Australia versus France

Australia is the most recent country affected by an inherent inability for recent Middle East immigrants to fit into the new environment around them. As an Oz letter to the blogger linked above notes, a lot of different immigrant groups from East Asia and elsewhere have been welcomed in Australia over the last couple of decades and have managed to blend into the political and social life of the country. But the mostly Lebanese Muslim recent arrivals have formed gangs, done drive-by shootings, and make rape of Anglo/Celtic females their political statement.

Another blogger on this subject, Mangan's Miscellany has a number of blogs on the Sydney riots, and quotes Laurence Auster thusly:

So it’s better for this to start now, while our side is still the overwhelming majority, rather than later, when we will be much weaker. Always remember that the key to the mass non-Western immigration over the past 50 years has been the Western people’s passive acceptance of it—and of the liberal regime that made openness to the Other our god. If at any point in this miserable process of self-undoing we had exercised our rights as a people and stood up and said, loud and clear, “We don’t want you here,” the immigrants would not have come. Though the white rioters in Sydney are only young rowdy men, they are the first significantly sized Western group to have done that.

Yes, the above may be extreme, but the Australian populace reacted differently to the provocations than the French populace did during their own recent bit of anarchy, even though the constabulary and gendarmerie proved equally feckless and afraid to act.

After the Muslim outrages, the Australians organized themselves independently, via cellphones and text messages that could not be intercepted by the police [who were demonstrating their overlawyered training by supporting the Mid-Eastern thugs], and evidently wreaked some havoc back in the home neighborhoods of the Lebanese beach raiders.

The French, to no one's surprise, cowered in their dwellings with their esprit du clocher and whimpered that they were frightened and waited for the police to defend them from the arsonists and other rioters.

Having lived in France, I often was reminded of the wisdom of Wellington's epithet that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Even back in Napoleon's day, a sense of self-organization when cut off from authority was lacking in the French. The time I spent in France had two occasions when I was provoked by French youths, but saw them flee when I responded by counterattacking them.

I was told by long-time ex-pats living in France that French youths preferred to manifest their aggression by verbal and rhetorical ambuscades rather than physical threats. I lived in London for several months in 1990 and saw that the Anglo/Celtic Brits are much more thuggish and physical, and Rule Britannia for all that!

This reliance on negotiation and motivating opponents not to infringe on one's rights is all well and good in a Cartesian la-la land. But it did not work during the Phony War of 1939-40 when the French sat in their Maginot fortresses believing they were defending their country.

I believe that the French have a much larger number of Muslims and Africans living in-country than they have acknowledged. When I was Vice Consul in Lyon back in the seventies, the Prefect of the Rhone Prefecture told me there were half-a-million North African Arabs [and Berbers] in the Rhone Pref. Multiply that by 30 years and there could be 12 million Muslims and Africans overall in France today and that would be 20% of the population. And to make the whole situation more strange, the French do not have accurate census data on the number of Muslim and African immigrants!

Jean-Marie Le Pen was the second largest vote-getter in the last presidential elections after besting Jospin, the Socialist candidate to get to the final tranche, where he was trounced by Chirac. My guess is that Le Pen may not win in 2007, but he will get a resounding cri de coeur from the French electorate.