Telegraph - Early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war. By Mark Steyn

The political class and the media seem to serve as mutual reinforcers of their obsolete illusions. Or as the Washington Post’s headline put it: “Rage of French youth is a fight for recognition”.

Actually, they’re very easy to “recognise”: just look out the window, they’re the ones torching your Renault 5. I’d wager the “French” “youth” find that headline as hilarious as the Jets in West Side Story half a century ago, when they taunted Officer Krupke with “society’s” attempts to “understand” them: we’re depraved on account of we’re deprived. Perhaps some enterprising Paris impresario will mount a production of West Eid Story with choreographed gangs of North African Muslims sashaying through the Place de la Republique, incinerating as they go.

In fact, “rage” seems the least of it: it’s the “glee” and “contempt” you’re struck by. And “rage” in the sense of spontaneous anger is a very slapdash characterisation of what, after two weeks, is looking like a rather shrewd and disciplined campaign. This business of car burning, for example. In Iraq, the “insurgents” quickly got the hang of setting some second-hand Nissan alight at just the right moment so that its plume of smoke could be conveniently filmed from the press hotel balcony in time for NBC’s Today show and Good Morning, America. For a while, every time you switched on the television in America, there’d be some doom’n'gloom anchor yakking away in front of a live scene of a blazing Honda Civic - as reassuring in its familiarity as that local station somewhere or other in North America (Thunder Bay, I think) that used to show a roaring fireplace as its test card all night. What the Aussie pundit Tim Blair calls the nightly Paris car-B-Q looks great on television, but without being sufficiently murderous to provoke the state into forcefully putting down the insurgency.

Indeed, it’s an almost perfect tactic if your aim is to have the entire French establishment dithering in grievance-addressing mode until you’ve extracted as much political advantage as you can. Look at it this way: after two weeks, whose prestige has been more enhanced? The rioters? Or Mayor Debré, President Chirac and Prime Minister de Villepin? On every front these past two weeks, the French state has been tested and communicated only weakness.

Ooh, spoke too soon! There’s a curfew now!

Some of us believe this is an early skirmish in the Eurabian civil war. If the insurgents emerge emboldened, what next? In five years’ time, there will be even more of them, and even less resolve on the part of the French state. That, in turn, is likely to accelerate the demographic decline. Europe could face a continent-wide version of the “white flight” phenomenon seen in crime-ridden American cities during the 1970s, as Danes and Dutch scram to America, Australia or anywhere else that will have them.

So, the French love a good uprising, but they also love an uprising with a poetic cast to it. Now, it’s been a while since I’ve read Victor Hugo, but as far as I remember Les Misérables, everyone dies at the end. Except our young lovers, of course, but this is France.

Update:

FOXnews has descended on poor, beleaguered Paris (finally!), and Jonathan Hunt has been reading the Telegraph.

Date: Nov 8th, 2005 · Comments RSS · Tags: Geography and Foreign Affairs