Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands 

 November 6, 2005

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST 

Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder 
keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street 
riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's 
Western Standard back in February. 

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years 
ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported 
in London: ''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.''

''French youths,'' huh? 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 banlieus of Paris to 
discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'':
They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from 
the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely 
to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're 
likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out 
finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois. 

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up
trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as
complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething
unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major 
city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting
alongside the Americans? For half a decade, French Arabs 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 seem to 
have lost 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, but 732 
A.D. -- 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 200 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 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' -- or ''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 the 
French government 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 rerun 
the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current 
riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ''French youths'' since the 
beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet 
night. ''There's a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,'' 
said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes' trade union Action Police CFTC. ''We 
can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have 
the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street 
fighting.'' 

What to do? In Paris, while ''youths'' fired on the gendarmerie, burned 
down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, 
as the ''minister for social cohesion'' (a Cabinet position I hope America 
never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior
minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters 
as ''scum.'' President Chirac seems to have come down on the side of those 
who feel the scum's grievances need to be addressed. He called for ''a 
spirit of dialogue and respect.'' As is the way with the political class, they 
seem to see the riots as an excellent opportunity to scuttle Sarkozy's 
presidential ambitions rather than as a call to save the Republic. 

A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the 
effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and
Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance 
of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated 
than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de
Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: 
Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less 
a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium. 

If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad
impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing 
their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning 
the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, 
and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple 
concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new 
Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced 
by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a 
new Dark Ages