On BBC Radio Four’s Today programme this morning (0810), I listened to the acclaimed French thinker Bernard-Henri Levy declare that it was a great mistake to assume that the French riots are about Islam. They are merely an outbreak of nihilism, apparently. This article from 2003 by Olivier Guitta about the inroads made by radical Islamism in France puts B-HL in un peu de perspective:

This extremist indoctrination also extends to French schools, where non-Muslim teachers are subject to daily insults and racist remarks. For instance, the principal of the Trappes’ primary school described how an 11-year-old kid insulted his female teacher because she was not wearing the hijab. Intolerant behaviors especially against teachers and other religions have skyrocketed in the past three years. These young children are taught from the time they can walk that Islam is the answer to everything the Ultimate Truth and that is why even six-year-olds are now fasting during Ramadan.

Therefore, is not surprising that ten-year olds call for the institution of Shariah, or Koranic law, during class. Or that during a high school History lesson regarding the Crusades, a Muslim student yelled: 'Anyway, the Arabs are going to kill the Christians and the Jews.' The teacher then asked him, 'When?' and the child replied, 'I do not know. It was not mentioned on the imam’s tape.' Or that on a course on the Holocaust, Muslim children demanded to be let go to ask their imams if what they were being taught was true.

But school is not the only place in France where militant Islam is omnipresent. For example, in Avignon, Muslim extremists distribute loads of Koranic tapes in French and drive around town with their windows open and propaganda blasting through the speakers. In French hospitals, most Muslim women, sometimes under the family’s pressure, refuse to be examined by male doctors and many Muslim men by female doctors. Many Muslim defendants refuse to be tried by Jewish judges, and some municipal pools have different hours for women and men to accommodate the Muslim population. A number of supermarkets carrying non-Halaal products (food not permitted by the Koran), have been vandalized by Muslims and then surrendered to this violent blackmail by taking the products off their shelves. This is what France has become.

Islamists have the clear goal of transforming France into the first Islamist regime of the West. Their master plan is clearly formulated and being implemented every day.

That was two years ago.