A good European website on what’s really happening over there

A reader has just directed my attention to The Brussels Journal, an intelligent, anti-left, European website—what a find. I’m halfway through an article by Paul Belien on how France and Europe, though their deliberate choices, including a 1975 call for the spread of Arab culture in Europe (as documented by Bat Ye’or), got themselves into this horror. The below stunning excerpt gives the flavor of Belien’s analysis, so utterly different from the mainstream media’s shallow sloganeering about Muslim youths’ supposed frustrated desire for integration into French society. It may completely alter your view about what’s happening in France.

Unlike their fathers, who came to France from Muslim countries, accepting that, whilst remaining Muslims themselves, they had come to live in a non-Muslim country, the rioters see France as their country. They were born here. This land is their land. And since they are Muslims, this land, or at least a part of it, is Muslim as well. The society they live in is a homogeneous Islamic one. For them that is society, there is no other. Consequently there is also no question of their “leaving” that society to become part of another society, the putative Western one. “Society” is the society they live in and from which they view and interpret what goes on around them….

Dyab Abou Jahjah, the young and charismatic Brussels-based leader of the Arab European League, rejects assimilation and demands segregated schools and self-governing, Arab-speaking ghettos. “We reject integration when it leads to assimilation,” Jahjah says: “I don’t believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I’m in my country, not the country of the [Westerners].”

The Western authorities quietly accepted this when they abandoned the suburbs to the immigrants a decade ago. The attempt by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a second-generation immigrant himself (though not from a Muslim country), to assert the authority of the French Republic over its lost territory has triggered the current civil warfare in France. For the “youths” this is a declaration of war. They are not in Sarkozy’s country but in their own country, where the West promised they could retain their own cultural values and spread them.

Those media that tell us that the rioting “youths” want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs. The violence in France is in no way comparable with that of the blacks in the U.S. in the 1960s…. The violence in France is of the type one finds when one group wants to assert its authority and drive the others out of its territory.

A reader points out that by claiming the Muslim areas in France to be their territory, the Muslims are in effect announcing that they have now arrived in the paradigmatic Medina, meaning a Muslim-ruled land from which they can now wage jihad. See my article, “The Key to Jihadist Ideology and Strategy.”

(Note: in the linked article, written in August 2004, I was still using the term “Islamist,” though interchangeably with “jihadist.” Jihadism is a much better term, as it has a real meaning, the supporting or waging of jihad, a duty that is enjoined on all Muslims. As for Islamism, though Daniel Pipes and others use it to mean something apart from Islam, it in fact has no real meaning distinct from “Islam” itself. Indeed, in the last paragraph of the article I noted that Islamism is “simply a pure form of Islam.” I didn’t call it an extreme form of Islam, I didn’t call it a modern ideological distortion of Islam, I called it a pure form of Islam, i.e., Islam.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 07, 2005 01:27 AM | Send