France burns; Muslims blame others for their own backwardness

The aftermath of the death of a 17-year-old boy of Moroccan and Algerian descent in Paris has followed a familiar trajectory. Islamists, who are morally supported by Leftists and liberals, tried to set France afire. Said to be the worst riots for almost two decades, 2,000 cars were burned, hundreds of public buildings vandalized, and life paralyzed. Economic losses are estimated to have crossed the $1-billion mark.

Nahel Merzouk has been presented as a martyr, though the fact is that he has been accused of juvenile delinquency in the past. While the police version has been disputed, what is beyond doubt is that Nahel, a minor, was driving dangerously and did not heed to the warning issued to him by the cops. They later shot at him. That he succumbed to the bullet injury is unfortunate, but this was clearly not a case of ‘systemic racism,’ the term in fashion.

By the way, liberal politicians and intellectuals use the term systemic racism only in the context of Western nations and societies. The implicit assumption is that all is hunky-dory in Muslim countries. There is no discrimination based on ethnicity or faith in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey. No one asks simple questions: why do countless hordes of Muslims (and also of non-Muslims) want to migrate to Europe, the United States, and Canada?

It is also a fact that in no Muslim-majority country human rights and civil liberties are as cherished as in Western countries. Worse, in many of these countries discrimination is doctrinally justified and systemically enforced. Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities in France and other Western countries enjoy not just greater freedom but also much better living standards than the people in the countries where they or their parents came from. This is the reason that they flock, often using illegal means, to Western countries in the first place.

And yet, the self-loathing liberals in the West keep blaming their own countries, indeed the Western civilization, for intellectually fashionable sins like Islamophobia and xenophobia. The Western mainstream media, by indulging in self-flagellation, provides moral and intellectual support to the Islamists who are increasingly gaining in strength and acceptability in Europe and the western hemisphere.

Islamists and their thuggish collaborators are able to capitalize on the death of a teenager, who died primarily because of his own recklessness. This is exactly what they did after Nahel Merzouk’s death. This also gave them an opportunity to indulge in vandalism, arson, and loot; the pretext is protest against ‘systemic racism.’ “When you loot a Foot Locker, a Lacoste store or a Sephora boutique, there is no political message,” Olivier Véran, the French government spokesman reportedly said on Sunday.

But robbers and goons just need pretexts, not political stimuli, to act. All manner of liberals—academics, media stars, celebrities, publicity seekers, et al—are always willing to spur violent Islamists and other felons; they peddle spurious theories which make Muslims look like the victims of inequality, injustice, etc.

The reality, however, is that in general Muslims cling to the most regressive practices of Islam, oppose the imperatives of modernity, and refuse to join the mainstream. It is their own self-caused ghettoization that keeps them separate and relative low on the socio-economic index. And yet, they blame others for their own attitudes and actions.

Leftists and liberals help the Muslims do this.