LESS, PLEASE

Writing in the Spectator, Rod Liddle discusses recent events in France:

It may well be that the motive for the rioting was nothing more than an inchoate grievance allied to youthful exuberance and a penchant for bad behaviour, but it was Islam which gave it an identity and also its retrospective raison d’être. The political aspirations of many French Muslim organisations and explicitly of the most important political Islamic organisation on the Continent, the Arab European League, is for much greater segregation, for Verwoerd’s ideal of separate development — the very essence, to my mind, of racism. The appalling Arab European League, in fact, likens assimilation or integration to ‘rape’ and calls upon all Muslims to resist such cultural imperialism. And the director of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, who delivered that nice fatwa, has seemed to request that the French government give Muslims autonomy within the state; to, in effect, allow them to follow their own rules. So for those pundits on French TV, apologies, but au contraire: the French Muslims do not, as a whole, want greater integration. They want less integration.

So it is that the French authorities have woken up of late and banned the burka in French schools and begun deporting the more radical and gobby imams — a tacit admission that this extreme form of multiculturalism, of separate development, doesn’t work and could lead, one of these days, to civil war.

France is looking more and more like a quagmire. Surely Chirac has an exit strategy.