Violences urbaines: A Paris comme à Falluja la guerilla vaincra (Nidra Poller)

C’est un moment génial de l’histoire de France. Toute la communauté issue de l’immigration adhère complètement à la position de la France. Tout d’un coup, il y a une espèce de ferment. Profitons de cet espace de francitude nouvelle. Jean-Louis Borloo (ministre délégué à la Ville, suite à des manifestations anti-guerre d’Irak marquées par nombre de cris d' »A mort les juifs! », avril 2003)

Pendant cinq ans, des musulmans français irrités ont ingurgité un régime régulier de violence ô combien “romantique” – le jihad-Intifada en Israel, le jihad-insurrection en Irak, le jihad-insurrection en Afghanistan. Quand ils ont commencé à brûler des synagogues et à molester des juifs à l’automne 2000, les médias ont dûment signalé que ces voyous étaient les produits de la “frustration” ressentie du fait des traitements des musulmans du Moyen-Orient et d’Asie centrale. Leur propre gouvernement ne multipliait-il pas au même moment les imprécations contre les Américains? Les protestataires étaient on ne peut plus dans le ton. (…) Au sein des élites françaises, l’ennemi était clairement identifié: non l’slamisme ou l’slamofascisme, non les foules déchainées des banlieues parisiennes, non Saddam Hussein, non Al-Qaeda, mais les troupes britanniques et américaines en Irak. Les voitures et les bâtiments brûlés dont sont pleins les rues françaises sont le résidu intérieur du culte du jihad dont ces musulmans français ont été “drogués” par Al-Jazeera, et qui a été légitimé par une classe intellectuelle française qui a toujours eu une vision si “romantique” de la résistance sous toutes ses formes.(…) Peut-être que certains de ces journalistes, chercheurs, intellectuels et hauts fonctionnaires qui colportaient ces choses pensaient qu’elles resteraient une diversion idéologique abstraite. La France est loin de l’Irak, après tout. Mais maintenant que le militantisme s’est retourné contre l’Etat français lui-même, ils sont brusquement choqués de ce qu’ils ont semé. Nidra Poller

Qui sème le vent récolte la tempête, dit le proverbe.

Et si la France payait aujourd’hui pour toutes ces années de violence militante dont on a gavé, dans la rue ou par medias interposés, une certaine jeunesse?

C’était tout le mérite de Nidra Poller, journaliste américaine résidant à Paris, d’avoir dès les premières manifestations contre l’intervention alliée en Irak, attiré l’attention sur ce risque. Sauf que personne ne s’attendait à ce qu’à peine deux ans après, l’avertissement reçoive une telle confirmation avec les toutes récentes émeutes des banlieues des grandes villes françaises.

Intifada a la francaise
Nidra Poller
National Post
November 08, 2005

PARIS – The French government is faltering as the flames of urban warfare spread from Paris to over 300 towns. Schools, warehouses, gymnasiums, bus depots, restaurants and shopping malls are being sacked and burned. Journalists, ambulance personnel and firemen are being attacked. Even armour-clad riot police now fear for their lives, as some of the protesters have equipped themselves with guns.

President Jacques Chirac, supposedly recovered from a stroke suffered in August, is out of commission. His dauphin, Dominique de Villepin, makes pompous proclamations while trying to roast his arch-rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in the flames of immigrant rage. But the plain-spoken Mr. Sarkozy did not summon this rage on his own. It has been simmering for years in the form of a steady increase in lawless, anti-social behaviour.

Until now, the angry Muslim men who constitute the bulk of the rioters have been allowed to masquerade as victims. It is a common refrain that these second- and third-generation North African immigrants have been marginalized by a racist French society. But much of what goes under the name of harassment is simply the half-hearted intrusion of the forces of order into territories that have been conquered by another system of values. In Muslim ghettoes, pimping, drug dealing, theft, terrorism and Islamic law mix and match. The block of working-class suburbs, or banlieues, in the Seine St-Denis region outside Paris, is especially lawless.

These areas are hardly dismal, dilapidated hellholes. Most of the housing and infrastructure is decent. Those who wish to pursue clean, honest lives have plenty of opportunities to do so. The insurrection spreading through France cannot be understood through the traditional Marxist prism of poverty, unemployment and discrimination. These problems exist in all nations. What is different in France’s Muslim ghettoes is a tradition of hate and xenophobia, one which the state has until now either ignored or encouraged.

In June, 2004, a huge demonstration was staged in Paris to protest the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush, who made a brief visit to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Posters depicted Bush as the world’s worst terrorist. By my first-hand observation, roughly one-third of the marchers came from hard-left parties and organizations: communists, socialists and ecologists, labour unions and wilted flower people. Another third were militant Muslims, many of them with checkered kaffiyehs. The other third were raunchy nihilists high on drugs and beer, marching with pitbulls and Rottweilers, calling for death and destruction. They painted graffiti on lowered store shutters and bus stop shelters, promising « a Paris comme a Falluja la guerilla vaincra » (In Paris as in Falluja, guerrilla warfare will triumph).

The same media that are now tallying up the number of cars torched and lecturing Sarkozy on the virtues of tolerance didn’t seem much put out by such displays. The hard words were aimed at Bush, after all — so the hatred expressed was seen as unremarkable, even admirable.

In the same way, much of France ignored the cries of « death to the Jews » that went up in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that began in 2000, and which eventually blended in with the anti-war demonstrations of 2003. Incendiary, sometimes bloodthirsty slogans against Israel and the United States became commonplace.

For five years, resentful French Muslims have been fed a steady diet of romanticized violence — jihad-intifada in Israel, jihad-insurgency in Iraq, jihad-insurgency in Afghanistan. When they started firebombing synagogues and beating up Jews in the fall of 2000, the media dutifully reported that these thugs were products of the « frustration » felt in regard to the treatments of Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia. France’s own government was full of hectoring words for the Americans, after all. The protesters were very much on message.

In elite French society, the enemy was clearly identified: not Islamism or Islamofascism, not the stewing mobs in the Paris suburbs, not Saddam Hussein, not al-Qaeda, but the British and U.S. troops in Iraq. The burned-out cars and buildings that litter French streets are the domestic residue of the jihadi cult that these French Muslims have been drugged on through al-Jazeera, and which has been legitimized by a French intellectual class that has always romanticized resistance in all its forms.

Perhaps some of the journalists, political scientists, intellectuals and public officials who’ve been peddling this merchandise meant it to remain an abstract ideological diversion. France is a long way from Iraq, after all. But now that the militancy is being turned on the French state itself, they are suddenly shocked at what they’ve sown.

Things could get worse. Until the state can exert its authority, restore order and protect its citizens, there is a danger that images of charred bodies will replace pictures of burnt cars.

For decades, the French media and government have been painting a rosy picture of social harmony within their borders. When the truth suddenly burst out with guerrilla warfare in the streets, the public was totally unprepared, as were the police and even the army. They might all have known that this is the terrible price to be paid for turning a blind eye to those who preach violent resistance.