The Shotgun Blog
« The World Needs More Canada | Main | "A New Dark Ages" »
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Intifada update
The liberal media call the riots in France anything but what they are. They're "suburban" "youths" who are angry about "poverty", and thus engage in "spontaneous" "unrest". A typical news story from the BBC or CNN will only introduce the word "Muslim" at the end of the story, when describing the identity of a complainant against "police brutality". Go to Google news and skim the first hundred headlines, and count on one hand the number that mention the identity of the rioters.
This breezy, see-no-evil analysis doesn't quite explain the Molotov cocktail factories police are discovering, or the rioters' website-based coordination.
For years, France was a moral and financial supporter of the intifada against Israel -- and a chief antagonist towards Israel when it sought to quell its riots.
Now that France itself is under attack, who will assume France's usual place at the United Nations to righteously condemn the French police response? Who will out-French France?
Posted by Ezra Levant on November 6, 2005 | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d834515b5d69e200d8345f19b053ef
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Intifada update:
Comments
Remember, France is a permanent UN Security Council member.
/cognitive dissonance
Posted by: Speller | 2005-11-06 3:56:28 PM
Perhaps you forget that the Sun publishes columns by Sheila Copps, Robert Mc.
I doubt, if Ezra would stoop so low, that you would entertain such verbal diarrhea from him on your blaug for so long.
Posted by: Speller | 2005-11-06 4:27:29 PM
It is funny that the French haven't acted more decisively yet. Remember what they did in the Ivory Coast earlier this year - shoot on sight? And they did it without UN Security Council permission too!!
I say send in the French Army's paratrooper division and make it like the Battle of Algiers. Widespread torture, indiscriminate bombings, etc. It makes Fallujah seem tame by comparison.
Posted by: Scott | 2005-11-06 4:29:09 PM
When you don't face problems in a realistic manner they eventually come back to haunt you, ask toronto.
Posted by: AsISeeIt | 2005-11-06 4:59:46 PM
Hey McLelland .... you commie bitch .. you couldn't carry Ezra's brief case.
Dream on, but the days of politically correct commies like you are just about over. There is a reality backlash going on and you are being left behind in your unrequited envy and stupidity.
Accusing the man lying without a shred of proof to offer. That's par for those who think the imaginary is reality.
I hope this comment is not too crude for this blog, but oddly enough, we on the right have feelings too except we try to use them correctly. I am correctly angry at your slanderous remark.
Posted by: Duke | 2005-11-06 5:03:01 PM
Has anyone read any comments from Robert McClelland lately? I haven,t read any by him in a long time, and you know I don't miss them one little bit. Honest disagreement and well substantiated arguments make for interesting reading but slanderous ad hominem attacks diminish the whole practice of blogging. If his own "blahg" is anything like his comments, (the ones I have inadvertently read before reading the author's name) are any indication, it must be the cesspool of the blogosphere.
Posted by: Bob Wood | 2005-11-06 5:16:53 PM
The rioting community has demanded that the police stay out of their "zone", which now seems to have expanded to included central Paris. It will be interesting to see in the next week what approach is finally taken -- whether the government will reward violence, arson and mob behaviour with kind words, apologies, cash, and the creation of a few of the demanded Muslim seed-states with France, or if they will instead behave like the hated Americans, and crease a few scalps.
Based on their history, and on their criticism of Israel for defending itself, I'm betting on that "running backwards while blowing kisses" approach which passes as progressive thinking by the French and leftists everywhere.
As a sidebar to this story, I don't know if anyone else has noticed but Mark Steyn is almost eerily prescient on all manner of world developments. It's like he has access to newpapers from two or three years in the future.
Posted by: EBD | 2005-11-06 5:24:06 PM
You are all encouraged to read Theodore Dalyrymple's article in the The City on line mag from 2002
Posted by: G Johnstone | 2005-11-06 5:34:18 PM
Fox News has just reported that violence has been escalating, and that twelve policemen have been shot south of Paris.
Posted by: EBD | 2005-11-06 5:35:09 PM
Steyn: Wake Up, Europe
Mark Steyn: Wake up, Europe, you’ve a war on your hands.
The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. — 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 200 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” — or “the Hammer.” Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they’d won, they’d have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. “Perhaps,” wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.” There would be no Christian Europe. The Anglo-Celts who settled North America would have been Muslim. Poitiers, said Gibbon, was “an encounter which would change the history of the whole world.”
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They’re in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It’s way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by “French youths” since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. “There’s a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,” said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes’ trade union Action Police CFTC. “We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.” via LGF
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-11-06 5:37:04 PM
Algerian group calls France 'enemy number one'
PARIS, Sept 27 (AFP) - An Algerian Islamist organisation, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has issued a call for action against France which it describes as "enemy number one", intelligence officials said Tuesday.
