Events precede the meaning we accord to them.
When I was watching the West Wing on 12/9/2001, a newsbreak (which didn’t interrupt programming) showed a plane hitting one of the World Trade Centre towers. Initial reports suggested it was a tragic accident. While this was not the case, enormous discursive work by politicians and in particular the round the clock coverage on the televisual media was necessary to establish the narrative - which later became a fact in that it changed the world - that what had happened was an act of war. As opposed to a heinous and horrific crime.
There are severe civil disorders occurring in France. A relatively dispassionate report can be found here.
How are we to ascribe meaning to these events?
A parsimonious interpretation might be, that like similar occurrences in Australia (Macquarie Fields for instance - or Redfern - where in both instances the trouble began through clashes between police and youths - just as in Paris) and elsewhere in the world, the disorder is a reflection of social alienation, lack of employment and opportunities and welfare traps as opposed to some sort of putative Intifada conjured out of the threads of reality by hyperbolic and hysterical right wing bloggers and commenters.
Many people who watch their cars, shops and schools go up in flames, however, are not buying it. They blame unemployment, racial prejudice and widespread youth boredom for the outbursts.
If that were the case, you’d hardly imagine that these events would set right wing bloggers aflame. After all, they’re usually resistant to systemic or structural explanations of events in terms of class, status, poverty and alienation.
But they’re burning up the internets tonight - inscribing these events in the grandest of grandiose narratives - clashes of civilisations, Islamist threats, the failure of multiculturalism. World history, goes the chorus, is in the making. It’s an intifada, it’s a world-historical clash of civilisations where secular liberalism is in extreme danger. And [via Tim Blair] the RWDB of the op/ed pages, Mark Steyn, calls the events a Eurabian civil war.
It’s not hard to suspect that the RWDBs’ interest in these events is more to score domestic political points than in understanding them.
France has never had a multiculturalist policy. La France Profonde, rather than being an exemplar of liberalism, actually exemplifies statist universalism - in its integrationist mission to reinscribe its own foundationalist values on the world and in its own metropolitan colonies slums. Despite claims of Islamist overtones to these events (which may be a contributing factor), it’s more likely that the deep causes of these events lie in the French version of universalist monoculturalism. As Tom Heneghan writes:
It is an established fact that youths from the housing estates, who are mostly French citizens, often face blatant discrimination as soon as they present a foreign-looking face or name to a prospective employer or landlord.
France promised liberty, equality and fraternity but failed to create the jobs that helped integrate earlier immigrants. Paris has tried everything from social programmes to police crackdowns to deal with frustration that has resulted.
“This is the paradox of integration faced with the promises the republic failed to keep,” said criminologist Alain Bauer.
And:
But those calls risk being drowned out in the cacophony surrounding the latest riots and the objections of Villepin and much of a political class hostile to proposals that smack of U.S.-style community-based politics.
The roots of the problem go back three or four decades, when Arab and black immigrants began arriving from Africa and ugly new towns arose on the outskirts of big cities to house them.
These bleak housing estates are now ethnic ghettos where most French rarely venture and the media usually write about them only in terms of the drug rings, gang rapes and suspected Islamic militants they find there.
Excluded from a political system firmly in the hands of white men, the more ambitious in the suburbs create self-help associations only to find the authorities criticising them as unacceptably ethnic because they have “Muslim” in their names.
National debates about the integration of immigrants or the separation of church and state usually end up with Paris reaffirming a strictly French way of doing things, such as barring any religious symbols in state schools.
This angers youths of immigrant origin who feel they have already made many efforts to integrate but the French majority does little to reciprocate.
Bauer said that, contrary to popular opinion, these youths are in a way quite well integrated into French society. The way they erupt in protest and violence against the strong central state reflects the model they see, he said, for example from protesting workers and far-left social agitators.
But the political system, which unconsciously equates integration with an ideal of Frenchness, has not been able to figure out how to deal with this new unrest.
