How little it takes for the Muslim masses to erupt in an apoplectic frenzy that shakes the very world to its roots! Last Tuesday, June 27, two police officers in Nanterre, a banlieue (suburb) of Paris, stopped a car whose driver then pulled away, whereupon one of the officers fired at it. His shot killed the driver, Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of Algerian parentage who turned out to have a remarkably long rap sheet for someone of his tender years, including over a dozen arrests.
When news of Nahel’s killing spread, swarms of French Muslims – without waiting to obtain further information about the case – took to the streets, setting fire, that night and on the nights that followed, to countless vehicles and bus shelters, plus innumerable buildings, including dozens of schools and city halls and police stations, at first in Paris and its outskirts and later in other French (and even Belgian) municipalities. A library in Metz – recently enlarged for the benefit of Muslim youth “who wanted to work, study, read, and have a haven of peace” – was burned to the ground. So was a transport depot in Aubervilliers. A Holocaust memorial in Nanterre was desecrated, with vandals writing on it that they planned to perpetrate “a new Holocaust.” And the homes of several mayors have been attacked.
On Saturday afternoon, the Guardian reported that, according to France’s finance minister, “more than 700 shops, supermarkets, restaurants and bank branches had been ‘ransacked, looted and sometimes even burnt to the ground since Tuesday.’” Among the protesters has been Nahel’s mother, who, clad in a t-shirt reading Justice pour Nahel, has been photographed cheering, laughing, and shaking her fists; in not one of the dozens of pictures I’ve seen of her does she look remotely grief-stricken. By contrast, Nahel’s grandmother called on Sunday for the rioting to stop, saying that while she abhors Nahel’s killer, she has nothing against other policemen; on the contrary, she said that she was glad they were out there, trying to restore order.
In France, of course, mass unrest is old hat. Riots, and for that matter revolutions, are a time-honored Gallic tradition. No one could ever claim that Muslims in France have done a good job of integrating into the finer aspects of the mainstream culture of their host nation, but at least their own readiness to torch and destroy stuff can make them look like a reasonably neat fit into the country that gave us the Reign of Terror, the June Rebellion of 1832, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the soixante-huitards. Indeed, the large-scale car-burning that has become a regular nocturnal pastime in the banlieues makes the Gilets Jaunes and other native Frenchmen of a rebellious bent, including those who recently took to the boulevards to protest the rise in the retirement age to 64 (!), look like slackers.
As for these latest riots, which have (are you surprised?) featured cries of “Allahu akbar,” they’re part of what, during the past half-century or so, has become a distinct French tradition all its own. The other day, the Sky News website provided a handy list of some of the more destructive Muslim disturbances in La Belle République. The very first, in 1979, took place in a suburb of Lyon “after a young person of North African descent was arrested.” In 1991, violence hit the Paris suburbs, first, in March, after “an Arab teenager was shot dead by a supermarket security guard” and then, in June, after police killed one Youssef Khaif, 23, who was driving a stolen car.
In subsequent years, riots ensued in various French cities when police killed “18-year-old Mohamed Bahri,” who was driving “towards a police roadblock”; when “police killed Algerian terrorist Khaled Kelkal”; when “Habib Muhammed, 17, was shot by police during a car theft”; when one Mohamed Benmouna died in police custody; and so on. These anarchic episodes, of course, should not be confused with the many acts of Islamic terrorism that have occurred during the same period – including the 2012 murder of a Jewish family in Toulouse, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre and Bataclan attacks, and the 2016 mass killing on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.
So far, this latest wave of lawlessness has led to the deployment of tens of thousands of police officers across the country. In many places, public transport has been shut down after dark to keep buses and trams from being set ablaze. Cities have instituted curfews; political leaders have held emergency meetings; President Emmanuel Macron canceled a trip to Germany (but found time to attend an Elton John concert). Rioters have thrown rocks and other objects at cops, who have responded with tear gas. More than 200 police officers have been injured. In the early days of this clash, police unions declared that their members were “at war with vermin”; on Sunday, the national police union issued a press release that began as follows: “In the face of these hordes of savages, asking for calm isn’t enough: it must be imposed!” Arrests have numbered in the thousands, with the average age of those taken into custody being 17 – exactly the same age as Nahel.
Yet for all the arrests, the rioting has continued, night after night after night. And why not? At present, the weather in France is more than pleasant (chestnuts in blossom, flammable holiday tables under the trees, and all that) – absolutely perfect for outdoor recreation. And even if you get picked up by the cops for torching a few Peugeots, you know you won’t go to prison for long (if at all), you won’t lose your welfare benefits, and you certainly won’t be deported to whatever uncivilized rubbish heap you came from.
