In a article, ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’, noted scholar of Muslim subjects, Daniel Pipes says :
The rioting by Muslim youth that began Oct. 27 in France to calls of a€eAllahu Akbara€ may be a turning point in European history. What started in Clichy-sous-Bois, on the outskirts of Paris, by its eleventh night had spread to 300 French cities and towns, as well as to Belgium and Germany. The violence, which has already been called some evocative names a€’ intifada, jihad, guerilla war, insurrection, rebellion, and civil war a€’ prompts several reflections:
The French insurrection are by no means the first instance of a semi-organized Muslim insurgency in Europe a€’ it was preceded days earlier by one riot in Birmingham, England and was accompanied by another one in Ă...rhus, Denmark. France itself has a history of Muslim violence going back to 1979. What is different in the current round is its duration, magnitude, planning, and ferocity.
The French press delicately refers to the a€eurban violencea€ and presents the rioters as victims of the system. Mainstream media deny that it has to do with Islam and ignore the permeating Islamist ideology, with its vicious anti-French attitudes and its raw ambition to dominate the country and replace its civilization with Islama’s.
Indigenous Muslims of northwestern Europe have in the past year deployed three distinct forms of jihad: the crude variety deployed in the United Kingdom, killing random passengers moving around London; the targeted variety in the Netherlands, where individual political and cultural leaders are singled out, threatened, and in some cases attacked; and now the more diffuse violence in France, less specifically murderous but also politically less dismissible. Which of these or other methods will prove most efficacious is yet unclear, but the British variant is clearly counterproductive, so the Dutch and French strategies will probably recur.
