Muslim immigrant riots, part deux: arson attacks escalate on the anniversary of the deadly 2005 riots, while French politicians mimic American politicians with tough-on-immigration rhetoric.

Mama Galledou, a 26-year-old Senegalese university student, is clinging to her life, with over 60 percent of her body badly burned. She had no way of knowing that the bus she was stepping on would soon become a target of terrorist thugs. It was Saturday evening, October 28, in France's southern port city of Marseilles. Suddenly, two hooded young men boarded the bus, doused it with flammable liquid, and set it ablaze.

The driver and about 10 other passengers aboard the bus escaped the flames, but Galledou was trapped. A witness at the scene interviewed by Agence France-Press said he vomited after seeing the horrible condition of her burned body.

"Her skin, it looked like gloves had been taken off her," he told AFP. "She's a black woman and her skin had been burned white ... and she had nylon trousers--you know what happens when nylon melts?"

It is uncertain whether Mama Galledou will live; she is reportedly in a coma, on a breathing apparatus. Fortunately, she is the only victim seriously injured thus far in a series of bus torchings "celebrating" the anniversary of France's 2005 riots.

A year ago, France was convulsed in its worst street violence since the radical student riots of the 1960s, as Muslim immigrant youths set fire to cars, buses, and hundreds of buildings and clashed with riot police, during a month-long rampage. Over 10,000 vehicles were set ablaze. France appears to be headed in the same violent direction once again, as mobs of marauding youths are using the anniversary to again terrorize and make demands for more government aid programs.

The coalition government of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is doing its best to play down the violence and to claim that they have everything under control. Since "only" a few hundred vehicles had been set afire by this November 1, the government has been claiming a sort of victory and sending the message that the violence will not likely spread to match last year's levels. French citizens whom we spoke with hope that is the case, but believe the government and French media are spinning the events to hide the true seriousness of the situation.

Deteriorating Situation

"The situation has deteriorated even further since last year, especially the 'Muslim problem'--which we are not allowed to speak of, under penalty of being prosecuted for 'hate crimes,'" one well-connected French political analyst told THE NEW AMERICAN, on condition of anonymity. "Although you have your own problems with 'political correctness' in the U.S., it is far worse here and is reaching truly totalitarian levels, so that freedom of political and religious expression is almost gone. People are afraid of speaking their opinions for fear of being fined or put in jail."

The fear of prosecution voiced by this gentleman and other French citizens we interviewed is not paranoia, but a reasonable fear based on recent experience. In 2004, former film star and sex symbol-turned-animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot was fined $6,000 for "inciting racial hatred" in her book, A Cry in the Silence, in which she decried the "Islamization of France" and the "dangerous infiltration of Islam." Also in 2004, Jean-Marie Le Pen, president of the National Front Party, was fined 10,000 euros for stating in an interview that the French should beware of "the day in France when we have 25 million Muslims, not five million"--the estimated population of Muslims in France today--because then "it is they who will command."

More recently, French intellectuals Robert Redecker and Alain Finkielkraut have faced death threats from Islamic radicals for criticizing Islam and the actions and demands of militant Muslims. They pointed out, for instance, that last year's rioters were not merely "disaffected youth," but Muslim immigrants of Arabic, North African, and Turkish descent, a fact that the government and media had gone to great lengths to avoid reporting. Rather than protecting Redecker and Finkielkraut and going after the militant Islamists who are threatening their lives and free expression, the Chirac/de Villepin government and French media were more inclined to castigate the writers for being "insensitive" to Muslim feelings.

An estimated 5 million of France's population of 60.5 million are Muslim. The country's Muslim demographic has been expanding rapidly, due to immigration (legal and illegal) and the high birth rate of Muslims. The carnage of last year's riots stirred a major political backlash that has caused many French politicians who are responsible, at least in part, for the current situation, to pose as champions of immigration reform. The scene is similar to the United States, where Democrats such as Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Bill Richardson, and Janet Napolitano, as well as Republican President George Bush and the GOP Senate and House leadership, all pretend to be deadly serious about securing our borders.

Virtually all of the leading French politicians--including President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy--have courted, and kow-towed to, the militant Islamic lobby, and most have also pressed for admitting Turkey into the European Union. If Turkey, an Islamic nation of 70 million, gains accession to the EU, Turks would be allowed to emigrate freely throughout Europe. Tens of millions of Turks earn but a fraction of the income of their European counterparts, and it is not fear mongering to suggest that literally millions of Turks would flood into the EU in very short order. This huge influx of Muslims, adding to the Islamic immigration that has already taken place, raises the specter of once-Christian European countries becoming Islamic--and reshaping their laws accordingly.

