First the Jews, then everyone else....

Phyllis Chesler on the riots in France.

France is on fire. The riots have spread from the environs of Paris to Toulouse, Nice, Rennes, Rouen, Lilles, Bordeaux, and Strasbourg. Rioters have prevented the evacuation of their own wounded and have attacked police and ambulances. One group of rioters set a woman with crutches on fire. According to the Associated Press, the French Internet is ablaze with the fury of France’s radicalized Muslim community. "Civil war is declared. There will no doubt be deaths," writes one Rania. "We are going to destroy everything," writes someone called “Saint Denis.” My colleague, the French-American novelist and critic Nidra Poller, tells me that one African Muslim woman in Paris announced that "we will burn white people's houses" (Has she just stepped off the pages of Raspail's novel?). Poller also tells me that one "Fatima," another African Muslim woman, set one of the first hellish fires. "Fatima had an assignation with a man but she was not pleased with how the evening went. Enraged, she set fire to his apartment and walked out," she explains.

The official response to the violence has been inept. Poller notes that, despite ten days of rioting, French authorities have yet to impose martial law. The mainstream media in America has done no better. Media outlets have explained the intifada as the function of "racial and economic injustice.” The role played by radical Islamism has been willfully minimized.

There is now a temptation to schadenfreude. After all, France applauded and supported the ongoing Palestinian Intifada against the Jews in Israel, possibly in the hope that such appeasement would pacify their own restless Muslim population. But their comeuppance gives me no joy. As it is said: First the Jews, then everyone else. If the war against the Jews is not stopped, then it will simply spread elsewhere, in a perfected form. In a worrying sign, the rioting French Muslims have begun to call their own neighborhoods "territories.” Some are demanding that they be governed by Shari'a, not French law.

Difficult questions must now be asked. Did France really believe that everyone naturally wants to become "French” and can do so on their own? Has France's tragic mistake been to allow too many impoverished, non-French speaking Muslim immigrants in and to economically subsidize three generations of immigrants who are hostile to France and to the West? Could the ceaseless violence in France’s Muslim community have been prevented—for instance, if French authorities had not refused to jail Muslim juveniles and adults when they committed crimes, or allowed radical Islamist mullahs to preach their hearts out via satellite and in mosques all over France? Should France exile its Muslim immigrants and their French-born children—the innocent along with the guilty—by sending them back to countries where they will have no housing, no health care, no education, and no employment, and where the lives of women will be even more endangered?