"The only way to teach France to behave is jihad and the Islamic martyr," the group's leader Abu Mossab Abdelwadoud, also own as Abdelmalek Dourkdal, was quoted as saying in an Internet message earlier this month.
"France is our enemy number one, the enemy of our religion, the enemy of our community," he was quoted as saying.
France was mentioned 15 times in the text, and the Algerian government was also targeted, the officials said.
Nine people detained in a series of raids west of Paris Monday are suspected members of the GSPC, officials have said. They were being questioned for a second day Tuesday at the headquarters of the DST domestic intelligence agency.
Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday that the risk of terrorist attack in France is "at a very high level... There are cells operating on our territory."
Suspected terrorist cell raided by French police
Sarkozy defends tough new anti-terror law
Islamic firebrand calls on Muslims to leave Europe
Dozen French potential suicide bombers in Iraq
The GSPC was created from a split in the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the main force in Algeria's long insurgency which was also responsible for a series of bombings in France in 1995.
Copyright AFP
http://www.rapp.org/url/?GYXW4TLJ
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-11-06 5:53:03 PM
After 9-11 it took the French about 10 minutes to smugly suggest that the US was getting what it deserved. Never a country to miss an opportunity to kick someone while they were down.
Though undeserved, I think the rest of the world will react with appropriate mature responses as France is faced with catastrophic social meltdown.
Posted by: ward | 2005-11-06 6:26:26 PM
ward: France has been with the US from the start in the War on Terror. Chirac was in NYC before anyone else but Blair. He sent the French military to help in the Coalition in the first wave, and has continued through ISAF. While the media may have had other opinions, the French government has been on side.
Posted by: Scott | 2005-11-06 6:45:31 PM
Anger as French riots spread to rural Evreux (Still in denial)
Reuters ^ | 07 Nov 2005
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1516988/posts
''There are no jobs. Jobs need to be found for the young people,'' said Hurier, who is himself unemployed. ''The cops are also too aggressive.'' As in Paris, it was a housing estate inhabited by immigrant families where angry youths used vandalism and violence to express their frustration with a society they feel excludes them from jobs and is too ready to treat them roughly.
>>>>>>>
Commenter:
"He [Hurier] must be mistaken. There is no unemployment in socialism." >>>
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-11-06 7:02:03 PM
maz2: I hate to disagree, but socialism is where government is responsive to the needs of the people.
But who is to say just who "the people" are? In Canada, only white people in Ontario are considered people. In France, they are white Christians.
America, despite its racist past, has prove to be much more responsive to the needs of its people than many others. Fortunately, they had people like Martin Luther King to show all Americans the better way.
If a non-white ever stood up in Toronto, they're looking for trouble. The cops there are extremely racist. I hope and pray that Alberta stops looking east, because they have nothing to offer.
Posted by: Scott | 2005-11-06 7:37:13 PM
Scott,
Alberta is not looking east. Trust me.
BTW, I checked out Robert McClellands "blahg". It's quite amusing. This post is my favorite: http://myblahg.com/?p=290
Posted by: Bart F. | 2005-11-06 7:49:51 PM
The War for Europe
MND ^ | Sunday, November 06, 2005 | by J. Thomas Lowry
Posted on 11/06/2005 6:18:06 PM PST by Nasty McPhilthy
It is alarming, though not surprising, to view the video from France. Each frame of film records, for posterity, the collapse of social order into chaos as perpetrated by Islamic gangs. Whilst the world appears shocked, few on the right have been caught unawares.
France occupies rarified air among the eight countries that project economic power across the globe. Never content to accept their role the French alone openly pander to North Africa and Islamic states. As a country with wealth and culture this is necessarily a bad thing as events have proven. Yet, to anyone with an orientation towards the past for guidance, it is not unexpected.
The French people possess an inferiority streak that is peculiar, inasmuch as it applies to their national identity. One need only read a history of the twentieth century to note the failures of France, both internally and, as is often pointed out, externally. That the German army made France their personal campsite twice during the century is enough to understand the French distaste for, in their minds, inferior cultures that resort to war.
Yet, in the images that are broadcast one is witness to a failure of epic proportions. The desire to be a world power is bloodlust among French leaders, so much so that in order to salve the conscience of a nation that deals nuclear material to the highest bidder, appeasement is regarded as compassion.
What is left then is social disorder. Social apologists proclaim that the riots are merely a cry for help among those feeling alienated by French society. In short France has failed her citizenry either way. If the Islamic thugs are forced to be subservient then all the hyperbole about France being an open and superior culture is drivel. Conversely if what is happening is the result of pandering to the Islamic hordes, which is more likely, then France has once again failed, in a Maginot Wall failure, to protect her internal security.
