After watching the seventh straight night of riots in the Parisian suburbs, I am afraid we are seeing the beginnings of civil war in Europe between the Europeans and the second and third generations of Muslim immigrants.
The unrest spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, exposing the despair, anger and criminality in France's poor suburbs - fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.
The violence, concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European nations face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from the continent's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values, too.
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The unrest spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, exposing the despair, anger and criminality in France's poor suburbs - fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.
The violence, concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European nations face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from the continent's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values, too.
Francis Fukuyama explores why Europe is in such trouble in A Year of Living Dangerously
We profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamist ideology when we see it as an assertion of traditional Muslim values or culture.....In his book "Globalized Islam" (2004), the French scholar Olivier Roy argues persuasively that contemporary radicalism is precisely the product of the "deterritorialization" of Islam, which strips Muslim identity of all of the social supports it receives in a traditional Muslim society.
The identity problem is particularly severe for second- and third-generation children of immigrants. They grow up outside the traditional culture of their parents, but unlike most newcomers to the United States, few feel truly accepted by the surrounding society.
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The real challenge for democracy lies in Europe, where the problem is an internal one of integrating large numbers of angry young Muslims and doing so in a way that does not provoke an even angrier backlash from right-wing populists. Two things need to happen: First, countries like Holland and Britain need to reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists. But second, they also need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds.
UPDATE: Wow, another must-read by Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal, The Suicide Bombers Among Us. At its heart, hatred and the desire to continue total male domination.
the sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced, in a single day, by the nightmare of permanent conflict.
Posted by Jill Fallon at November 4, 2005 2:19 AM | Permalink