Why Paris is burning

Okay. You seem to be able to see the different sides of the issue and I accept your analysis and your experience. I admit that making this an entire Jihadi thing is presumptuous.

But considering what has been going on elsewhere in Europe and the world, we should not be quick to eliminate the global “buzz” of political Islam from the picture, and how it may effect the Muslim youth of today in terms of their view of the West, and how it can make their grievance against their secular governments more common and frequent. Many of them are certainly not “pious” and they drink beer, eat pork and so forth. But is being religiously Islamic and following religious law the only prerequisite for being influenced some way by the anti-Western sentiments coming from the political side of Islam?

Having said that, and assuming that the Muslim youth today are not that different from your experience a decade ago, I’ll be open to the notion that political Islam’s influence on the riots, direct or indirect, is trivial.

At any rate, since these subjects are no longer “taboo,” we should expect more objective analysis of the current events coming from the formal intelligencia, rather just pundits and bloggers. Pipes, on the other hand, is formally educated and well versed on the subject, and I think he tries to be objective. But a lot of people think otherwise because they believe that being “politically correct” is being objective.

 

i'm not french but looking at what is going on in France I think Mr. LePen is a happy camper. He'll win next election and fix the problem with muslim population in France. Than we may see Holland, Austria and Germany to follow his steps.
I guess this would be the worst option for muslim people in Europe. not all of them are burning cars and rioting.

 

I wonder if the rioting briefly ceases five times a day, when the 'youths' take their prayer break.

 

Pipes on CNBC right now!

 

I lived in Thailand for a few years. About 95% of the population are seriously Buddhist, however in their youth a fair proportion would be carousing,drinking and whoring- but still feel the Buddhist faith was their defining nature. I'd estimate about 10% of those "wild' ones would eventually take to serious study and pondering of the Buddhist scriptures and become pious and follow Buddhist principles without deviation. As it happens Buddhist principles revolve around non-harming and make one a valued addition to any society.

Comparing that with the rough youth of a Islamic background, who eventuallly takes to serious and pious study of the Koran and we might have a different result. If he takes the Koran to heart then he will have to find anyone who is not Islamic as being rather vile and indeed a potential enemy. Problems can escalate..

 

Ok read the article. He underlines the islamist ideology, "with its raw ambition to dominate the country". What I know as a fact is that most of the muslims in France either are fully assimilated or are willing to assimilate and can't manage. Please don't call this wishful thinking, it is true ! Again a minority of youths doesn't represent the whole muslim population. An islamic uprising would have involved all age groups-these riots involve 14-20 year olds.

Also the article talks about the declining Christian faith, but I'm not sure these youths are very religious either. They would have respected the fatwah if that were the case.

He's right about the way Sarkozy's comments were interpreted. I think I have written it in this thread : there was no need to be provocative, it only made things worse.

Yes I believe it is a socioeconomic issue and that massive investments should be made. A bit of historic perspective : immigration is not new in France, there have been waves of Italian, Spanish, Polish immigrants in the 20th century. Sure, their integration was easier than North Africans. But there are other key elements : they often came when the French economy was flourishing and needed labour and they weren't put in ghettos. What we have at the moment in France is a weak economy with high unemployment. These facts are not mentioned ANYWHERE in the article. Mr Pipes prefers talking about a civilisation clash.

 

The map was a joke : it was drawn by satirists. Yes I am in France.

 

I don't think it's "Islamism" either. But there's something, there's some ideology motivating this behavior. And it's not "umemployment" or "soical exlcusion" (not in the sense it's normally understood, anyway). I mean, how long could a 15 year old have possibly been looking for work before his inability to secure it drove him to despair and thus rioting (even though one doesn't auotomatically flow from the other)? That's BS.

