Mark Steyn - America Alone

And the Fijian scenario — a succession of bloodless coups — is the optimistic one, and not just when measured against such notable bicultural societies as Rwanda. After all, the differences between Fijian natives and Indians are nothing compared to those between the French and les beurs. All those Bush Doctrine naysayers who argue that Iraq is an artificial entity that can never be a functioning state ought to take a look at the Netherlands. You think Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia are incompatible? What do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomite antieverything-you-dig Islamists? If Kurdistan’s an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland? Europe’s problems don’t nullify the Bush Doctrine so much as present a more urgent case for it.

As to the “French” “youth,” a gentleman in Antibes cautioned me against characterizing the disaffected as “Islamist” and advised me to examine them more closely. “They look like L.A. gangsters,” he said, “not beturbaned prophet-monkeys.” Leaving aside more than a few cries of “Allahu Akhbar!” on the streets, my friend is correct. But that’s the point. The theoretical virtue of “multiculturalism” is that it’s a form of mellifluous cultural cross-pollination: the best of all worlds. But just as often it gives us the worst of all worlds: the worst attributes of Muslim culture — the subjugation of women-combined with the worst attributes of Western culture — license and self-gratification. Tattooed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the royal escort. Islamofascism itself is what it says: a fusion of Islamic identity with oldschool European totalitarianism. But, whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today’s identity of choice for the world’s disaffected. In 2001, Paris elected its first openly homosexual mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, and, as always, this was taken as evidence of how cool and relaxed everyone is about the whole gay thing nowadays. M. Ie Maire certainly worked hard to put the gay in gay Paree — potted palms and parasols along the Seine all summer long, etc.. His big idea was the Nuit Blanche — the “Sleepless Night” — of October 5, 2002, when the city’s landmarks would be open for one big all-night party. Come to the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, and if you make it through till dawn there’ll be free coffee and croissants. City Hall itself was done up like a stylish ’tween-wars nightclub — and no state security metal detectors on the doors, because, after all, what genuine jazz boïte would have such things?

And that’s where M. Delanoé was, in the thick of the festive throng, when he got stabbed. His assailant missed his aorta by less than an inch, but gamely the mayor insisted that the party go on while he was taken to the Pitié-Salpétrière hospital for a three-hour operation that saved his life.

His would-be killer was a Muslim immigrant, Azedine Berkane. But, as the establishment was at pains to emphasize, the good news is that he wasn’t a terrorist. No, he’s just a Muslim who hates homosexuals.

And that’s good news how, exactly?

Le Monde reported from M. Berkane’s wretched riot-prone ghetto the views of his neighbors: “He was a bit like us,” said one. “We’re all homophobic here, because it’s not natural.”

“It’s against Islam,” said another. “Muslim fags don’t exist.” A traditional terrorist has demands which are in most cases subject to circumstances: He doesn’t want your troops on his soil? Okay, we don’t really need them there anyway. But a Muslim who hates you just cuz? That’s all but impervious to external pressure.

The old joke about British Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land: hence today a Western democracy and a disaffected Muslim population exist in (for the most part) two solitudes on the same piece of real estate. But doesn’t that sum up Europe too? The jihadists understand that the Continent is up for grabs in a way that America isn’t. And as their numbers grow it seems likely that wily Islamic leaders in the Middle East will embrace the cause of the rights of European Muslims in the same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians. When France began contemplating its headscarf ban in schools, it dispatched government ministers to seek the advice of Egyptian imams, implicitly accepting the view of Islamic scholars that the Fifth Republic is now an outlying province of the Dar al-Islam. As the Zionist Entity can testify, that’s not a club you necessarily want to be signed up for (though it helps explain why the Quai d’Orsay can live with Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third). And what happens when, say, Iran starts spreading a little terror start-up money through France and the Netherlands the way the ayatollahs have done in Lebanon and Gaza? What would it take to persuade a European Muslim to blow himself up in an Amsterdam gay bar?

Few EU leaders have a clue what to do about this, but, as France’s headscarf law and Britain’s Incitement to Racial Hatred bill underline, mediation between what Tony Blair called (in the wake of the Tube bombing) “our way of life” and Muslim values has already become a central dynamic of European political culture — a remarkable achievement, for a minority few Europeans were more than vaguely conscious of before September 11. Meanwhile, across the borders pour not primarily suicide bombers or suitcase nukes, though they will come in the end, but ideology-fierce, glamorous, and implacable. Here’s the final irony, and perhaps the most distressing of all to European anti-Semites: in one of history’s better jests, in this scenario they’re the Jews.

As the Guardian reported in London in 2005: “French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.”

Ah, those “French youths.” You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse?

Granted that most of the “youths” are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn’t take much time in les banlieues of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as “French,” and likely never will. Four years after September 11, it turned out there really is an explosive “Arab street,” but it’s in Clichy-sous-Bois. Since the beginning of this century, French Muslims have been carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general interest. They’re losing that battle. Unlike America’s Europhiles, France’s Arab street correctly identified Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins in the ’burbs, but 732 AD — as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within two hundred miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground “like a wall… a firm glacial mass,” as The Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname “Martel” — “the Hammer.”