The riots in France were occupying my thoughts at the end of a long day, when the telephone rang.  It was a friend who lives in Metz, a quiet town that is a long train ride away from Paris.  “I’m looking out my window,” he said, “watching an apartment building going up in flames.  A police helicopter is going back overhead, but nothing is being done to stop the rioters.”

I had been watching the news since the disturbances broke out, and, on All Saints, I noted that, of nearly 300 stories on Google mentioning France, only one was an American reference to the violence.  When the Washington Post and the New York Times finally made up their minds that the news could not be suppressed—always a painful decision for them to have to make—we quickly learned about French racism and the plight of the poor Arabs and Africans.

But, if a desire for better jobs is the reason why Muslim young men in France are rioting, raping, setting buildings and women on fire, what explains their behavior everywhere else in the world?  In Egypt, where they riot to protest a secular government.  In Pakistan, where they stage cross-border raids into India for the sole purpose of killing non-Muslims.  In New Jersey, where they went into the streets to celebrate their victory on September 11.

To take the argument back to the source, how do we explain the actions of Muhammad and his followers, who looted, murdered, and raped their way across Arabia and the Middle East?  Yes, it is true, an Islamic state, after a few decades of grotesque brutality, will generally let Christians and Jews alone.  They need people to pay the taxes, handle the trade, and staff the bureaucracy—talents that are traditionally hard to find in Islamic states.  Naturally, the success of non-Muslims will periodically arouse the righteous indignation of the “youths” who spend their time loafing on street corners, and a pogrom per decade is a small price to pay for living under George W. Bush’s “religion of peace.”

I shall never forget my first experience of this peace.  I was traveling in Kosovo about ten years ago, looking at medieval churches, when I was set upon by a gang of Albanian youths who would have killed me, had my driver not had the good sense to carry an AK-47.  In those horrifying minutes, I began to understood what it was like to be a Christian or Jew living under Islamic rule.

In fact, the non-Muslims of France are now experiencing what some of their ancestors endured in the days before Charles “the Hammer” beat the Muslims back into Spain.  Do not expect French politicians to use such language.  Interior Minister Sarkozy, after correctly describing the rioters as scum, now declares his government’s eagerness to promote civil rights.  France, like most countries of North America and Western Europe, has a leftist government, and only a fascist beast like Jean-Marie Le Pen or Charles de Gaulle would waste time talking about the French nation.  Nations, in the eyes of leftists, are an optical illusion.

Leftists in France and the United States actually believe that the Arab youths, as victims of discrimination, are doing exactly what they ought to.  Imagine you are a French intellectual approaching 60, forever dwelling on the glory days of the student riots in which you and your pals burned cars in 1968.  Isn’t this the same scenario?  Dispossessed people struggling for freedom and dignity?  As a former student protestor myself, I have to say that I have learned to hate my generation.  We were nothing but trouble in the 60’s, and, now that we rule the world, we are dangerous.

At the heart of the problem in France is not the teachings of a religion of violence but the stupid leftism taught in schools, preached in churches, and blathered endlessly in the media.  If you do not believe that there are such things as societies or nations, then you will not object when your country is flooded with immigrants who bring an alien and hostile religion.  Religion is all bunk, after all, so what difference can a few million Muslims make?  Things are hardly any better here in America, where our government refuses to defend the border, even though evidence is mounting that Al Qaeda operatives are learning enough Spanish to pass as Mexicans before slipping across the border.  Wait a few years, and both Paris, Tennessee, and Paris, Texas, will be experiencing the same fruits of multiculturalism that are being enjoyed in Paris, France.

Long before there was a France, there were Franks.  They had stolen Gaul from the Romans fair and square, and they were not going to allow the land that fed their children to be taken away and given to feed the children of Muslim aliens.  Until the French become Franks once again, until we Americans discover and defend our own identity, you can expect these hooligans to continue on their violent path, destroying every symbol of a West they envy and hate.