The gathering storm: Islamic violence in France, fostered by French anti-Christian political and cultural elites, gives a glimpse of what our own elites are bringing upon us via uncontrolled immigration.

If Americans want a gander at the future, they need only look east, to the City of Light. Sixty years ago, it was all the French could do to boot out the Nazi armies that had raped Europe and captured Paris. Today, the French apologize for not welcoming the deluge of Muslim immigrants who set the country ablaze last November.

What a difference six decades makes.

Whatever the difference is, Americans can see what awaits them if they do not overturn the anti-Christian political and cultural elites who would bring to Baltimore, Omaha, and San Francisco what anti-Christian French elites have brought to Rennes, Nice, and Paris: a seething, unassimilable religious and racial minority, numbering some six million, no more interested in becoming French than it was in becoming Christian when its religious fore-bears sacked the Holy Land and provoked the first Crusade.

The Muslim community in America already numbers three million. But America, unlike France, also faces an additional demographic threat: the growing number of illegal Mexican immigrants. Hat in hand, they fill our schools, jails, and welfare rolls, yet still demand cultural homage from real Americans in the cities and towns they infiltrate, and in some cases, like Los Angeles, conquer. Lest anyone think the danger is hypothetical, the public statements of Muslims living in America, as well as the anti-American violence on the part of Mexicans attending a World Cup soccer match in Los Angeles, provide fair warning of what may be coming.

Very simply, overwhelming numbers of Muslims and Mexicans (and other foreigners)--encouraged by our political and cultural elites--expect us to submit to their demands: to reorder school curricula, holidays, government and business practices, even the language in which we vote. As France and the Scandinavian countries have learned, capitulation does not portend a peaceful future.

What's Happening in Europe

The wave of Islamic violence that swept over France was predictable. So was the excuse for it: discrimination against Muslims, no jobs for Muslims, not enough welfare for Muslims. (In a word: "racism.") And so was the answer of the ruling elites: they groveled.

France boasts some of the most generous welfare benefits in Europe, but Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was on his knees. The Muslim colonists can't get jobs because they have "foreign-sounding names," he lamented, and "the effectiveness of our integration model is in question," he told French legislators. The riots, he said, are "a warning" and "an appeal."

"We must be lucid: The Republic is at a moment of truth," Villepin rightly said in the understatement of the century. "France is wounded. It does not recognize itself in these devastated streets and neighborhoods, in this outburst of hatred and of violence that vandalizes and kills."

Actually, what France doesn't recognize is its own religion and culture and the beginning of its demise as a nation and republic. Its gaspingly weak president, Jacques Chirac, aping Villepin, deplored the "ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin," his spokesman announced. And of course, he recognized "the incapacity of French society to fully accept them," that France "has not done everything possible for these youths, supported them so they feel understood, heard and respected."

High jobless rates and poverty are also Muslim woes, Chirac reiterated, which invites the question of how a purportedly penurious people afford the cell phones and Internet services they used to foment the bedlam.

And this insurrection, Muslims warn, is only the beginning.

The Rest of Europe

Before the riots even spread in France, Danish officials collared four terrorists in Copenhagen plotting a suicide bombing in Europe. One of them was of Danish nationality, and the others had grown up there--a similar profile to the Islamic rioters in France, many of whom undoubtedly claim French nationality.

Unsurprisingly, the violence in France quickly spread to Belgium and Germany, where officials wondered whether the crimes were mere "copy-cat" events.

Robert Spencer, who writes the "Jihad Watch" column and believes Islam will conquer Europe within 10 years, offered these frightening tidbits about Scandinavia in September 2004: Sweden's third-largest city, Malmo, according to the Swedish Aftonbladet, is the Middle East of Scandinavia: "The police now publicly admit what many Scandinavians have known for a long time: They no longer control the situation in the nation's third largest city. it is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants. Some of the Muslims have lived in the area of Rosengard, Malmo, for twenty years, and still don't know how to read or write Swedish." Ambulances and police cannot enter Muslim areas.

