Who will raise the siege of Paris?

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Ever since September 11, 2001, I've gloomily predicted 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 most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover the rioters do not think their primary identity is "French": They're young men from North Africa increasingly estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything likely in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, we find there really is an explosive "Arab street," but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.

The notion Texas neocon arrogance frosted 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 a half-decade, French Arabs have carried on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent these attacks from spreading to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have failed. Unlike America's Europhiles, France's Arab street correctly identified Jacques 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 AD -- 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, had they won, they would have found it difficult 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, "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.