I challenge Messieurs les RWDBs to make the case for their interpretation of these events. Not just by repeating mantras about Intifadas, Eurabian civil wars, and “clashes of civilisations” but through careful and measured argument. But I expect all I’ll read in response is more ludicrous hyperbole. I’ll quite happily join in the criticism of the universalist and heavy-handed French state, and would strongly argue that social injustice and alienation should be systemically ameliorated in order to mitigate the underlying structural causes of these disorders, but I won’t agree that history is being made or civilisation is in danger.
Elsewhere: In other news for the RWDBs, another reality check from John Quiggin - Chirac is actually right-wing and his policies may have contributed to the situation.
In addition to touching on all of your points Mark, Akerman in Sunday’s Telly finishes his rant like this:
He also argues that it’s the fault of civil rights law that this kind of thing is occuring, and with the statement actually appears to believe that we should not have civil rights enshrined because many the countries where the migrants come from do not have those same rights. As if we in the west should not aspire to something higher…..one would have thought he would have wanted us to be different.
Much is made of the success of our’s and Canada’s multicultural system, and there should be real pride in this because it is multicult that has given us the flexibility to absorb migrants into our nations, it gives them breathing space to grow into a society rather than force feeding them a heavily statist, authoratarian one size fits all view of society (where is all the jive talk about choice and flexibility now huh?). But then again, in that the French are just like our bellicose RWDB’s, methinks that is why they protest so much, they see the stunning failure of their way.
There is more here at the increasingly useful and important Global Voices Online.
There’s this exculpatory need for the Huntingdon style “grandiose narratives” pedlars to push a line that Islam is intrinsicly evil.
Exculpatory because Messieurs RW almost invariably support the Iraq war as that too kicks Islamic ass, problem being that the Iraq war is a real headache which is being palpably lost, because those “perfidious” people did not see the vision and splendour of the Bushovic Imperial Scam for world domination.
The only way out for them to recover some high ground, (out of the geo-political latrines where they have fallen), is if the Islamic world becomes more wicked and perverse than they are. So the more shit that goes down in any Islamic condemnatory context, the happier they are.
Notice the gloating, the perverse delight of Messieurs RW, over the French rioting, unedifying to say the least, and draw the only logical conclusion—they don’t want to understand the hole the French statists have dug for themselves, they merely want to put the boot in.
Oh and because France opposed the war, it’s double gloat time.
Why should I make use of careful and measured argument when you don’t?
You simply repeat left-wing mantras about “psocial alienation, lack of employment and opportunities and welfare traps” as if they were established facts, and force complex religious, ethnic and cultural phenomena into a one-size-fits-all leftist straitjacket.
Far from being parsimonious, your interpretation of these events is an artificial construct based entirely on your political ideology.
And they still cannot spell Huntington! Good grief, now ol’ Samuel must know how John Quiggan is feeling…
I told you so.
very good Steve.
Here cometh the wet and dry sandpaper narrative, (in 80 grit today?)
And you thought you’d get no serious discussion, Mark. Your cynicism diminishes us all.
I must say we must give the RWDB’s credit for spending the best part of the last 4 years constructing this narrative and finding data that fits it, whether it be piggybanks or European riots. Of course sometimes things like France’s lack of multiculturalism, put a hitch in the story they want to tell, but we can always state that it really is multiculturalism anyhow. Any other inconvient facts are written off as liberal or MSM bias and voila, we have a grand narrative, an approaching apocolyptic end times struggle heralding the oncoming class (or race or religious) struggle that would make any post-modernist proud.
But you never have.
The left’s supreme dedication to ignoring all the evidence that contradicts its pretty ideological constructs would put a creationist to shame.
So ignoring the fact that riots whether in LA or Paris start in places of poverty and unemployment, but instead deciding that this time its all about a clash of civilization isn’t ignoring the evidence?
Bauer’s point, cited by you Mark:
Is a good one. The rioting in France follows the pattern of a lot of other significant historical French unrests. I don’t think you can look at these riots without also looking at the obvious comparison: the student riots of 1968.
