Sunday, October 22, 2006

 

Signs and Warnings

Somebody’s watching the violence carefully, and asking when the next Improvised Explosive Device (IED) will detonate.

Only, we’re talking France.

Okay sure, the next IED will be the first, but at the moment it appears that some among the violent Islamic youth don’t just want to cause mayhem. They want to kill French police.

How easy will it be for a determined French Jihadist to get hold of the munitions or explosives material for an effective IED?

The tactic has spread to Afghanistan. I certainly wouldn’t wish it upon the French, however much I note the irony potentially involved.

The foreign policies of France, perhaps more than any other Western nation, exemplify and even enshrine the complete devotion to diplomacy and negotiation as the sum and total of international relations. Whatever military options they retain and only rarely exercise, are only used for occasional window dressing, usually in situations of complete diplomatic failure, and always as face saving, never effective.

For the Global Jihadi movements to start viewing France as enemy and target, in many ways repudiates the smug multiculturalism that has smothered Europe. True, France treats their unassimilated Muslims as third class citizens, in fact blocks any possibility of assimilation. To a lesser extent, so too Britain.

So how does one prevent Jihadi violence? The French are at a loss. The British, too. Forget the Dutch. Clearly, any degree of surrender to the Sharia oppression of Western democracies is insufficient to avoid the violence of angry, radical muslims. The only thing left to try is total surrender. That’s what the Koran advises, surrender in dhimmitude, or suffer violence at the hands of the holy Jihadi warrior. Talk about your Crusades.

Of course, there is one alternative. Fight back. But that sounds way too much like Cowboy Diplomacy to European elites. And way too close to something that dreadful George W. Bush might say.

I would say, there but by the grace of God, go we. But with falling public support for this Administration and its war policies, and the boldness and rhetoric of Opposition party leaders, I’m not so sure events in France aren’t a dim – and frightful – harbinger of a world to come. The streets of Baghdad, transported and re-enacted all over the world.

And should that day come, will we wring our hands, saying how much we are hated, how much it is all our fault, because of that war-monger President Bush? If control of one or both houses of Congress falls to Democrats, itching for investigations and impeachment hearings, somehow I doubt that these same would rethink their previous antagonism.

I am reminded that New York City didn’t get cleaned up until a certain Mayor took a zero tolerance (“broken window”) policy towards crime.

Why wouldn’t the international equivalent work as well against Islamic terrorism?





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