The Nordgardsskolen in Aarhus, Denmark, Spencer reported, is the "first Dane-free Danish school." All the students are Muslim immigrants. The Koran, he reported, is now required reading for all upper-secondary school students. Again unsurprisingly, Aarhus was the site of an uprising inspired by the violence in France.

Like most Europeans, the Danes thought multiculturalism a good practice, as Daniel Pipes reports, but they now know they were wrong. Among the hard truths about Muslims in Denmark, Pipes reports, are these: They are five percent of the population and 40 percent of the welfare recipients. They make up the majority of the country's rapists, and unsurprisingly, most of the victims are not Muslim women. They have brought with them repellent customs: forced marriage, and worse, a death sentence for any Muslim who converts to another faith. And they "openly declare their goal of introducing Islamic [Sharia] law once Denmark's population grows large enough." That could happen in 30 years, Pipes reports, given Muslim fecundity.

Thus has a horde of alien religionists from the Middle East and North Africa laid low the descendents of Leif Ericson and his mighty Norsemen.

Dutch officials, too, are paralyzed.

When a Muslim fanatic murdered film director Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam, Holland, a year ago, Pipes and Spencer reported, the authorities acted as if it were a common street crime, instead of what it was: a religiously inspired assassination of someone who had offended the followers of Allah.

The Muslim murderer, Mohammed Bouyeri, 26, "a Dutch-born dual Moroccan-Dutch citizen, left a five-page note in both Arabic and Dutch attached to Van Gogh's body with a knife," Pipes reported. "In it, he threatened jihad against the West in general, ('I surely know that you, Oh Europe, will be destroyed'), and specifically against five prominent Dutch political figures." The note contained verses from the Koran, Spencer reports, yet the Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende opined that "Nothing is known about the [killer's] motive."

Even England is knuckling under to Islam, once called the most "retrograde force" in the world by Winston Churchill, notes Srdja Trifkovic, author of The Sword and the Prophet.

Right now, it is debating a "racial and religious hatred bill," Trifkovic reports. "This is an Orwellian piece of legislation," he wrote for Chronicles magazine. "Its real purpose is preventing any meaningful discussion of Islam. If passed it would enable authorities to charge people with 'inciting religious hatred,' even if they speak or write the truth about the Koran, the hadith, the historical practice of jihad, or the long-term aspirations of the Muslim diaspora in the West."

Europe's indulgence of Islam stands in striking contrast to its treatment of its own religion. In Sweden in 2004, Pentecostalist Pastor Ake Green was sentenced to prison for his statements against homosexual sodomy. In France, the French prosecuted Brigitte Bardot, who expressed reservations about Muslim immigrants, and Muslims have demanded the same for the scepter'd isle ever since Salman Rushdie, penned his blasphemous Satanic Verses. That book invited a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini. It seems militant Muslims will silence anyone critical of Islam any way they can, if not by the sword then by the law. The former will surely follow the latter when the dark curtain of Sharia law descends on Europe.

And it seems British officials, Trifkovic reports, are making a jolly good show of capitulating to Islamic demands. Banks in London make home loans according to Sharia law, which forbids interest, and British companies are legally constrained to provide Muslim prayer rooms and pay time off for Muslim holidays. In 2003, a British judge forbade Jews and Hindus from serving on a jury sitting in judgment of Abdullah el-Faisal, a Muslim cleric accused of soliciting the murder of non-believers, meaning Jews and Hindus. Under Sharia law, non-Muslims may not judge Muslims.

As for France, Trifkovic writes, "The real cause of the French intifada is the enormous growth, dysfunctionality, and arrogant self-confidence of the Muslim immigrant community within France, coupled with the cultural enfeeblement and demographic decline of the French nation. The mix is dangerous." Muslim writers and teachers, Trifkovic reports, forthrightly say Mohammed's followers must act as if European laws are null and void and "feel themselves entitled to live on their own terms." Meanwhile, he writes, "under the terms of Western liberal tolerance, society as a whole should feel obliged to respect that choice."

