European Civil War Updates

Reuters:

"Youths forced passengers off several buses and set them on fire overnight in suburban Paris, raising tensions Thursday ahead of the first anniversary of the riots that engulfed France’s heavily immigrant neighborhoods.

About 10 attackers - five of them with handguns - stormed a bus in Montreuil east of Paris early Thursday and forced the passengers off, the RATP transport authority said. They then drove off and set the bus on fire.

Late Wednesday, three attackers forced passengers off another bus in Athis-Mons, south of Paris, and tossed a Molotov cocktail inside, police officials said. The driver managed to put out the fire. Elsewhere, between six and 10 youths herded passengers off a bus in the western suburb of Nanterre late Wednesday and set it alight.

Masked assailants torched buses in the eastern suburb of Bagnolet but passengers fled before the flames engulfed the vehicles. Television footage showed the burnt-out wrecks. In the Bagnolet attack, one assailant held a pistol to the head of the driver while others forced passengers to get off."

Paul Belien reports:

"As America prepares for Halloween, France is girding for a wave of attacks from Muslim youths—a reprise of the deadly French riots of last year.

A leaked French intelligence report warns that during the first week of November, a school holiday (Nov. 1 or All Saint’s Day), Muslim riots could convulse the country.

Not that France has been at peace since last year’s riots. In the past few weeks alone, several policemen were ambushed by youths who seemed intent on killing them.

In response, the French Interior Ministry asked the police to keep a low profile and not to show themselves in the Muslim suburbs in order to avoid tension.

Since appeasement alone is not a strategy. French authorities are keeping a force of some 50,000 riot police in permanent stand-by.

Last year’s intifada lasted three weeks. It petered out when the authorities asked the media to stop devoting attention to the riots.

The situation, however, never returned to normal. Unless one considers (as some French officials seem to do) the current situation as “normal.” In the first six months of this year there were 50,000 acts of urban violence by Muslims. On average 15 police officers, fire fighters or other public officials are attacked per day and 100 cars are set alight per night.

Gangs of immigrant vandals operate in a paramilitary fashion. A spokesman for the French police officers union, himself a policeman, has said that France is in the midst of a “civil war.”

Meanwhile, Native Europeans flee:

"The German author Henryk M. Broder recently told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant that young Europeans who love freedom, better emigrate. Europe as we know it will no longer exist 20 years from now. Whilst sitting on a terrace in Berlin, Broder pointed to the other customers and the passers-by and said melancholically: “We are watching the world of yesterday.”

Europe is turning Muslim. As Broder is sixty years old he is not going to emigrate himself. “I am too old,” he said. However, he urged young people to get out and “move to Australia or New Zealand. That is the only option they have if they want to avoid the plagues that will turn the old continent uninhabitable.”

Many Germans and Dutch, apparently, did not wait for Broder’s advice. The number of emigrants leaving the Netherlands and Germany has already surpassed the number of immigrants moving in. One does not have to be prophetic to predict, like Henryk Broder, that Europe is becoming Islamic. Just consider the demographics. The number of Muslims in contemporary Europe is estimated to be 50 million. It is expected to double in twenty years. By 2025, one third of all European children will be born to Muslim families.."

Stanley Kurtz reviews Mark Steyn's America Alone and its predictions of imminent European collapse into civil war, in National Review ODT (no link to article available)

‘Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.” That 1809 message, sent by General John Stark to his Revolutionary War comrades 32 years after the battle of Bennington, is now New Hampshire’s motto. Granite State resident Mark Steyn takes General Stark at his word. In contrast to the pampered charges of Europe’s bloated nanny-state, says Steyn, only free and self-supporting citizens, willing to stand up and fight, have a shot at winning the existential struggle with radical Islam . .

Wait a second: “have a shot”? Mark Steyn believes that the United States of America has only a shot at winning the War on Terror? Come off it. Steyn can’t seriously believe the West might actually lose to the likes of Osama bin Laden and his pathetic suicide squadrons. Okay, maybe we’re looking at years of scattered terrorist attacks and international police actions. But lose?

