For several weeks now, Rush Limbaugh has been railing against the "template:" the MSM's persistent point of view that has come to dictate the facts reported, even if those "facts" are made up of whole cloth. You don't need any examples, do you? Joe Wilson? OK.
Paul Belein, a Belgian economist and outspoken conservative, has written an excellent post about why the "disaffected youth" in the French suburbs are rioting . I am very happy to say that this piece was picked up by James Taranto and unhappy to say that I had thought of putting it in yesterday's post about France and just didn't. But because Best of the Web picked it up, at least the alternative press is getting the word out, so that we don't have to take the insipid analysis of the MSM for granted. It is terribly easy to look at young black people burning cars and destroying property and fit the scene neatly into the "American Riots of the Sixties" template. So we hear alot of the no opportunities, racism, alienation pablum: typical Leftist talking points. It's the paradigm. If the youth are angry and violent, it's because of the way others have treated them. By implication, of course, their lawlessness is understandable and therefore excused.
Mr. Belein tells us right where all of this started and what triggered this anarchy:
In the “Resolution of Strasbourg,” passed unanimously by the general assembly of the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation on June 7-8, 1975, more than 200 Members of Parliament from Western European countries, representing all shades of the political spectrum (except the far right), unanimously agreed to allow Arab immigrants to bring their culture and religion to Europe, to promote it and spread it. The parliamentarians stressed “the contribution that the European countries can still expect from Arab culture, notably in the area of human values” and asked the European governments “to accord the greatest priority to spreading Arab culture in Europe.” Today the forests of satellite dishes on the apartment blocks in the suburbs of Western European cities link the immigrants to the culture of their countries of origin, whose television programmes they watch day after day.
Dyab Abou Jahjah, the young and charismatic Brussels-based leader of the Arab European League, rejects assimilation and demands segregated schools and self-governing, Arab-speaking ghettos. “We reject integration when it leads to assimilation,” Jahjah says: “I don’t believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I’m in my country, not the country of the [Westerners].”
The Western authorities quietly accepted this when they abandoned the suburbs to the immigrants a decade ago. The attempt by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a second-generation immigrant himself (though not from a Muslim country), to assert the authority of the French Republic over its lost territory has triggered the current civil warfare in France. For the “youths” this is a declaration of war. They are not in Sarkozy’s country but in their own country, where the West promised they could retain their own cultural values and spread them.
Which begs the question: what is Europe going to do about it?