The Intifada Comes to France

David Warren, writing on “The Fire in France,” summarizes the on-going conflict, where “at least 20 urban districts in France (mostly around Paris) have gone up in flames”:

As well as we can now reconstruct, it began in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburban, North African ghetto, which has been a police no-go area for several years (like many other Muslim ghettoes in Europe), and where young, declaredly Islamist, thugs rule the streets by day and night. (Their war cry, while hurling missiles and setting fires, is "Allahou Akbar!" — "God is great!" There is no possible doubt about their orientation.)

The police were nevertheless called to deal with some youths who were stripping parked cars with more than the usual ostentation. Two kids who were probably not participating in this crime, and were anyway not being chased by the police, decided to hide behind the fence around an electrical pylon.

That was the Bastille event. They were electrocuted. They died. As this news spread, the entire district erupted in violence. Over the last nine nights, the violence has spread from one Muslim ghetto to another. . . .

The French authorities are beginning to realize that this French Intifada is not entirely spontaneous, that e.g. weapons had been laid in for just such an uprising. . . The rule of these districts is now effectively in the hands of radical Islamists, whose central demand is that French authorities stay out of the little emirates they have declared. . . .

Both [Prime Minister de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy] speak as if they were dealing with some Marxist revolt of the proletariat against their capitalist oppressors. Instead, what they have is an Islamist revolt against French society.

Mark Steyn, in an interview with Hugh Hewitt on Friday, traces the beginnings back a little further:

This is a serious issue for France, and it’s been mimicked in Denmark, and to one degree or another, in parts of Belgium as well. This is a fuse that’s been lit all over Europe. . . .

You know, the Europeans have been tolerant of, for example, Palestinian terrorism for years, and of the intifada that’s been going on in France against synagogues and Jewish schools and Kosher butchers and all the rest. And now, it’s moved on to more general targets. They’re suddenly finding it’s kind of harder to appease these people.

To the surprise of the French, the crocodile has decided to eat them too.