A couple of days ago, I pointed out that “what’s going on in France is complicated” and that [m]ultiple triggers have sent alienated and in some cases highly politicized youth into the streets”. An obvious observation, I thought, but that hasn’t stopped some observers from engaging in astonishing exaggeration and misrepresentation.
Leading the way in this regard is noted academic Daniel Pipes, who, in a recent post at his blog, says that the riots may be “a turning point in European history” and that “[t]he time of cultural innocence and political naïveté… is drawing to a close”.
He goes on to list the issues that have brought on the rioting: “a decline of Christian faith and the attendant demographic collapse; a cradle-to-grave welfare system that lures immigrants even as it saps long-term economic viability; an alienation from historic customs in favor of lifestyle experimentation and vapid multiculturalism; an inability to control borders or assimilate immigrants; a pattern of criminality that finds European cities far more violent than American ones, and a surge in Islam and radical Islam.”
I offer a longer reply to Pipes at The Reaction, but let me say this here as a British citizen (no, I’m not just Canadian), a former resident of Germany, and a student of European history and politics:
Europe certainly has problems. It needs to think about how well (or how poorly) it has integrated its immigrant populations into its national communities and it needs to consider the long-term viability of its largely socialist welfare systems.
But come on. Is this really “a turning point in European history”? Like the fall of Constantinople, or Luther nailing his 95 theses on the door of that church in Wittenburg, or the storming of the Bastille, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, or the Battle of the Somme?
Pipes blames everything on “the Muslim presence” and on, to quote Ratzinger-cum-Benedict, the tyranny of relativism. Pipes and his ilk are spinning the riots through their own anti-Europeanism and through the distorted prism of a “clash of civilizations” worldview. But what if it’s just a major outburst of anger that has little or nothing to do with al Qaeda and jihad? What if these angry youth want to be a part of the system, not apart from it? What if they want to be more French, not un-French? What if they aspire to material success, not theocracy? What if they really don’t pose a challenge to France, to Europe, to the West?
The riots are awful, but they’ll end. And France and the rest of Europe will move on. Hopefully having learned something, hopefully doing something to confront some admittedly serious and urgent challenges. But let’s not make them what they’re not.