The 1968 rioting was interpreted on both sides as a smaller part of a grand global struggle for and against capitalism. On the other hand, it was also about trade unionists in car plants being heavied by the Government and their managers, and striking as a very specific self-protective (non-revolutionary) act.
Was the 1968 rioting caused by Commo students? Yes, some of them were Communists, but that’d be a very simplistic way of looking at the event. It’s the same here. Just because some rioters are nominally Muslim doesn’t make them part of a grand discourse.
Of course you could take the good oil on grand discourses from Adam Yoshida, if you really wanted to.
Nonsense. These riots are in no way comparable to the unrest of 1968, with their socialist underpinnings.
There are religious and ethnic bases to the current violence, caused by the introduction of Islamic ghettoes that will not assimilate and are seeking autonomy.
Amir Taheri presents a realistic assessment, one not based on leftist wishful thinking:
The rise of political correctness and cultural relativism combined with a much larger influx of immigrants than could be readily absorbed, prevented assimilation from taking place.
The result is a widespread subculture that regards itself as Islamic, African or Palestinian, and opposed to the rest of France. That subculture has been expressing itself in violence for many years, but governments and media turned a blind eye because it didn’t suit their ideological preconceptions to admit its existence.
Now it’s become so big that it can no longer be ignored in France itself — though leftist theorists in other countries still manage to conceal the truth from themselves.
Well, if I lived in one of those godawful cites you glimpse on the way into Paris from Charles De Gaulle, I’d be out torching the odd beemer myself for kicks.
But look on the bright side, the death toll is nowhere near what happens in the US when angry bored young men, simmering with racial and economic grievances, erupt because of ham-fisted policing. What was the LA 1992 riot death toll again? 50+. Detroit ‘67, 40+, Watts ‘65 30+.
“…with shot and shell. As harsh as it sounds, there is now no alternative to blood running in the streets of Paris.”
I’m sure Yoshi baby is actually a performance artist punking the other RWDBs.
If only the French had adopted a sensible policy of multiculturalism, all this could have been avoided.
Aha! Finally EP finds a way to blame multiculturalism, even though no such policy exists in France.
Something else being ignored is that the reason there are so many French communities of Algerians is because the French deliberately refused to acknowledge Algeria as a colony, incorporating it into the French nation-proper. Under that policy the Algerians were French before they even got off the planes. The point isn’t a cataclysmic
Consider that even Chirac, hardly a lefty multicultural theorist himself, acknowledges that it’s the economy, stupid:
And, strangely emailed to me by Jack Strocchi, this New York Times article seems to confirm my thesis more than his - describing the differences in French social policy as compared to US and UK policy which lie behind this phenomenon. Interestingly, though, it does point out that material conditions in the French cites are much better than those in the US. Perhaps the French need WorkChoices to motivate all these kiddies to get a job? Hang on - that doesn’t fit the clash of civilisations meme…
Excuse me:
The point is that it isn’t cataclysmic.
EP’s link also refers to the failure of assimilation!
Remember the left’s Grand Narrative on Hurricane Katrina?
Women raped!
People murdered at the Superdome!
Americans with guns!
Mosquito-borne pandemic!
Seven year-old girl gang-raped!
10,000 dead!
Bush causes hurricanes!
Halliburton got rebuilding contracts!
Levees sabotaged!
Genocide!
World economy endangered - thanks Bush!
Kim quoted Dreadnought approvingly as the “one Australian conservative blogger who’s prepared to confront the truth.” The ‘truth’ was:
Hysterical codswallop.
Kate:
Where hurricanes are an annual reality.
John Quiggin:
Only worth it if you’re trying on a bogus grand enviro-narrative for your own political reasons.
In Tim Dunlop’s long list of laments, no mention was made of Mayor ‘What Buses?’ Nagin’s culpability. (He’s a Democrat).
Hey, Paul Krugman described what’s needed in France now:
That disabled woman set on fire by RoP adherents could have done with some security and rescuing.