While the fires are burning all over France, supposedly in reaction to the killing of Nahel M., elsewhere Muslims have been acting up with equal gusto over another matter. On Wednesday – which happened to be the day after the shooting of Nahel Mehzouk, and which, on the Islamic calendar, was the holy day of Eid al Adha – Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee, burned a Koran outside the Central Mosque in Stockholm.
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyiq Erdogan, was quick to kick up a fuss, threatening to block Swedish entry into NATO. His foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, rejected the explanation that Momika was simply exercising his freedom of expression: by permitting such an action, he charged, the Swedish government was complicit in it. Other governments condemned Momika’s action as well. Matt Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, had the nerve to contend – as if it fell even remotely within the remit of the pusillanimous poobahs at Foggy Bottom – that Momika had “created an environment of fear” for Muslims in Sweden. (If Miller wants to experience a real “environment of fear,” I would suggest he take an evening stroll through certain neighborhoods of Stockholm, Gothenburg, or Malmö.)
The Saudi government called the Koran burning unacceptable “under any circumstances.” The Moroccan ambassador was ordered home, while the Swedish ambassadors in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates were read the riot act by those countries’ governments. On June 29, a mob stormed the Swedish embassy in Baghdad. On July 2 the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, in an emergency session, demanded new measures in Sweden to forbid Koran-burning. All in all, pretty reminiscent of the Danish cartoon crisis of 2005-6, with more than a touch of the George Floyd riots of 2020. Ingmar Karlsson, a Middle East expert, warned Sweden’s government to expect further acts of this kind. “The feeling,” he said, “is that enough is enough.”
“Enough is enough”? The audacity! During recent decades, the rulers of Muslim nations have tormented their Christian, Jewish, and other non-Muslim citizens to a literal fare-thee-well. In those countries, unjust imprisonment and torture for religious minorities are commonplace. Even the left-wing Guardian, which usually prefers to whitewash Islamic malfeasance, acknowledged in 2019 that according to a new report commissioned by Britain’s then foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, the “[p]ervasive persecution of Christians” in the Middle East rises in some cases to the level of “genocide” and has promoted “an exodus” of Christians from those countries.
Rarely have Western governments dared to criticize this systematic infamy. Surely none of them has gone so far as to say about this genocide that “enough is enough.” On the contrary, they routinely turn a blind eye to the mistreatment of Christians in the Muslim world, however savage, just as they try their best to move past every new act of bloodthirsty jihadist terrorism as quickly as possible, never saying anything remotely like “enough is enough.” And despite all the anti-Christian genocide and anti-Western terrorism, despite all the manifest Muslim contempt for all things non-Islamic, these Western governments have continued to roll out the red carpet for Muslim immigrants in massive numbers, even though it’s long since been demonstrated beyond a doubt that their religion isn’t just incompatible with Western values (notably the freedom of expression that Momika was exercising in Stockholm) but is also explicitly hostile to those values.
By now, we should all know the drill: according to Islam, the West is part of the House of War, which Muslims are solemnly obliged by their faith to bring, both through holy war and through “softer” types of jihad (e.g., pressuring the Swedish government to take a more sharia-like attitude toward freedom of speech), into the House of Islam. This isn’t to say that every last one of the Muslims who are rioting today in France and elsewhere around the world necessarily thinks of himself as a holy warrior. But that doesn’t matter: the reflexive anti-Western hostility that’s intrinsic to their belief system, and that they’ve imbibed since infancy, is hard-wired into them – which explains why it doesn’t take very much at all to trigger their irrational fury.
On Sunday, French authorities said that the violence in that country had seemed to begin ebbing the night before. So maybe it’ll be over soon. And then they’ll all be acting as if it never happened. And then, sooner or later, something else will happen to trigger another, even bigger, convulsion. And it’ll keep happening, on an ever larger scale, until it turns into the Fourth French Revolution. Unless somebody does something. And the same will happen in Sweden. And everywhere else in Europe. Unless, that is, our leaders in the West dare to look squarely at what Islam has done in recent decades – to Christians and Jews and Hindus, to Western welfare systems and Western freedom and Western law and order – and, at long last, speak the words “enough is enough”; or, more to the point, unless voters across the Western world stop electing craven invertebrates like Macron and instead hand over power to somebody like Éric Zemmour or Marine Le Pen – or, in Sweden, Jimmie Åkelsson – who will say “enough is enough” and actually act on it.