Is it Jihad in Europe?

Anyone watching Europe with both eyes open would have told you it was only a matter of time. So much tinder awaiting an opportune spark. As I write, Paris is still burning ... at least in the suburbs where, for twelve consecutive nights, shards of smashed plate glass windows cover the streets and hundreds of cars are on fire.

For those who remember the Paris riots of 1968, November's flame-licked skies were not as alarming as the fact that the violence was spreading to hundreds of French towns, triggering fears in nearby European capitals that they might be next. They had reason to worry. Within days, flames were beginning to appear in Belgium and Germany, confirming that the chilling murders of Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo van Gogh had indeed been harbingers of things to come.

This latest violence was ignited by a single event: on October 27, two teenage boys of Tunisian and Mauritian origin were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation, thinking they were being chased. As word of the deaths spread like wildfire through Clichy-sous-Bois, a grim collection of housing projects an hour from central Paris, dozens of angry youths from its Soviet-style high-rises took to the streets looking for cops to attack and cars to burn on streets named after French cultural heroes: me Picasso, allee Albert Camus, boulevard Emile Zola. From there, the rage spread night after night, first through the ghettoes that circle Paris, then to the corners of France, from Lille to Perpignan, from Rennes to Nice.

Then a second critical event occurred--this one on the fourth night of violence, also in Clichy-sous-Bois. When a tear-gas canister exploded near a mosque, a new cry pierced the sky: "This is war," said one of the vandals. Others shouted, "Jihad."

Predictably, the French media ignored international reports that the rioters were mainly Muslim and countered with claims that, no, it wasn't Jihad and Paris was not burning, at least not the Paris where tourists go. Still, there was no denying the evidence: by using cell-phone text messages to set off their incendiary mobs, rioters across France managed to burn thousands of cars, buses, shops, warehouses and churches over a dozen nights. As of November 8, one man had been killed, hundreds injured and at least 1,200 suspects detained.

What's really shaken the French government, however, has been its total inability to contain the metastasizing anarchy despite President Jacques Chirac's vow to crack down on the perpetrators of the most widespread violence ever seen in postwar France. Fears were also rising that in this age of terror, rage like this could swell the ranks of radical Islamists throughout Europe.

Officially, there are more than 12 million people of Muslim origin in Western Europe, approximately half in France. But most Europeans assume that a steep increase in illegal immigration in recent years means the actual number is much higher.

Though many Muslim immigrants have adapted, they have not assimilated into European life. Tensions and deep resentments remain, especially among those living in communities that have never considered themselves European and who are being influenced by imams intent on radicalising young Muslims whose impressionable minds are already stretched to snapping point--cult-style--between two cultures.

Something else. Although there were similar riots in France in the 1980s and 1990s, this time there is an ominous sense that the numbers of disaffected Muslims in Europe may be reaching a critical mass where initially unrelated explosions of violence could spontaneously combust into a full-blown movement. That frustrated Muslim youth--already susceptible to Internet propaganda promoting suicide-bombing in the Middle East--might spawn a "naturally-occurring" Jihadist movement across Europe, akin to the anticipated avian flu pandemic the World Health Organisation is so worried about.

Such movements are not without precedent. The largest and most historically recent was the antiwar movement of the 1960s, led by angry baby-boomers whose Marxist politics first infected disparate universities and then mushroomed into a virulent, world-wide epidemic.

Today, that same generation of baby-boomers who pioneered postmodern rebellion and then institutionalised it, who insisted religion was irrelevant, are confounded by this intensifying Muslim threat to their once-forbidden-but-now-accepted fruits--secularism, amoral social engineering, radical feminism, abortion, pornography, homosexuality, same-sex "marriage," euthanasia and generalised decadence.

Four decades on, the chickens are coming home to roost in the form of a systemic threat coming from a new generation, some, like the London bombers of July 7, willing to kill themselves and others to redress the 40-year assault on the natural law--ironically engineered by the same liberal baby boomers now in power in Western democracies.

As to the question of whether the current epidemic of violence across France means Jihad in Europe, I am reminded of how irregular contractions in a heavily pregnant woman invariably signal intense labour pains straight ahead.

Paula Adamick is a professional journalist. She writes from London, England, where she publishes the monthly Canada Post.