That is exactly what Mark Steyn believes. The West is losing the War on Terror, Europe as we know it is fated to disappear, and a stranded America is going to be lucky to pull out a victory in the struggle for its cultural and physical existence. Yes, that Mark Steyn. The funny one. You want funny? Then by all means read Steyn’s book. The jokes are all there, along with Steyn’s dazzling trademark wordplay, and the usual switchblade putdowns. But when it comes to Mark Steyn, funny’s just another word for sad, smart, scary, and (unfortunately) largely true.

Europe defeated, neutralized, locked in an open and bloody civil war, and effectively enabling the world’s Islamists in their quest to destroy the United States: Think about that scenario for as long as it takes to get past the schadenfreude, and weep. Weep for us, and for them (because despite our spats, we are still Europeans). The collapse of the West’s own homeland is almost too horrible to contemplate. Yet it is happening before our eyes.

Europe’s ever-deepening surrender to radical Islam is a tribute to the emptiness of multicultural ideology, to the disabling effects of the welfare state, and, above all, to the power of demography — the last of which, Steyn cautiously notes, accounts for a good 90 percent of everything. European fertility rates have fallen to unprecedented levels. The population of the developed nations was once twice as large as the Muslim world (30 percent to 15 percent of global population). By 2000 we were even, at 20 percent apiece. And in 20 more years? Steyn points out that on current trends, by mid-century, tiny Yemen will have more people than a vast and empty Russia. Already, in France’s larger urban centers, up to 45 percent of the population under 20 is Muslim. Before risking death for freedom’s sake, you must first be born.

Steyn lays out the consequences of these fearsome demographic facts. Millions of now-teenage Muslims will shortly be entering Europe’s voting booths. So we’ll soon see the rise of Islamist political parties, which will share Osama’s Islamicizing goals, if not his tactics. A Europe where Muslims already exercise a virtual foreign-policy veto will be intimidated and broken by the duo of terrorist Islamist “bad cops” and peacefully political Islamist “good cops.” After all, terrorists have already toppled one European government (Spain). That, says Steyn, is the merest beginning.

Even now, sections of France where Muslims dominate have turned into “no go” zones for police and firemen. For their physical and psychological safety, Western women living in heavily Muslim urban centers are beginning to walk about covered. A few Westerners are even converting. And Steyn believes that as Europeans face the prospect of living as a frightened minority in Muslim-dominated cities, more Western converts will follow. Bereft of cultural confidence and lacking the will to fight, Europe is assimilating to its immigrants.

The demographic disaster has only just begun, and already the English national flag (which features the “crusader” cross of St. George) has been banned in British prisons. Steyn reminds us that America’s colonists pledged to resist “the first unjust demands of an encroaching power,” lest a succession of “convenient” concessions prove “fatal to public liberty.” But that was General Stark’s old New Hampshire. In the new Hampshire, the new Brussels, and the new Paris, we’re seeing an endless train of small and “convenient” concessions. At this rate, says Steyn, Osama bin Laden won’t need to march in triumph down the Champs-Elysées. A decade or so down the road, he and his only somewhat less ornery fellow travelers will have Islamified Europe piecemeal. In Steyn’s words, “The last people around in any numbers will determine the kind of society we live in, and right now the last people around Europe will be Muslim.”

As the world’s most advanced demographic basket case, Russia, already barely able to raise an army to defend its borders, is likely to lose large chunks of its territory to China on one hand, and to a succession of new Islamic states carved out of its decaying carcass on the other. Steyn reminds us that this means still more nukes floating around the Middle East. As far as the Islamists are concerned, Steyn informs us, it was they — and not the U.S. — who won the Cold War. American money and technology may have helped push the Soviets over the edge, but the Islamist fighting spirit in Afghanistan delivered the death blow. Absent a willingness to risk death for freedom, our money and technology will avail us nothing when our paid assassin wheels round from his Soviet victim and turns the knife on us. Russia’s but one example. Simply as a matter of fact, says Steyn, every year more of the world lives under Islamic law.

In short, jihad can win. Nor is Steyn shy about dating the apocalypse. Steyn expects an implosion of the welfare state, societal collapse, fascist revivalism, and bloody civil unrest in a semi-Islamic Europe within a generation, with much of the change emerging within the next ten to fifteen years, if not sooner.