Looking Back

Charles Martel, John Sobieski, Pelayo, Rodrigo de Vivar (El Cid), and the other great Christian defenders of Europe against 1,200 years of Mohammedan aggression must be already turning in their graves at the thought of such betrayal.

In 721 and 725 A.D., great Muslim armies invaded France from Spain (which itself had fallen to a lightning invasion by the Moors in 711 A.D.), reaching all the way to Autun in the center of the country. In 732 A.D., Abdul Rahman led a new and greater invading force that pushed northward through two-thirds of France to Tours. There he was stopped by Charles "Martel" (The Hammer) and his Frankish warriors. If not for Charles Martel's victory at the Battle of Tours, France (and perhaps all of Europe) soon would have succumbed to the sword and crescent of Islam.

Flash forward another 900 years, and we see Western Europe again on the verge of falling to militant Islamic invaders. This time the invading hordes, led by Kara Mustafa, were defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1683 by Poland's great King John Sobieski, dubbed by his Turkish adversaries "The Lion of Lehistan." Between these great battles of Tours and Vienna were hundreds of other battles in which Christian Europe fended off the incessant attacks of Muslim invaders. Now, a vitiated, secularized Europe prepares to open the gates and welcome the invasion.

Nikolas Sarkozy, Interior Minister in the Chirac/de Villepin government, is touted as a leading contender for the next president of France. Sarkozy is obviously one of the favored candidates of the power elite, as evidenced by, among other things, the fact that the insider-controlled press never fail to mention him these days without the accompanying descriptives, "hard-line," "conservative," "rightist," "authoritarian," "tough on crime," "tough on immigration"--all calculated to burnish his conservative bona tides with increasingly restive French voters who are demanding action against lawlessness and the steadily growing Islamic Trojan Horse.

The media elite would like French voters to forget that it was Monsieur Sarkozy who came up with the idea of establishing the French Council for the Muslim Faith (CFCM) and led the effort to establish it, as well as supervised its first election of officers in 2003. The supposedly moderate CFCM has been taken over by militant Islamists (as critics predicted would happen) and is pushing more aggressively than ever for Islamization of France.

The same elite also are not going to draw attention to what would now be an embarrassing blemish on Sarkozy's "tough on immigration" image: last year's accolade from the Turkish Weekly praising Sarkozy as "French Muslims' Favored Politician." Since the riots of 2005, Sarkozy has been sounding the clarion call against Turkey's accession to EU membership. But wary French political observers view Sarkozy's current anti-Turkey stance as being of dubious conviction. The popular Interior Minister is notorious for his vaulting ambition and shrewd reading of the public pulse. "If Sarkozy is elected president," one well-connected French analyst told THE NEW AMERICAN, "I would not be at all surprised to see him reverse (his position) on Turkey in the EU"

Indeed, even the Turkish Weekly, which has been critical of Sarkozy over his opposition to Turkey's EU membership, recently carried an editorial suggesting that Sarkozy's position was probably just a pragmatic move for political expediency. Sarkozy is the political elite's best hope in 2007 for heading off a populist revolt in which millions of French voters defect to Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front and Philippe de Villiers' Movement for France. The huge "No" vote to the European Union constitution in France's referendum in 2005, followed by reactions to the dots, are but two of the signals that the revolt is brewing. It is de Villiers who is the big threat. While Le Pen often comes off looking buffoonish, demagogic, and racist, de Villiers is intelligent, charismatic, polished, dignified, and well-spoken.

The de Villiers/Sarkozy face-off could be compared to the special California gubernatorial race in which Senator Tom McClintock, the genuine conservative, was aced out by pretend conservative Arnold Schwarzenegger, backed by GOP insiders, Big Money, and Big Media. Besides openly opposing Turkey's membership in the EU, de Villiers, a member of the European Parliament, also opposes France's membership in the EU, rightly seeing it as a fatal threat to his nation's sovereignty. Sarkozy has tried to capitalize on the growing anti-EU sentiment by opposing the proposed constitution as is. However, the changes he proposes to make the constitution acceptable would actually accelerate the transfer of power to Brussels and make it impossible for France (or other countries) to veto dangerous proposals, such as Turkish membership in the EU, which he claims to be against.