It must be noted that a failure in internal security in France has international consequences. The French are a nuclear power. Therein lays a very clear and present danger. It is doubtful that roving gangs will ever be able to access French military sites. The greatest threat will come from concessions that the government will grant to avoid further problems. Make no mistake; France will capitulate. In doing so Islamic clerics will gain a more noticeable foothold in establishing policy. It will begin locally but will spread.
If this sounds far-fetched consider the attacks on American soil. How many were caught unaware. Yet the United States acted swift and decisively to mitigate the threat. The citizenry demanded it and history shows that the United States, when faced with decisions about self preservation, will act accordingly.
France has no such history. In fact much of the government of France became Nazi collaborators in the Vichy government, including their greatest living military hero, Petain. There is little to suggest that this internal threat, while not as critical as tanks rumbling through the countryside, is as dangerous in the long term. If France follows history there will be another titanic internal struggle and it will be left to an outside force to rectify the problem. >>>
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1517019/posts
Posted by: maz2 | 2005-11-06 7:52:08 PM
How sweet it is... France threatened by Islamic terror. Certainly the USA will not offer or help the French. The American citizenry would revolt if its government went in that direction.
So, who will help the French? I suggest that it be Germany.
Posted by: Michael V Smith | 2005-11-06 8:21:49 PM
Scott - no one here, not the troglodyte left or sentient right, thinks that you have even the most tentative grip on reality. That's a real achievement. Up the meds!
Posted by: NotScott | 2005-11-06 8:24:15 PM
NotScott: please don't use the 'mental illness' counterargument, it just makes you look silly. The rich Easterners try it all the time, even saying how Albertans are 'not Canadians' (from the lips of Pierre the Terrible himself) or "we can't get along with them" (Chretien the Crook). Easterners are as lazy as they are greedy, which is why their society is in decline.
Posted by: Scott | 2005-11-06 8:27:00 PM
Micharl V Smith...how about Iran ?
Posted by: MarkAlta | 2005-11-06 8:28:37 PM
Headline subtitle on FoxNews.com right now:
"French president vows to restore order after primarily Muslim thugs continue terror spree for 11th night"
"primarily Muslim thugs" - That is the clearest description of the rioters I have seen in the MSM to date.
Posted by: timmyz | 2005-11-06 9:56:21 PM
We'd better start asking how "Dithers" will respond to the Algerians/Moroccans in Quebec copying their Jihadist pals in France. You haven't seen a real wimp until you've seen a Lberal wimp. You can be sure they will be out in full force.
Posted by: Keith Thomson | 2005-11-06 10:09:39 PM
Scott: Perhaps I missed something but I seem to remember the French vowing to veto any action on the part of the US with regards to Iraq. Or as I like to sum up their position " No war - for oil!"
Posted by: ward | 2005-11-06 11:55:20 PM
The sins of France are catching up with them. Cowardness disguised in socialism and communism. Remember the PCF was the most powerful communist party outside USSR.
There is scum in France but not only in the Islamic suburbs. Maybe they should be left to simmer in their own sins for a while.
Quite frankly, I see only one solution. Divide the French territory into 2 parts. One will be the communists, socialists and Islamists to be called the Islamic French Republic with shariah law implemented. The other one The old decadent France republic of french fries.
What else? Do you think the French mishaps still have enough energy and drive to expatriate the 5 000 000 muslims outside of France? Algeria would be more than happy to welcome them, right? Je vous ai compris, like Charles de Gaulles was saying!
Do French prefer a civil war? It is well under way.
A little riddle. How do you get 5 millions muslims out of France? You may use the TGV, boats, busses, planes.
Answer: ask how the Turks managed their armenian problem or how the Spanish did it in the 16th century. Well if you can manage to take out 100 000 each day, this takes only 50 days. To replace those people, we could send them our own potential trouble makers.
Posted by: Rémi Houle | 2005-11-07 8:52:04 AM
Thinking of Steyn,
Remember him pointing out that when the elites of the mainstream parties deem whole subjects verboten that the people will then seek alternatives outside the mainstream?
The last French election saw a runoff between Chirac and Jean Marie Le Pen (a far-right fascist.)
The campaign slogan of luke-warm Chirac supporters was "vote for the thief, not the fascist."
Next time it may be "vote for the fascist, not the coward."
Le Pen must be happy. The rest of us should be concerned. Europe has gone to the extemes too many times to think it couldn't happen again.
Chirac (and now Germany, Belgium and probably others,) have a big problem on their hands. How they handle it will decide the fate of Europe.
I for one am not optimistic.
Posted by: Warwick | 2005-11-07 10:59:25 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.