America Alone (20 page)

Oh, dear. Who's not "being serious" here? In Normandy, it's not just the cheese that's soft and runny. Granted that France's over-regulated economy severely obstructs the social mobility of Muslim immigrants, even M. Debris--whoops, sorry--even M. Debré cannot be so out of touch as to think "seriously" that the rioters were rioting for "a fairer, more fraternal society." But maybe he does. The political class and the media seem to serve as mutual reinforcers of their own obsolete illusions.

In December 2002, I was asked to take part in a symposium on Europe and began with the observation that "I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan
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than, say, Holland or Denmark." At the time, this was taken by the Left as confirmation of my descent into insanity: Europe was still regarded as a bastion of progress. By 2006, the Right was querying the thesis, arguing that the Bush Doctrine is a crock: how can liberty save the Muslim world when Muslims are jeopardizing liberty in Europe?

Well, they're not contradictory positions. In the Middle East, it may well be that, as the gnarled old Yankees tell tourists, you can't get there from here. But I'd argue there's a sporting chance of being able to get at least partway there from the here and now of the present Muslim world. Whatever their problems, most Islamic countries will be embarking on their evolution into free states as reasonably homogenous societies. European nations face the trickier job of retaining their freedoms at a time of increasing societal incoherence: they're getting there from here in the one-way express lane, and they're not going to like where they end up. About six months after September 11, I went on a grand tour of the Continent's Muslim ghettos and then flew on to the Middle East. The Muslims I met in Europe were, almost to a man, more alienated and angrier than the ones back in Araby. Don't take my word for it. It was a Hamburg cell that pulled off September 11, a British subject who was the shoe-bomber, a London School of Economics graduate who had Daniel Pearl executed ...

True, America and Australia grew the institutions of their democracy with relatively homogeneous populations and then evolved into successful "multicultural" societies. But the Continent isn't multicultural so much as bicultural. You have hitherto homogeneous Scandinavian societies whose cities have become 40 percent Muslim in the space of a generation. Imagine colonial New England when it was still the Mayflower crowd and one day they woke up and noticed that all the Aldens and Standishes, Cookes and Winslows were in their fifties and sixties and all the young guys were called Ahmed and Mohammed. That's what's happened in Rotterdam and Malmö. There are aging native populations and young Muslim populations and that's it: "two solitudes," as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there's three, four, or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing "We Are the World." But if there's just two--you and the Other--that's generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it's no longer quite clear who's the majority and who's the minority--a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian, or Dutch maternity ward. Take Fiji--not a comparison France would be flattered by, although until the late 1980s the Fijians enjoyed a century of peaceful, stable, constitutional evolution the French were never able to manage. At any rate, Fiji is comprised of native Fijians and ethnic Indians brought in as indentured workers by the British. If memory serves, 46.2 percent are native Fijians and 48.6 percent are Indo-Fijians. Fifty-fifty, give or take, with no intermarrying. In 1987, the first Indian-majority government came to power. A month later, Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, officer of the Order of the British Empire, staged the first of his two coups. Is it that difficult to sketch a similar situation for France? Even in relatively peaceful bicultural societies, politics becomes tribal: loyalists vs. nationalists in Northern Ireland, separatists vs. federalists in Quebec. Picture a French election circa 2020: the Islamic Republican Coalition wins the most seats in the National Assembly. The Chiraquiste crowd give a fatalistic shrug and M. de Villepin starts including crowd-pleasing suras from the Koran at his poetry recitals. But would Jean-Marie Le Pen or (by then) his daughter take it so well? Or would the temptation to be France's Colonel Rabuka prove too much?

And the Fijian scenario--a succession of bloodless coups--is the optimistic one, and not just when measured against such notable bicultural societies as Rwanda. After all, the
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differences between Fijian natives and Indians are nothing compared to those between the French and les beurs. All those Bush Doctrine naysayers who argue that Iraq is an artificial entity that can never be a functioning state ought to take a look at the Netherlands. You think Kurds and Arabs, Sunni and Shia are incompatible? What do you call a jurisdiction split between post-Christian secular gay potheads and anti-whoring anti-sodomite antieverything-you-dig Islamists? If Kurdistan's an awkward fit in Iraq, how well does Pornostan fit in the Islamic Republic of Holland? Europe's problems don't nullify the Bush Doctrine so much as present a more urgent case for it.