Naomi:
Economic growth in America is up.
Alan from Southerly Bluster:
Lefty Elitist agrees:
Sweet moment.
To paraphrase Mark: It’s not hard to suspect that the the left’s interest in these events was more to score domestic political points than in understanding them.
As for guns, this just in:
One of the protesters calls it as it is:
So how low has France sunk?
Gaddafi offers help over riots.
Muammar mia.
Liam - most of the impetus for Mai 68 came from anarchist students - the “official” Communist Party was in effect on de Gaulle’s side. Sorry if that stuffs up another of EP’s grand narratives.
But it’s quite right that a popular French tradition is being invoked/twisted here.
There’s no point there, C.L., - structural inequality peculiar to the US was at the root of Katrina and structural inequality peculiar to France (eg the assimilationist universalist policy, the failure of colonialism) is at the root of these events.
You’ve proved nothing, C.L., and typically, despite the invitation, you fail totally to advance your thesis in positive terms, preferring your usual game of LEFT bashing.
I repeat - let’s see a reasoned interpretation of these events as world-historic, representative of a clash of civilisations and (in your words) akin to an Intifada.
25 years!
Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables
Shorter CL: I am holed up with a gun in a shack somewhere, linking imaginary left positions into a grand, carceral narrative. Help me.
Lefty, shouldn’t there be an Inverse “Elitiste du Gauche Three Paragraph Rule” to outlaw snarky ‘Shorter X’ comments? I think so.
Currency, you may have a point. A lot of people were wrong to jump so fiercely about and around Katrina. It doesn’t make your constant references to the “Religion of Peace”/”RoP” any less sectarian, and doesn’t demonstrate anything about the rioting in Paris.
In other news, another reality check from John Quiggin - Chirac is actually right-wing and his policies may have contributed to the situation.
Nabakov says: November 7th, 2005 at 10:58 am
Nabakov seems to be implying that France’s (proto-New Right/New Left) post-war immigrant selection and settlement policy was wrong. That would mean he is joining the ranks of the despised “national citizen-ists”, which would be a Pauline conversion if ever there was one.
Maybe Nabakov, instead of indulging in pretentious put-downs of a wannabe Davos-man, should do some empirical social analysis. Those “godawful cities” were built by welfare statist planners to house guest workers.
Next he will be telling us of the horrors of “fly-over land” in the US.
This is whats called “defining deviance down”. If one lowers the bar on a cultural policy then anything short of full scale civil war qualifies as success. The same tendentious debating tactic is being used by die-hard defenders of Iraq attack to pretend that regime change is a success.
I, unlike Nabakov who talks a good game about political protest but does nothing except blow hot air, have experience in organizing actual political protest groups. Lawful protest works best for all concerned in the long run, since it legitimates political change. This talk of “burning beamers” is just false bravado from the rear echelon.
Jack - It‚Äôs not a matter of “selecting immigrants”. Most of the rioters are third generation French citizens of North African and particularly Algerian origin — a legacy of France‚Äôs approach to colonialism (which was to refuse to recognise that colonies were that and incorporate them into metropolitan France) and the immigration is the responsibility of De Gaulle‚Äôs government‚Äôs continuing the fiction that these French citizens were indistinguishable from native French and would automatically assimilate.
It would help if some commenters would recognise the specificity of French history and culture and not automatically extrapolate from Australian experience, as if it were the same.
And the “guest worker” phenomenon was primarily German and Northern European immigration - as your link implicitly recognises when it refers to North Africans having fought in French uniform in WW2 - France is a different case from the rest of Europe and immigration has largely been from its former colonies, as was the case at the same time in the UK, but not in Germany where most immigration was from Turkey.
It’s helpful, Jack, to study some of these matters rather than just making assumptions on the basis of articles on the internet.
On Liam’s point, to the degree that any of us showed too much emotional affect during discussion of Katrina and not enough dispassionate analysis, that should be an object lesson for C.L. to adopt a measured posture on these events rather than hyperbolic raving about clashes of civilisations.
