Battlefield Europe?

What a mess in France huh? How many days of riots have there been? Such a long series of riots is very rare here in the Netherlands. In 2000 we had three days of riots in Den Bosch (my hometown then) after a FC Den Bosch ‘fan’ was killed by the police.

The riots in several (!) French cities are much more severe.

The two police officers shot on Sunday night were hit during what police described as an “ambush” in the Paris suburb of Grigny.

France has been set ablaze by the embers of a racial resentment that the Villepin government has been incapable of extinguishing

They were taken to hospital with wounds to the leg and throat.

Police chiefs said their men were being deliberately confronted by gangs apparently intent on fighting them.

Violence was also reported in Marseille, Saint-Etienne and Lille on Sunday night.

Some countries, including the UK, urged their citizens to use “extreme care” if travelling in the affected areas.

Interesting is the use of internet. It is used as a source of mobilising people to rebel, but also the issues of the two boys who died (which started the riots) is discussed.

French youths have been turning to weblogs to express their anger and frustration over the violence that has hit some of the country’s poorest suburbs.

As the rioting has spread, so has the debate between bloggers and their readers.

The deaths of two teenagers of African origin, which helped spark the riots, inspired a number of online tributes.

Bouna Traore, aged 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, “died for nothing”, said one blogger, Bouna93 – the number is a reference to their home department of Seine-Saint-Denis.

“We love you guys… All of Clichy is with you,” he added, referring to the town of Clichy-sous-Bois where the two teenagers died.

“We are all tense, we are all irritated and we are all mourning.”

The blog Clichy-sous-Bombe prints photographs of the two teenagers, captioned “RIP”.

One visitor commented: “Too young to die, they didn’t deserve this!”

Threats

Tribute website Bouns93 gathered 1,700 comments from readers before it was shut down by its host for not following regulations.

Another, Banlieue93, has elicited more than 300 responses to its post calling for readers to pay their respects to the two teenagers.

I don’t think Bouna and Zyed would be proud of you
Visitor to Les K1-Fry

But on many blogs, alongside messages of condolence were insults targeting police and threats of more violence.

“Clichy is avenging you,” wrote blogger Les K1-Fry.

“France should be ashamed of the rotten police, and anyway France should be ashamed of herself with such a bad government,” wrote a visitor.

“We burned shops last night, believe me the cops aren’t safe,” wrote a reader of the Banlieue93 blog.

“We’re going to destroy everything,” wrote another.

“All the departments should unite… and screw justice,” wrote a third.

‘Pointless’

But there is also considerable anger aimed at the rioters, who have caused damage to thousands of cars and dozens of buildings.

“They are angry at the police and yet they burn the cars of factory workers who aren’t involved and who will have to work hard for the rest of their lives to pay for it,” a visitor to Clichy-sous-Bombe wrote.

“Our neighbourhoods are already dilapidated, why destroy them even more?” wrote a visitor to Banlieue93.

“What do the rioters want, do play the [extreme right-wing anti-immigration political party] Front National’s game, to have Baghdad in the 93?” asked a visitor to Les K1-Fry.

“Guys, stop destroying everything, it’s pointless, I don’t think Bouna and Zyed would be proud of you, avenging them by burning everything, by attacking innocent people,” said another.

Others also said they had sympathy for the police, who have been blamed by some for the boys’ deaths.

Bouna and Zyed “shouldn’t have run away from the police”, wrote a visitor to Banlieue93, and their deaths were “not the fault of the police… or of Sarko [Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy]”.

“You have to be stupid to hide in an electric generator,” wrote another.

Some bloggers are making comparions between the killing of Van Gogh last year in the Netherlands, the Madrid and London bombings and the French riots such as Tigerhawk (foreseeing a kind of civil war like in former Yugoslavia):

I would also observe that nobody is yet writing much about that inevitable reaction that will arise — count on it — from the traditional Christian Right in France and Europe generally. It is a mere handful of years since a rather grotesque religious war broke out in Europe’s backyard whereby Croation Catholics, Orthodox Serbs and Bosnian Muslims tried to exterminate one another – with the Serbs enjoying a rather pronounced advantage and therefore more effectiveness until the US (not Europe) put a stop to it. We today have a German Pope. He is a doctrinal conservative.

In my view, the London bombings, the Madrid bombings, the murder of Theo Van Gogh and now the French riots are all hastening the day that the European right will react. And bacause that reaction is likely to happen only after a lengthy period of appeasement, it may in fact result in an overreaction. This will not be pretty.

Logical Thinking is quoting Gilles Kepel about the riots:

The riots “are a blessing for them because it gives them the role of intermediary,” says Gilles Kepel, a scholar who has studied and written extensively about the rise of Islam in France. That, in turn, puts them in a stronger position “to force concessions from the state,” such as demanding a repeal of the law France passed last year banning headscarves from public schools, he says.

The past year is proving to be a watershed in modern Europe’s encounter with Islam. As a number of events have shown — including last year’s assassination of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim radical and the bombing of the London Tube by home-grown terrorists this summer — Europe has failed to cope with the Muslims within its borders.

In France, legions of North African immigrants were taken in amid the post-World War II economic boom to fill low-skilled jobs. But the country did little to integrate these newcomers, neglecting to ensure they received language training, for instance. Authorities assumed they eventually would leave. They didn’t. By the 1990s, many factory jobs were moving to cheaper countries, and joblessness soared in immigrant communities.

