XPost: soc.culture.usa, soc.culture.europe   
   From: staten@lycos.com   
      
   On leaving a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI recently , the Dalai Lama told   
   reporters "Nowadays, I often express that due to a few mischievous Muslims'   
   acts we should not consider all Muslims as something bad. That is very   
   unfair."   
      
   The Holy Father has either a great sense of humor or a total lack of it.   
   According to his logic "A few mischievous Muslims" making kidnapping,   
   torture, beheadings, bomb plots, mass murder and death threats behave like   
   schoolboy pranksters. But 9/11's inferno and 3000 dead souls must be then   
   nothing more but a "mischief" caused by high-spirited Muslim merrymakers .   
      
   The "few mischievous Muslims" wonderfully celebrated their holy month of   
   Ramadan by totaling up with an impressive body count -- more than 1,600 dead   
   in 280 separate terror attacks in 17 countries.   
      
      
      
   The French intifada that started last November never really stopped. At one   
   point last year, merrymaking Muslim "youths," as the French press lovingly   
   calls them, out of sheer "mischief " were torching 1,300 cars a night. This   
   year the "mischievous Muslim pranksters " torched just 277 cars. The French   
   Interior Ministry declared it as "relatively calm." situation. A true   
   "victory" indeed.   
      
   Muslims keep burning, murdering, torturing , set on fire but Europe keeps   
   apologizing, appeasing, whitewashing their own homegrown Osamas, Zarqawis,   
   Nasrallahs. What a wonderful time we live in. Who would have thought that   
   centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated, enlightened Europe   
   would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a   
   documentary or have its popes discuss comparative theology?   
      
      
      
   ONLY 277 CARS TORCHED By FRED SIEGEL   
      
   By FRED SIEGEL   
      
   FRANCE today is a lot like New York City was before Rudy Giuliani: Its   
   government is so large it crushes the economy - yet also too weak to stem   
   widespread criminality. As with pre-Rudy New York, the fear that France's   
   best days are behind it prevails. For the moment, the French are breathing a   
   sigh of relief, as the anniversary of last year's three weeks of rioting by   
   Muslim youth passed with much fanfare but no widespread disturbances.   
      
   Yet - with the nation approaching both a presidential election and the Fifth   
      
   Republic's 50th anniversary - the French elites worry that their famously   
      
   unstable country is headed for breakdown and a Sixth Republic.   
      
   The 2005 Ramadan Riots, which saw some 10,000 cars torched and 300 buildings   
   firebombed, have been followed by a yearlong, lower-grade rolling riot -   
   what some in the French police are calling a "permanent intifada."   
   Nationwide, this works out to 15 attacks a day on police and firefighters,   
   and 100 cars set ablaze nightly. And for the first time, the police are   
   being subject to well-planned ambushes.   
      
   So when the Oct. 27 anniversary of last year's violence was met with "only"   
   277 torched cars, the Interior Ministry declared it "relatively calm."   
      
   But the trends are not good. While last year's violence was disorganized   
      
   (rioters armed only with bricks, crowbars and Molotov cocktails) and largely   
   confined to heavily immigrant Muslim and African neighborhoods, this past   
   week saw a half-dozen well-organized attacks on public buses in   
   non-immigrant neighborhoods by "youths" armed with guns. In some cases, they   
   ordered passengers out at gunpoint, then firebombed the bus. In others,   
   they've tossed Molotov cocktails into buses with the passengers still   
   aboard.   
      
   The French press ardently insists there's no link between Islam and the   
   unrest in the streets. But there is a connection, albeit complex, between   
   the rioters and Islam's Jihadi elements.   
      
   Some of the rioters of 2005 and car bombers of recent clashes have shouted   
   Allah Akbar (God is Great). But other rioters are drawn to Islam less as a   
   faith and more as an off-the-shelf oppositional ideology that has replaced   
   Marxism as the intellectual drug of the alienated.   
      
   In his Policy Review article "The French Path To Jihad," based on interviews   
   with French prisoners, author John Rosenthal notes that Islam's attraction   
   is often less its theological content than an aura of rebellion. "Islam   
   disturbs people," notes Jacques, a non-Muslim "and for me that's a good   
   sign."   
      
   One Muslim prisoner he interviews sounds like an underclass kid from early   
   '90s New York: "Islam was my salvation. I understood what I was as a Muslim,   
   someone with dignity, whom the French despised because they didn't fear me   
   enough . . . That is the achievement of Islamism. Now, we are respected.   
   Hated, but respected."   
      
   The Fifth Republic's foreign policy, which sees the Arab world as a   
   counter-balance to U.S. and Israeli power, has unintentionally legitimated   
   some of the violence. French television, its perspective an extension of the   
   nation's ruling elites, has tried to incorporate young Muslims by depicting   
   the conflicts in the Middle East largely from a Franco-Muslim perspective.   
   On many nights, the TV news glorified the intifada against Israel. In the   
   "al Dura affair," French TV went so far as to fabricate images of a   
   Palestinian boy supposedly killed by Israelis.   
      
   The Muslim underclass, not surprisingly, identified with the "youths"   
   attacking Israelis and sees in their own violence a heroic extension of the   
   battle against the enemies of Islam.   
      
   The continued violence and fear have received heavy coverage in the French   
   press, and - along with a weak economy, high unemployment and the collapse   
   in support for President Jacques Chirac - set the terms for the 2007   
   presidential campaign, now underway.   
      
   The 74-year-old Chirac is a career politician - and, like most of France's   
   insular elite, cut off from the public. He has managed the remarkable   
   accomplishment of becoming less popular in France than President Bush.   
      
   But the old Socialist opposition - which had already managed to finish third   
   in the 2002 presidential elections, behind the fascist Jean Le Pen - have   
   been unable to capitalize on the nation's troubles. The Socialists, who   
   largely represent government bureaucrats and professionals, are as cut off   
   from popular sentiment as Chirac. They are, explains American expatriate   
   writer Denis Boyles, so ardent in their courtship of the Muslim vote as to   
   be literally tongue-tied when it comes to the violence.   
      
   The one politician who seems to be in touch with the mood of anger and   
   anxiety is Chirac's plainspoken interior minister and political enemy -   
   Nicholas Sarkozy, whose parents came to France as immigrants.   
      
   Sarkozy is not only philo-American, he admires Giuliani.   
      
   If his thus-far successful efforts to constrain Muslim violence hold, his   
   chances of becoming the next president increase. The question then will be   
   if Sarkozy has the Giuliani-like courage and ability to buck the tides of   
   the traditional elites and pull his country back from the brink of ruin.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)