Physician, heal thyself.
I also await some framing of the events from C.L. in a positive argument that supports his position.
At least EP had a go. C.L. appears unwilling to defend his own arguments rationally.
A long, three-year-old, but still very prescient article by Theodore Dalrymple on the cities of darkness that surround the City of Light is here.
Your thesis is nonsense, Mark. The same phenomena are occurring throughout Europe. It’s not all about France. That’s where the Intifada is centered at the moment. Disturbing incidents are also now common in Swedan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Holland, Germany, Spain, Britain, Russia etc. That’s to say nothing of the RoP’s exterminationist agenda to our North and Iran’s recently revealed Final Solution. (Explained away disgracefully here last night).
The West is at war with a sick cult.
Mark:
Iranian President misunderstood.
Quiggers:
“Chirac actually right wing.”
What next?
Torched disabled woman actually a case of spontaneous human combustion.
This is becoming hilarious.
Haven’t got time to read all of it, Rob, but the first example of the sky falling in is Rumanians perpetrating street crime. Doesn’t fit the “barbarians at the gate” story that C.L. and EP want to tell.
Yes, it is, C.L. Because you’re still not arguing your point - except to connect disparate events with different proximate causes to an ideological proposition about Islam.
I await, given the link Rob’s helpfully provided, your fearsome denunciation of Christian European Rumanians causing isolated incidents across Europe which really go to show that Eastern Europeans form unassimilable enclaves and that the big W West should therefore bomb Rumania.
You do need to read the rest of it, Kim.
C.L.
Play fair, please.
I have not said that the Iranian President was misunderstood.
I pointed out that his speech was ritualistic, and also that other senior Iranian officials - when the reaction became clear - rushed to distance Iran from any actual plan to attack Israel.
That does not mean that I support the Iranian regime.
The fact that you do not distinguish between Shi’ite Iranians in a particular geo-political and historical context and Sunni French people of North African orignin within their particular social and historical context - preferring to make invalid generalisations about “Islam” (as if religion had any particular relevance to what’s happening in France anyway) just shows how totally disconnected your grand narrative and doomist rhetoric is from any actual facts.
I haven’t the time, Rob, at the moment - I have to work. Unlike others, much of my work doesn’t involve me sitting at a desk and a computer, so I don’t have the luxury of constant participation in these threads.
Great column: Wake up, Europe, you’ve a war on your hands.
Par example:
Rob, CL, Teddy ‘not my real name but oh I so want to be a Toff sitting in an exclusive gentleman’s club’ Dalrymple, my head hurts. Can one of you please explain - is this about crime or jihad? Were the blacks in Watts just the vanguard of our new Islamic colonialists or is this about social marginalisation?
Argument by link the best you can do, C.L.?
Rob - it sounds typical of any urban area that’s socially deprived - try visiting Redfern, mate. Be hard to pin that one down to Islam (though as far as I can see - unlike C.L. and EP, you’re not joining that bandwagon - which I recognise and respect).
What Jason and Mark said.
People could also visit East LA and Compton.
Hispanics and African-Americans are largely not Muslims - in fact most Hispanics are Catholic (which is reflected in some of the gang culture in fact) - but Dalrymple could just as easily have written much the same about folks there.
I was there a fortnight ago - would happily show C.L. and Rob around.
Jack Strocchi says: November 7th, 2005 at 12:05 pm
Correction: that should read “proto New Right/retro-Old Left”. The post-war French immigration policy evolved as a compromise between (the proto-New Right) capitalist industrial demand for cheap labour and (the retro-Old Left) statist bureaucracy’s supply of urban planning monstrosities.
This kind of deal is typical of the arrangements that emerge out of the nation famed for political “cohabitation“.
Translates to a famous hit of the 1980s, if my French does not let me down. NWA came and went and society’s still here.
“Baise La Police” - not a slogan peculiar to Islam.
