Wake Up Europe!

Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands

November 6, 2005

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's
about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street
riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's
Western Standard back in February.


Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years
ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian
reported in London: ''French youths fired at police and burned over 300
cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of
violence in a week of urban unrest.''

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and
Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of
the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris
to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as
''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more
estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded
ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than
anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent
years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab
street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up
trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as
complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething
unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city,
would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting
alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs have been
carrying on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers,
Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to
prevent the spread of these attacks to targets of more, ah, general
interest. They seem to have lost that battle. Unlike America's
Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Chirac's
opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

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.''

What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned
down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in
two, as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope
America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from
the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed
the rioters as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the
side of those who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He
called for ''a spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the
political class, they seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity
to scuttle Sarkozy's presidential ambitions rather than as a call to
save the Republic.

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the
effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of
Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In
defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less
assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime
minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing
at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are
incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than
for France and Belgium.

If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad
impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing
their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If
burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn
'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore
Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim
summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural
compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent
conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages.