Viva la Collaborateurs!

You gotta love the French.

When my parents visited France for their one and only time (well, it was my dad's second, his first being when he was in the US Army, during WWII), it was during the 1967 student riots.

While they were there, the sights they came to see, like Versailles and the Louvre, the Tour Eiffel, were all closed, closely guarded by the gendarmes and military. When my parents, who had witnessed some of the riots first-hand, asked the guards why these places were closed, they were stiffly informed that they were undergoing minor maintenance or cleaning. The cops on the street insisted everything was fine, everything is normal. So did the concierges and others who whose work involved them closely with tourists.

Things got so "normal" that my parents, in order to get out of the country (Orly being closed for cleaning, apparently), finally found a taxi who decided he might as well profit from the normal situation and agreed to drive my parents to Belgium.

When they reached the French border, the French border guards were….taking a cleaning break, and so refused to exit my parents out of the country, while berating them for wanting to leave France because France is the greatest country on hearth. The Belgian border guards finally took pity on my parents, and got them across into Belgium and on their way. This was not the first such rescue by the Belgians, who had become accustomed to their French counterparts, uhm, cleaning frenzy.

What was the trigger for the current riots? A typical "let's blame anyone but those responsible" reaction. Two Muslim teens, one of whom was wanted by the police, hid from the searching officers in a power substation. One of the teens was accidentally electrocuted. So, of course, it makes perfect sense to start destroying people's cars, stores, even schools, and attack non-Muslims, including firefighters trying to contain and put out the, with baseball bats, pick axes, stones, and pellet guns. And Molotov cocktails.

Combined with the typical French reaction (clap hands firmly over the ears, squeeze shut the eyes, and sing La Marseillaise as loud as possible), one could say that this was a conflagration that was bound to happen. The only surprise thus far is that neither size has (yet) blamed Zionists, Jews, Israel, or the US (Bush specifically or the American public in general).

A short while ago on the news, I heard an American reporter say words to the effect that, while the French ignored the riots for the first week or so, they were now acknowledging there might be a problem - now that Paris itself is burning.

In a brief statement on Sunday, Day 11 of the riots, his first public statement since the beginning of the riots, Chirac indicated, "that the government intended to address the alienation, unemployment and neglect contributing to the explosion of rage in predominantly Muslim neighborhoods." Might I suggest that the French begin by examining their own role in alienating pretty much everyone else in the world?

The Dutch are facing the same problems with Muslims who ghettoized themselves in The Netherlands, as highlighted in this L.A. Times article, Shaking the Pillars of Islam, about Dutch Parliament member Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Tremblez, tyrans et vous perfides

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