Steyn’s article (and I already linked in the post to an interview with him) is an excellent example of doomist hysteria with very little proportion to the facts.
His comparison with Iraq is interesting.
Remember how Lefties were supposedly racist - according to George W. Bush - because we allegedly said that Arabs couldn’t “do” democracy?
Now C.L. and Steyn tell us that North Africans (who aren’t “Arabs”, but hey…) are starting a civil war against civilisation, liberalism, democracy etc, and C.L. puts it all down to one causal factor - Islam.
But then consistency appears not to be a virtue for RWDBs.
It seems to me that Islam is largely a side issue, though it may have post-facto application as a means of self-justification and self-identification for the riots. The roots seem to be, as Dalrymple suggests, in structural things: appalling urban environments, endemic unemployment, alienation and disaffection that has sunk in to such a level of depth, both socially and psychologically, that it may in fact be uneradicable.
Dalrymple seems to saying so here:
Islamism treads on the heels of alienation and despair; it does not precede it.
Insofar as any rioters have stated a goal, it is separatism from the civil authority.
They want the French government and police out of their Islamic neighbourhoods.
Pretty much what the Muslim separatists want in Aceh and southern Thailand, and which they have been pursuing with violence for many years.
How many times can you witness the same pattern of behaviour, and still fail to perceive it?
What Rob said. What Rob said, what Rob said, what Rob said.
Thank you Rob.
Mark — Islam is not a race. It is a religion.
You accuse RWDBs of inconsistency, based on your own failure to appreciate the most basic distinction between physical characteristics and ideology.
It seems that accuracy is not a virtue for leftist commentators.
Argument by link the best you can do, C.L.?
Apparently yes, Mark. Your brief post includes no fewer than four links to my Catallaxy observations.
Dalrymple isn’t even that keen on living in Britain, Jason, so I doubt he’s that interested in British gentlemen’s club culture. Like many other practising medicos who write, he uses a pseudonym. A fairly pointless critique.
Taking Rob’s cue, a few quotes seen apposite:
The phenomenon mentioned in Dalrymple’s latest column is surely something the left will be happy to condemn - Islamic misogyny. He links it to that culture of violence and mediocrity which is so common to Islamic enclaves. Let’s all agree that there is a link between the abuse of women and the health of any culture.
Indeed: Family guilty of ‘honour killing’.
EP, is Islam the cause of the Acehnese desire for independence, or the rallying call of those who wish to fight for it?
Indeed Rob. Well said. Most urban riots have a similar aetiology.
Some commentators need to apply Ockham’s razor.
I’m not saying Islamism isn’t a threat to Europe - I think it is. But I don’t see these riots have a lot to do with it. In fact, we’ve seen a number of times - Bouyeri, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh, the London Underground suicide bombers - the real danger lies with apparently ‘normal’, well educated young men who, for whatever reason, are radicalised to the point they seek martyrdom through murder and access to the Islamic paradise.
Well said, Rob.
EP, I’m well aware that Islam isn’t a race. The fact that prejudice against Islam now seems legitimate whereas racial prejudice is still not might be worth pondering.
I’m rather surprised C.L. hasn’t trotted out his “Islamic misogyny” line before now - which incidentally, lots of us have condemned - though unlike C.L. we recognise that there are also cultural factors at play - just as it would be wrong to ascribe Western beliefs that women should not go out on streets unaccompanied which were prevalent in the bourgeoisie of the 19th century entirely to Xtianity.
It’s a boring diversionary tactic, while we continue to await C.L.’s reasoned defence of his clash of civilisations thesis and the Paris disorders.
Which is rather like Waiting for Godot, it seems.
Rushdie’s thesis of a sick religion in need of reform is Occam’s Razor applied.
The sociological accretions being manufactured by liberals to explain the Paris Intifada constitute a repudiation of William’s principle.
And EP - the LA rioters wanted the LA police out of their neighbourhoods. But they weren’t Islamic.
