Dalrymple’s hellish portrait of Islam in France

With the Muslim riots in France now in their seventh—or eighth?—day, this may be a good time to revisit Theodore Dalrymple’s nightmarish article in the Autumn 2002 City Journal about the Muslim areas surrounding Paris and other French cities, or La Zone, as French police call it. Dalrymple predicted what is happening now:

For imagine yourself a youth in Les Tarterets or Les Musiciens, intellectually alert but not well educated, believing yourself to be despised because of your origins by the larger society that you were born into, permanently condemned to unemployment by the system that contemptuously feeds and clothes you, and surrounded by a contemptible nihilistic culture of despair, violence, and crime. Is it not possible that you would seek a doctrine that would simultaneously explain your predicament, justify your wrath, point the way toward your revenge, and guarantee your salvation, especially if you were imprisoned? Would you not seek a “worthwhile” direction for the energy, hatred, and violence seething within you, a direction that would enable you to do evil in the name of ultimate good? It would require only a relatively few of like mind to cause havoc. Islamist proselytism flourishes in the prisons of France (where 60 percent of the inmates are of immigrant origin), as it does in British prisons; and it takes only a handful of Zacharias Moussaouis to start a conflagration.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 03, 2005 11:23 AM | Send