Intifada updated

Tuesday, 4th December 2007

Glenn Reynolds has forwarded his latest item on the French riots. It's actually a report from the Sunday Times, and it's worth looking at the thread underneath to get a taste of the ignorance displayed by many of the American commenters (and a few of the Europeans too.) The point I made in my original post still stands: Reynolds uses the term "intifada" and tries to draw a crass comparison with Fallujah. I see that Nidra Poller, Paris editor of Pajamas Media is still at it:

It’s not a question of race and origins. It is a question of jihad—or, more precisely, muqawama as explained by Patrick Poole in FrontPage Magazine. It was manifest at the fringes of the transit strike and the pseudo-student movement and, in all its flaming rage, in the latest banlieue outburst. What if local populations—the “first victims…the hostages”— turned against the punk jihadis the way Iraqis are turning against al Qaida? How about a surge in the banlieue!

As I've said before, ad nauseum, I have no vested interest in saying there isn't or never can be an "intifada". I'd just like to see people providing hard evidence. My impression at the moment is that there's a certain type of blogger out there who wants to see a jihad in "surrender-monkey" land and doesn't care over much about the facts.

Time to move on to something more interesting... I recommend Christopher Caldwell's article about law and disorder in the banlieues. Bleak stuff.

[Pic: Police on patrol in Villiers-le-Bel, outside Paris, last week. Credit: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images