangs would help the brotherhoods to impose Islamic law on the inside.

There was a further division of labor: When the gangs would engage in inordinate violence against the police or non-Muslim communities, the brotherhoods would act as "wise men" available to mediate between the government and the gangs and to help restore law and order--on their own terms.

This partnership does not look kindly on any attempt by the French government to reestablish any control over 'little Algeria'.

According to many experts, this is precisely what happened last year, when the conservative minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, talked of "thoroughly cleansing" ("passer au Kärcher") the eight hundred or so no-go zones that had cropped up all over urban France. Neither the gangs nor the fundamentalists liked that prospect. The gangs masterminded unprecedented "youth riots"; the fundamentalists then restored civil peace, and won as a reward de facto pardon for most rioters, a "less provocative" police presence in the suburbs, i.e., no "cleansing," more privileges for Islam as "France's second and most quickly growing religion," and recognition for themselves as national leaders. As Michel Thooris put it in an interview with L'Est Républicain>, an influential newspaper in eastern France: "Security is a state prerogative. Inasmuch as the national police fail to provide it, the imams are ready to usurp it." The riots last year clearly ended as a victory for both the gangs and the fundamentalist imams.

The French are not blind to what is happening and many are alarmed. The upcoming presidential election may offer a change from the current policies. Nicalos Sarkozy(mentioned above) is the conservative candidate and Segolene Royal as the Socialist's choice. Both these candidates are running on a law-and-order platform. Hopefully the winner will be able to face up to the problems and find some solutions.

Europe, for all of it's current feel-good socialism, has a long history of violent fascism. Some sort of post-modern guilt has has kept those impulses in check for the last few decades. The continuing violence combined with the bleak prospects for integrating the muslim immigrants into modern European society could awaken the slumbering fascism. The masses still have an overwhelming majority over the muslim immigrant populations. UPDATE: I just found an article about this topic.

And what can we learn from the situation in France? I believe that this situation is a microcosm of what is happening today in the middle east. I see many parallels. Do you agree? What does this mean about our presence there? I'm not going to pretend to know all the answers, but I think we can learn from France that ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away will only make it worse.