As to the "French" "youth," a gentleman in Antibes cautioned me against characterizing the disaffected as "Islamist" and advised me to examine them more closely. "They look like L.A. gangsters," he said, "not beturbaned prophet-monkeys." Leaving aside more than a few cries of "Allahu Akhbar!" on the streets, my friend is correct. But that's the point. The theoretical virtue of "multiculturalism" is that it's a form of mellifluous cultural cross-pollination: the best of all worlds. But just as often it gives us the worst of all worlds: the worst attributes of Muslim culture--the subjugation of women-combined with the worst attributes of Western culture--license and self-gratification. Tattooed, pierced Pakistani skinhead gangs swaggering down the streets of northern England are as much a product of multiculturalism as the turban-wearing Sikh Mountie in the royal escort. Islamofascism itself is what it says: a fusion of Islamic identity with oldschool European totalitarianism. But, whether in turbans or gangsta threads, just as Communism was in its day, so Islam is today's identity of choice for the world's disaffected. In 2001, Paris elected its first openly homosexual mayor, Bertrand Delanoe, and, as always, this was taken as evidence of how cool and relaxed everyone is about the whole gay thing nowadays. M. Ie Maire certainly worked hard to put the gay in gay Paree--potted palms and parasols along the Seine all summer long, etc.. His big idea was the Nuit Blanche--the

"Sleepless Night"--of October 5, 2002, when the city's landmarks would be open for one big all-night party. Come to the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, and if you make it through till dawn there'll be free coffee and croissants. City Hall itself was done up like a stylish 'tween-wars nightclub--and no state security metal detectors on the doors, because, after all, what genuine jazz boïte would have such things?

And that's where M. Delanoé was, in the thick of the festive throng, when he got stabbed. His assailant missed his aorta by less than an inch, but gamely the mayor insisted that the party go on while he was taken to the Pitié-Salpétrière hospital for a three-hour operation that saved his life.

His would-be killer was a Muslim immigrant, Azedine Berkane. But, as the establishment was at pains to emphasize, the good news is that he wasn't a terrorist. No, he's just a Muslim who hates homosexuals.

And that's good news how, exactly?

Le Monde reported from M. Berkane's wretched riot-prone ghetto the views of his neighbors: "He was a bit like us," said one. "We're all homophobic here, because it's not natural."

"It's against Islam," said another. "Muslim fags don't exist." A traditional terrorist has demands which are in most cases subject to circumstances: He doesn't want your troops on his soil? Okay, we don't really need them there anyway. But a Muslim who hates you just cuz? That's all but impervious to external pressure.
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The old joke about British Palestine was that it was the twice-promised land: hence today a Western democracy and a disaffected Muslim population exist in (for the most part) two solitudes on the same piece of real estate. But doesn't that sum up Europe too? The jihadists understand that the Continent is up for grabs in a way that America isn't. And as their numbers grow it seems likely that wily Islamic leaders in the Middle East will embrace the cause of the rights of European Muslims in the same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians. When France began contemplating its headscarf ban in schools, it dispatched government ministers to seek the advice of Egyptian imams, implicitly accepting the view of Islamic scholars that the Fifth Republic is now an outlying province of the Dar al-Islam. As the Zionist Entity can testify, that's not a club you necessarily want to be signed up for (though it helps explain why the Quai d'Orsay can live with Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third). And what happens when, say, Iran starts spreading a little terror start-up money through France and the Netherlands the way the ayatollahs have done in Lebanon and Gaza? What would it take to persuade a European Muslim to blow himself up in an Amsterdam gay bar?

Few EU leaders have a clue what to do about this, but, as France's headscarf law and Britain's Incitement to Racial Hatred bill underline, mediation between what Tony Blair called (in the wake of the Tube bombing) "our way of life" and Muslim values has already become a central dynamic of European political culture--a remarkable achievement, for a minority few Europeans were more than vaguely conscious of before September 11. Meanwhile, across the borders pour not primarily suicide bombers or suitcase nukes, though they will come in the end, but ideology-fierce, glamorous, and implacable. Here's the final irony, and perhaps the most distressing of all to European anti-Semites: in one of history's better jests, in this scenario they're the Jews.

CONQUEST

As the Guardian reported in London in 2005: "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."

Ah, those "French youths." 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 banlieues of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as "French," and likely never will. Four years after September 11, it turned out there really is an explosive "Arab street," but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois. Since the beginning of this century, French Muslims 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're losing 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 in the 'burbs, but 732 AD--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 two hundred 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
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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"--"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 Europe 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 re-run the Battle of Poitiers. When Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille, daughter of former prime minister and EU bigwig Jacques Delors and likely presidential candidate in the post-Chirac era, held a meeting with an imam in Roubaix, the gentleman demanded that it take place on the edge of the neighborhood--in recognition that his turf was Muslim territory which she was bound not to enter. Mme. Aubry conceded the point, as more and more politicians will in the years ahead.

The peoples of Europe may not be willing to go as far down the appeasement path as their rulers, but Europe is a top-down construct, so the rulers will get quite a long way down before the masses start to drag them back. One observes, for example, that brave figures who draw attention to these trends--men and women such as Theo van Gogh, Bat Ye'or, and Oriana Fallaci--are either murdered, forced to live under armed guard, driven into exile overseas, or sued under specious hate-crimes laws. Dismissed by the European establishment, they're banished to the fringe. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian, spoke out against the ill-treatment of Muslim women, a subject she knows about firsthand, and found herself under threat of death. Her neighbors, the justice system, and the Dutch government reacted to this by taking her to court, getting her evicted from her home, and announcing plans to revoke her citizenship. Boundlessly tolerant Europe, which finds it so hard to expel openly treasonous jihad-inciting imams, finally found one Muslim it's willing to kick out.