What most MSM isn't telling us about France

(Welcome visitors from Mudville Gazette and Don Surber open posts. )

Does most MSM news reporting from France sound right to you? Riots without rioters? Police shot at and schools burnt by “youths without hope?”

If your nodding yes, you won’t like what Nidra Poller is reporting. She’s telling important truths that the Left on both sides of the Atlantic want us to ignore. And if we do, we'll be helping make a dangerous situation much more dangerous:

Until now, the angry Muslim men who constitute the bulk of the rioters have been allowed to masquerade as victims. It is a common refrain that these second- and third-generation North African immigrants have been marginalized by a racist French society. But much of what goes under the name of harassment is simply the half-hearted intrusion of the forces of order into territories that have been conquered by another system of values. In Muslim ghettoes, pimping, drug dealing, theft, terrorism and Islamic law mix and match. The block of working-class suburbs, or banlieues, in the Seine St-Denis region outside Paris, is especially lawless.

These areas are hardly dismal, dilapidated hellholes. Most of the housing and infrastructure is decent. Those who wish to pursue clean, honest lives have plenty of opportunities to do so. The insurrection spreading through France cannot be understood through the traditional Marxist prism of poverty, unemployment and discrimination. These problems exist in all nations. What is different in France's Muslim ghettoes is a tradition of hate and xenophobia, one which the state has until now either ignored or encouraged.

In June, 2004, a huge demonstration was staged in Paris to protest the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush, who made a brief visit to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Posters depicted Bush as the world's worst terrorist. By my first-hand observation, roughly one-third of the marchers came from hard-left parties and organizations: communists, socialists and ecologists, labour unions and wilted flower people. Another third were militant Muslims, many of them with checkered kaffiyehs. The other third were raunchy nihilists high on drugs and beer, marching with pitbulls and Rottweilers, calling for death and destruction. They painted graffiti on lowered store shutters and bus stop shelters, promising "a Paris comme a Falluja la guerilla vaincra" (In Paris as in Falluja, guerrilla warfare will triumph).

The same media that are now tallying up the number of cars torched and lecturing Sarkozy on the virtues of tolerance didn't seem much put out by such displays. The hard words were aimed at Bush, after all -- so the hatred expressed was seen as unremarkable, even admirable.

In the same way, much of France ignored the cries of "death to the Jews" that went up in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that began in 2000, and which eventually blended in with the anti-war demonstrations of 2003. Incendiary, sometimes bloodthirsty slogans against Israel and the United States became commonplace.

For five years, resentful French Muslims have been fed a steady diet of romanticized violence -- jihad-intifada in Israel, jihad-insurgency in Iraq, jihad-insurgency in Afghanistan. When they started firebombing synagogues and beating up Jews in the fall of 2000, the media dutifully reported that these thugs were products of the "frustration" felt in regard to the treatments of Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia. France's own government was full of hectoring words for the Americans, after all. The protesters were very much on message.

In elite French society, the enemy was clearly identified: not Islamism or Islamofascism, not the stewing mobs in the Paris suburbs, not Saddam Hussein, not al-Qaeda, but the British and U.S. troops in Iraq.
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Perhaps some of the journalists, political scientists, intellectuals and public officials who've been peddling this merchandise meant it to remain an abstract ideological diversion. France is a long way from Iraq, after all. But now that the militancy is being turned on the French state itself, they are suddenly shocked.
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They might all have known that this is the terrible price to be paid for turning a blind eye to those who preach violent resistance.

The poisonous social and political culture and distortions of religion Poller describes exist not only in France. They exist here, also.

Have those French politicians and journalists who see "British and U.S. troops in Iraq" as the enemy said anything more critical of our troops than Senators Kennedy, Durbin and other Democrats, liberals and leftists?

Didn't Howard Dean, in a presidential nomination debate, refer to America's President as "the enemy?"

In Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore cast President Bush as responsible for 911. So do French communists and Muslim fundamentalists. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Moore was seated next to former President Carter in The Honor Box.

This July, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) overwhelmingly endorsed economic divestment from Israel, the only country in the world against which the Presbyterian Church (USA) supports divestment.

Given what we face, what can the average American do?

A letter or call to your newspaper editor could help. Ask why much of MSM calls those who advocate or excuse violence against American and allied troops in Iraq and against Israel are "peace activists."

Why are people advocating an immediate withdrawel of our troops from Iraq called "peace advocates" when everyone acknowledges that such a withdrawel will lead to civil war and an increase in the strength of Muslim terrorists. Aren't the "peace advocates" really "civil war advocates" and "terrorist supporters?"

Ask the editor how neo-Nazi skinheads MSM rightly condemn differ from the Hamas terrorists MSM often treat sympathetically. Both groups hate Jews and preach violence against them. Both deny the Holocaust. Both want Israel destroyed. Both groups should be condemned.

Are you a Democrat or do you have friends who are? It's time Democrats reconsidered the people they elect and honor? How did the party of FDR, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy become what the Democratic Party is today?

If you know a Presbyterian minister, ask him or her why only Israel is on the church's divestment list. What about Syria? Or Sudan? Or Zimbabwe?

I could go on, but this is enough for now.

We have a great country. Let's act in ways that will help us protect and preserve it.

As Churchill was fond of saying: "Action this day."

Call that editor. Write that letter. Question that minister. Be heard.

Hat Tip: Best of the Web.