The attitude of much of the liberal media in Britain, France and the US to the French riots is now clear. The riots have nothing to do with Islam. The fact that most of the rioters are Muslim is irrelevant. The riots are about poverty, unemployment and discrimination. Anyone who says there’s an Islamist agenda here is a far-right bigot peddling patent and dangerous untruths.

Thus the Big Lie is being promulgated, and all who speak the truth are to be neutralised through vilification. This is vicious stuff, and truly lethal. If it becomes the received wisdom – and there’s every chance that it will, since the weapon of vilification is a ruthlessly effective censor – we’re finished. So before reality is totally submerged by fantasy, let’s remind ourselves of a few facts which have emerged from journalists who still have their heads screwed on the right way.

The French authorities, in desperation, have asked imams to restore order in the ghettoes. Funny kind of non-Islamic problem when imams are having to sort it out. They have also issued a fatwa telling the rioters to cool it -- all in the name of the same Islam which we are told has nothing to do with the problem.

As Charles Bremner wrote in the Times:

Bearded Muslim activists have been wading into the night-time mayhem of the housing estates, megaphone in hand, and addressing the rioters ‘in the name of Allah’. Far from inciting the violence, they have been urging the rioting teenagers to stop destroying property and go home. For the Government, the Muslim mediators have been playing a useful role calming youngsters from the mainly Arab estates who respect their authority far more than that of the police and local officials. However, the Muslim mentors, who style themselves ‘big brothers’, are also causing unease in France because they symbolise what many see as a root of the unrest: the isolation of the ethnic Arab and black minorities into ghettos where Muslim law and outlook prevails. There is also a widespread belief — denied by the authorities — that the unrest is being fostered by the Islamists. The mediators were bolstered yesterday by a fatwa issued by one of the main Muslim organisations, the Union of Islamic Organisations of France, quoting the Koran as saying that ‘God abhors destruction and disorder and rejects those who inflict it’. The fatwa sparked a dispute with the mainstream Muslim Council, which said that the edict equated Islam with the current vandalism.

In the Spectator, Rod Liddle reports:

The black youths I spoke to in Grigny, hooded and furtive, lurking in the stairwell of a particularly noisome concrete development, mentioned jihad three times in the course of a very brief and slightly scary exchange.

Jihad, eh? Another characteristic of western European unemployment patterns?

As Liddle observes:

It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam that gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d'etre. The political aspirations of many French Muslim organisations and explicitly of the most important political Islamic organisation on the Continent, the Arab European League, are for much greater segregation, for Hendrik Verwoerd's ideal of separate development: the very essence, to my mind, of racism.

The appalling Arab European League likens assimilation or integration to rape and calls on Muslims to resist such cultural imperialism. And the director of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, who delivered that nice fatwa, has seemed to request that the French Government give Muslims autonomy within the state; to allow them, in effect, to follow their own rules. So for those pundits on French TV, apologies, but au contraire: the French Muslims do not, as a whole, want greater integration. They want less integration.

So it is that the French authorities have woken up of late and banned the headscarf in French schools and begun deporting the more radical imams: a tacit admission that this extreme form of multiculturalism, of separate development, doesn't work and could lead, one of these days, to civil war.

Then there is support for Osama bin Laden, as reported in the Boston Globe:

Mahmoud Khabou, 20, the jobless son of Algerian immigrants, knows little of the world beyond the concrete housing projects that rise in bleak rows barely an hour's subway ride from the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and other grand monuments of Paris. But he knows who his heroes are. '’Osama bin Laden and Rodney King,’ he said, referring to the Al Qaeda leader and the African-American whose videotaped beating by Los Angeles police in 1991 spawned massive racial riots. ‘One because he gives pride back to the Muslims,’ the young man asserted as he and a trio of friends stood near the charred ruins of a carpet shop. ‘The other because he was just a poor man, a 'nobody man' of color, but he caused a great city to burn.’

Jihad and nihilism spatchcocked together – the reality of what is currently consuming France.

Posted by melanie at November 14, 2005