In my experience, there is a very real feeling of "us against them" among Arab youth. It doesn't matter how well their parents are doing economically. I've experienced this first hand. The Lebanese friends I used to "hang out" with all came from families who owned small businesses and were doing fairly well (better than the median Anglo, for sure). Yet we'd still wreck havoc on a night out on the town, and that rage was directed primarily at Anglos, who we considered "uncultured pigs".

Where does that come from? I'm not really sure. I don't think it's some big conspiracy. It really takes precious little to convince a youth that some part of soceity is "against" him. We'd listen to stories of older cousins and how they fought against so and so, or crimes that they'd done (all exeaggerated) and we'd seek to emulate them. Ultimately, I think you have to factor race and/or "ethnoculture" into it. Not for any deterministic biological reasons, just that racial features enable us so easily to recognize the "other", and who you're "supposed to" be "against".

I notice you added a bit about previously successful integration efforts. But I'm not sure just how much value those comparisons have. It's one thing to integrate an Andalusian into Cataluna, or a Portuguese into France and quite another to integrate a Muslim Algerian. I really think we need to face up to the fact some cultures are harder to integrate than others. Some cultures are simply less compatible with our own. And with such cultures you really take a gamble - will they drop old habits and accept ours, or will the immigrant experience harden the old habits? Not easy questions to answer and I think it's morally questionable whether immigration enthusiasts have the right to make guinea pigs of their fellow citizens.

I went to a heavily multicultural high school. We had Italians, Greeks, Ex-Yu, Arabs, Turks, Vietnamese, South Pacific Islanders. To me, Arabs were head and shoulders above the rest in belligerance and disobediance. About a decade ago some reworked pop song came out with the lyrics, "No matter what they tell us, no matter what they do, no matter what they teach us, what we believe is true". I had a Lebanese friend who laughed out loud on hearing it, saying this described his high school experience perfectly. And it does.

(Then again, there's always hope. Ten years ago I certainly wasn't sitting at a PC writing pseudo-philosophical tracts on what ails society.)

 

Are you for real, you reall think they pray?

(They certainly prey! )

 

There they go again, but predictable and timely:

http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=10103

Yea, right. Sure they want to be French citizens…. As long as France changes so they don’t have to. Until then, their “struggle” continues.

They think they can get away with this association, but you can’t blame them, since people fall for this bullshit over and over and over again.

It just never ends. Other ethnocentric groups striving for power and influence LOVE to compare their “strife” with Black America. They love it so much they brainwash their young into believing that they share the plight of American Blacks.

American ethnocentric advocates have tried for years to hijack the Black Civil Rights Movement for their own political maneuvers. There has been some success with this. For example, all we hear of “black and hispanics” when it comes to social issues about not enough hispanics or blacks working at certain industries or going to certain universities, and so on. Blacks had Martin Luther King Jr., so hispanic advocates had to have their own martyr, Ceasar Chavez, to create the illusion that Hispanics were also “forced into slavery” and “wronged by American Society” just the same.

But there is one GIGANTIC difference here: Hispanics came to America by choice; blacks were taken from Africa and sold into forced slavery in America. After 300+ years of slavery followed by 100 years of post Civil War Jim Crow apartheid, the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s was a successful attempt to quash the Jim Crow apartheid laws and integrate blacks into society.

To compare this long, complex, and painful process of black integration with other ethnic groups who choose to immigrate to other countries and multiply like rabbits and gain influence, is pure bullshit. Their ethnocentric leaders want to resist assimilation, so they spin America’s Civil Rights Movement in a way to push their own misguided propaganda of false martyres, State racism, forced poverty, and so on –all to win the hearts and minds of the “naïve heavy hearted,” and easy-to-manipulate teenagers.

Perhaps this is what is tweaking the minds of the young Arabs living in the French suburbs. It may be a combination of a lot of things, including what they hear from their parents, their schools, their peers, the neighborhood “buzz,”, their favorite sites on the internet, and so on. But someone is succeeding at pushing a propaganda campaign that does not encourage them to become French, but rather, revolutionaries striving to make France yield to North African Culture.