Fjordman

The Battle for France

By Paul Belien from the Brussels Journal:


The Battle for France

France is not exceptional. Police officers and firemen are used to having stones thrown at them in Western Europe’s immigrant neighborhoods as a normal part of their daily routine. This is what Andrew Osborn of the British Sunday newspaper The Observer wrote after visiting Borgerhout, the largely Moroccan suburb of the Flemish city of Antwerp, in December 2002: “Outsiders aren’t welcome. ‘Go home before we beat your f------g white ass,’ is how one group of young men greet The Observer. Passing police cars are bombarded with a barrage of expletives and spittle.” Here is what Rolf Landgren, a police officer in the Swedish town of Malmö, told Steve Harrigan of Fox News in November 2004: “If we park our car it will be damaged—so we have to go very often in two vehicles, one just to protect the other vehicle.” Fear of violence has changed the way police, firemen, and emergency workers do their jobs, explained Harrigan. There are some neighborhoods Swedish ambulance drivers will not go to without a police escort.

These examples, unknown to Americans but all too familiar to many Europeans, show how for years virtual no-go areas have been forming in Old Europe. The areas were abandoned by left-leaning authorities intent on not “provoking” the immigrants with police presence. These pockets of Eurabia are scattered across the western part of the continent. Some of the gangs consist of Islamic radicals, some are plain mafia gangs engaging in “secular” criminal activities, some are a mixture of both. Whenever right-wing law-and-order politicians try to reassert the state’s authority over their territories, heavy rioting follows. Indeed, it is more convenient to think that the cause of the riots is plain thuggishness resulting from discrimination on the job market. The poor natives who live in the immigrants’ neighborhoods know better, however. They know that the generals of Eurabia, the leaders of the “youths,” drive BMWs and Mercedes (which no-one dares to set alight), and that they use mobile phones and PCs to instruct their highly mobile troops. The war in France is not about social injustice, but about territory.

posted by Unknown @ 2:21 AM