Perhaps Kim could inform us - as a recent visitor - if 13 years down the track, LA lies in smoking ruins, shattered by a clash of civilisations.
Or - as is more likely - tensions remain, and social problems remain - but American civilisation is still standing.
Rubbish, C.L.
If you see similar phenomena occurring in similar urban areas in Australia, the UK, the US, France and many other countries, and the common factor is not Islam, and indeed Islam is not a factor at all in some cases, then Occam’s razor would indeed suggest that the cause is sociological at base.
You’re the denialist, Mark. Last night it was Iran, now “cultural factors at play” in violence against women. Have you no shame?
Mark — Islam is not a race. It is a religion.
Like bigots have ever been that picky for their fix.
Calm down, C.L.
There are cultural factors at play in violence against women. That’s not to excuse it - any fair person would recognise that I totally condemn it - but to seek understanding. There are also cultural factors at play in violence against women by Anglo males.
I’ve already pointed out to you that you’ve misrepresented what I said about Iran.
You are absolutely shameless in the way that you argue - you distort opponents’ positions consistently. It’s offensive.
C.L., I’m placing your comments in moderation til you apologise for making offensive misrepresentations about other commenters, and commit to civil dialogue.
Should you be prepared to defend your thesis positively, I’ll let that one through.
AS I pointed our last night, its like saying Brixton riots were “caused by blacks”. It may - or may not- be empirically true in the shallowest descriptive sense, but tells us literally nothing about the problem. We remain fully ignorant if satisied by that statement.
So, UK blacks were just like that, huh - riotous by nature? You see the inherent racism. We have reasons to act, they have dispositions.
Well what I see is drug-related gangs (hardly surprising in that neck of Paris) in turf wars, which police failed to nip in the bud, which has now spilled out and sucked in every man and his dog who wants a stoush and every other two bit who wants to use the opportunity to fan the flames. Which is why it is a riot not an organised movement.
Kind of reminds me of Macquarie Fields. Didn’t we also have some right wing nutzos of some sort wanting to come to their aid as well? Maybe some elements of Redfern.
There’s a italics tag somewhere that needs to be closed….
There is one new factor though, compared to previous such riots in the UK and the US. ICT. What with SMS and the internet, it’s so much easier to organise flash mobs and to warn of les flics and the CRS approaching - hence there is more semblence of organisation. However the aims appear as inchoate as ever.
And jeez Jack, yer really booking today. But I really don’t think my little observation deserved the positive mob of strawmen you marched up hill and down dale.
“This talk of “burning beamers” is just false bravado from the rear echelon.”
“Rear echelon”? I think that reveals rather more than just your rather scanty sense of humour.
Also “pretentious put-downs of a wannabe Davos-man”?? and “have experience in organizing actual political protest groups.”
Well at least you managed to work round to your favourite topic, “Strocchi! A Man For All Reasons. The Musical”.
Should be fixed, Rob, if you mean on the front page. Try refreshing your browser.
I’m well aware that Islam isn’t a race. The fact that prejudice against Islam now seems legitimate whereas racial prejudice is still not might be worth pondering.
Yes, if I were a slave-unit of the leftist hive-mind who had actively vilified Christianity over many years, I’d ponder my hypocrisy in getting upset over people pointing out certain unpleasant truths about Islam.
What we really need is no more cheer squads for RFSP
The French govt need to widely publicise they are immediately calling in the army with orders to shoot to kill any rioters or arsonists and take back the streets from the RFSP. Whatever it takes and however long it takes. Only when the streets are clean should any talking begin.
Nabakov says: November 7th, 2005 at 2:07 pm
Good point. The Islamist problem is a wierd hybrid of pre-modern ethnonology and post-modern technology.
Its hard to read a yearning to “burn a few beamers” as anything else than an incitement to riot. Which is kind of funny coming from a laid back fat-cat like Nabakov.
Typical with the link thingy. Try here http://nerra.com/broadsword/archives/2005/11/05/723/really-fucking-stupid-people/