Jewish Chronicle, 18 November 2005

Then after Britain’s own human bomb attacks last July, the media became gripped by fear not of Islamist terrorism but of Islamophobia, or fear of the fear of Islamist terrorism.

Now we are told that the riots in France by Muslim and Arab youths from the banlieues — the city suburbs — have nothing to do with Islam but are the result of poverty, unemployment, racism and discrimination. Those who say, au contraire, that Islam is at the core of the disorder are being vilified as far-right racists and crazed reactionary demagogues.

Such a view surely displays a pathological refusal to connect to reality, which is given a vicious edge by the crude attempt to shut down debate through smears and demonisation. Denying the Islamic element of these riots is to deny the obvious.

The vast majority of the rioters are Muslim. They have sent France up in flames to screams of ‘Allahu akhbar’, chatter about jihad, declarations that they intend to turn France into ‘Beirut’ and pledges of support for Osama bin Laden. There have even been calls for a ‘millet’ system, through which the Ottoman empire provided separate development for different cultures.

More pertinently still, the French government — which has no idea how to deal with this insurrection — has begged Muslim leaders to quell the disorder. It is the imams who have gone into these neighbourhoods and urged the rioting youths through megaphones to go home ‘in the name of Allah’. The Union of Islamic Organisations of France has issued a fatwa quoting the Koran as saying that ‘God abhors destruction and disorder and rejects those who inflict it’.

Since when were imams and fatwas deployed to deal with a situation which had nothing to do with Islam? Religion is being used to quell this uprising because religion is at its core. Those who disagree, because there appears to be no open incitement to jihad by Islamist radicals, or because the youths are mainly secular and are said merely to want jobs and respect, are wearing blinkers.

Certainly, unemployment and all the resentments that come from being herded into impoverished and separate enclaves are part of this story, as are the internal personal tensions caused by the conflict between Muslim and degraded secular values. But this situation has been exploited by radical Islamists, who moved into the ghettoes and provided its smouldering youth with a creed that is more sedition than religion — and which inflamed them against the society for which they already felt no attachment.

The result has been a steady drumbeat of clerical intimidation in these areas. Teachers are subjected to daily insults and racist remarks, with children and their parents threatening them if they do not teach Sharia law or the Koran in class. Muslim defendants refuse to be tried by Jewish judges, and some municipal swimming pools have different hours for women and men to accommodate the Muslim population. And so on.

The political writer Michel Gurfinkiel, Editor-in-Chief of Valeurs Actuelles and a member of the Political Commission of Crif, the Representative Council of French Jewish Organizations, told me that the banlieues had spawned alliances of Islamists and local criminal mafias to create no-go areas for the French state.

Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood — the Islamists who preach holy war — have adroitly positioned themselves as honest brokers between the rioters and the state. Having been radicalising the banlieues for years, they are now poised to consolidate their power and use it to wring further concessions from a French state that is on its knees before them.

Britain should be watching these events across the Channel with undiluted alarm. So why is there this blank refusal to acknowledge what is actually going on, pouring scorn instead on all the evidence mentioned above, even though it comes from those in France who are at the receiving end?

Part of the answer is that multiculturalism has gone very deep here. Its proponents believe that cultural majorities are illegitimate and all minorities oppressed, and that anyone who finds fault with a minority is therefore by definition racist or ‘phobic’.

But perhaps even more significant is an aspect of the sturdy British character. The British just don’t do ideology or abstract thinking. Rooted in the everyday, they only believe what they can see, and think that every problem has a rational cause and a rational solution.

The upside is that they scorn extremism. The downside is that they simply cannot get their heads around religious fanaticism. Presented with clear evidence of the effects of shrewdly targeted religious sedition, they are incredulous and latch on to poverty and unemployment instead.

They think the attempt to Islamicise France and Europe is too mad to be true. They’re right — it is mad. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Jewish Chronicle, 18 November 2005