Blogger For Israel, and Justice: Schadenfreude is even more outspoken (in order to do justice i quote him at length:)

I had a discussion with a friend a few days ago on this issue. He’s intelligent but not extremely well informed. Ironically, his profession is that of a mediator, and it showed. Every fiber of his being told him that what France (and Holland too for that matter) needed is defusing of this tense situation. Polarization is the worst thing that can happen, nobody wanted it, and it could only worsen the conflict.

And I offered him the example of Hitler, and the unilateral escalating steps he took before France and Great-Britain grudglingly decided to try and stop him. Every time the Allies failed to intervene, Hitler got bolder, was less inclined to believe anyone was going to stop him. If they’d bombed Berlin when he invaded Checkoslovakia, WW2 would never have happened. If the West had taken a much stronger stance during Hitler’s meddling in the Spanish Civil war, it might well have stopped there.

It was quiet on the other side of the table for a while, and then the discussion on Islam in Europe moved to wether Muslims do or do not want to be or become Europeans like the Norwegians, the Dutch and the Italians.

Apart from the generalizing, I think we’re past that discussion. A third generation of immigrants is coming of age in the Netherlands, and most of them are more alienated from mainstream society than their parents are. Whatever caused it (and it was not an absence of will in Dutch society or politics), integration – let alone assimilation – failed miserably. And now we have hundreds of thousands of people in our midst who came to our country because they didn’t like their own (and who could blame them?), and now they want to turn this country into a copy of theirs, minus the sunshine.

They’re not leaving. They are becoming more radical in their faith. And Islam is 100% incompatible with Western-style democracy. So where and when is this train going to derail?

And this is why I welcome the riots in France, and hope they will spread to Belgium, Germany, Holland. It will force the issue, or at least force the man in the street to rethink his positions, the beliefs pounded into his head by decades of leftist fluff.

There is no end to appeasement, but the mood in the Dutch street is changing, and has been for a year now, ever since the brutal Zarqawi-style murder of Theo van Gogh. Riots, cars and buildings burned by ‘disaffected youths’ could accelerate this building consciousness. So, Muslims everwhere, do me favor please! Unite, and slay the infidel where you find him!

It is true I guess that such a long series of rioting involves some kind of planning. If the islamists are behind it, I don’t know. It is possible but necessary I think. What you need for organizing is a few friends, a mobile phone and internet and an enemy. At the beginning the police was the enemy, now it is Sarkozy and perhaps the French state in general. This will grow stronger when more bad things happen during the riots.

It is a little bit too simple to say that this is the beginning of a civil war. The UOIF, a conservative Muslim organisation in France (the largest one I think) for example has issued a fatwa against the riots:

“It is strictly forbidden for any Muslim … to take part in any action that strikes blindly at private or public property or that could threaten the lives of others,” the fatwa said.

“To contribute to these exactions is an illicit act,” said the declaration by the Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF).

“Every Muslim living in France, whether a French citizen or a guest of France, has the right to demand deep respect for his person, his dignity and his
convictions and to strive for more equality and social justice.

“But this action, whether taken in a concerted or spontaneous way, must in no way contradict (Muslim) teaching or the laws governing communal life.”

Calling for a speedy return to calm, the UOIF said the events of the past 11 nights — in which thousands of cars have been torched in the poor suburbs of dozens of French cities — “seems to lay bare the serious defects of the French model of interation that clearly throws dozens of young people in difficult neighborhoods into dispair and poverty.”

The UOIF appealed to the French political class and government “to evaluate the seriousness and danger of the situation.”

The group called for a national dialogue on poor suburbs and disadvantaged youths “to launch a struggle, a declared ‘national cause,’ for equal opportunity and the social, political, cultural integration of the young people in question.”

I doubt if they have any control over these youths. These youths are not rioting because they are Muslim (an identity in itself does nothing), but are mobilised by different labels: Muslim, trash, beur and so on. Muslim is only one of them and it doesn’t mean that it is a religious identity only. This way it looks more like an ethnic and political resistance identity.

The same thing is actually done by those bloggers I mentioned (especcialy Schadenfreude). He is using a role as a victim, a perceived threat, to frame this into a religious conflict. You have to be carefull with things like this. It doesn’t have to be a religious conflict but if you talk about it like it is one, it might become a religious conflict. The picture might be untrue, the consequence might be very real.

Pointing to the bad socio-economic circumstances is important; they do play a role. But of course after several days there is more to it (There might be some organized networks who take over from the early more spontaneous rebels.). The riots probably gain a kind of dynamic of their own; every reaction of French authorities adds more fuel to the fire. At the same time these people are destroying their own community in which they live. Their own cars, their own houses and schools. What does that mean. Well I don’t know. A few guesses. First of all it is symbolically very important. Destroying your own community is giving a very strong message of being fed up with your own circumstances. It is a short term strategy, after some time not much is left and you still live there, but there is no future anyway so why not, that is what they seem to think. It also means that not all of France or Europe for that matter is the battlefield. The battlefield are the ghetto’s where they live. Something similar happened in the city of Den Bosch but also in Amsterdam at the Mercatorplein-riots where Moroccan youth rebelled against what they saw as unjustified police violence. It also shows that they really hate the environment where they live. The people who can afford it, leave, the others burn and slash to put it a little bit in black and white terms. A little bit too black and white of course, because many of the inhabitants are sick and tired of these riots and while police and youth are busy targeting eachother they now try to protect themselves. This doesn’t mean that the French rebels are victims. They are not victims of society and they are not victims of their culture or religion. They are actors with their own agency, made possible by and restricted by circumstances. There might be some psychological and cultural (‘French banlieu culture’) factors that play a role as well.