Islam and Immigration in America

Given Islamic religious and cultural solidarity, the feelings of many of the three million Muslims living in the United States likely differs little.

In February 2005, Scott Richert of Chronicles magazine notes, USA Today reported on the myriad Muslim-owned mortgage companies the federal government is financing through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, congressionally chartered companies that support mortgage lending. An undated but glowing report at Islam Online says Freddie Mac's investment will enable these companies, one of which operates in 15 states from California to Virginia, to write $5 billion in loans over five years.

Last year, Hamtramck, Mich., a suburb of Detroit, rewrote its noise ordinance to permit the Muslim call to prayer, over loudspeakers, five times a day. Mecca has come to Michigan.

But Muslims may have more in store for America than interest-free lending and obnoxious noise. Lest anyone doubt what Islamic spokesmen want for this country, Chronicles' Richert provides a few quotes. A common view among Muslims is expressed by Syed Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi. The former chairman of the board of trustees of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies writes in Muslims in the West: The Message and the Mission:

   Islam is the most suitable religion
   for this land [America]. Islam is not
   the faith in America, a misfortune for
   this country and the world. But now
   circumstances are taking a favorable
   turn. Muslims are migrating to America
   in a steady stream from different
   lands and for different reasons. There
   is no Islamic country whose finest
   young men are not found here.

And "so-called mainstream Muslim organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR]," Richert reports, exert control of what Americans read about Islam. The council "successfully pressured Boeing to convince National Review to quit selling Srdja Trifkovic's Sword of the Prophet on its website." One wonders whether a federal racial and religious hatred bill is far behind, particularly given the remarks of CAIR's chairman, Omar M. Ahmad, who frankly admitted Islam's goal in a speech in 1998: "Muslim institutions, schools and economic power should be strengthened in America. Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."

"This is not surprising rhetoric," Richert concludes, "from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who named his son Osama and worships at a mosque that, in the 1990s, raised money for Al Qaeda's second in command."

As USA Today sang hosannas to Islamic lending, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a graduate of the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax, Va., was arrested in a plot to assassinate President Bush. In November, he was convicted. He was born in Houston. Assimilation, it seems, didn't take, although one news report called him "a former Virginia high school valedictorian," as if he were pals with Wally Cleaver at Mayfield High. Sadly, as Richert observes, Ali's "high school" is right around the corner from Mount Vernon.

Uncontrolled Islamic immigration to the United States and Europe, which has enabled the establishment of what Richert rightly calls a Muslim "beachhead," is a misguided domestic policy, the effects of which are exacerbated by the neo-conservative war in Iraq, now the cornerstone of American foreign policy. American foreign and domestic policy are rooted in false assumptions about motives of Islamic terrorists and the nature of immigrants and unrestricted immigration.

The terrorists do not detonate their bombs because they despise Wal-Mart, the First Amendment and Britney Spears, although despise American culture, particularly its worst elements, they certainly do. They do not detonate their bombs in the hope they will invade and conquer us. They know they cannot. They detonate their bombs, as they keep telling us, because of what we do, i.e., meddle in the Middle East.

With unrestricted Muslim migration across the planet, the terror network has a phalanx of potential recruits across Europe and the United States. Imagine the widespread inferno that will ignite when Osama bin Laden or some other terrorist imam sounds the tocsin among the three million Muslims here now.

The Mexican Invasion

As if triumphalist Islam is not enough, illegal Mexican immigrants are overwhelming America. Several million annually pour across our border and 500,000 of them stay permanently. Southern California and the Southwest are targets for la reconquista, meaning the reconquest. Militant Mexican activists believe they will conquer this vast region and claim it as a land called Aztlan.

For now, Mexican illegals pose a greater demographic threat to American culture than Muslims, although the latter, thanks to lax immigration and visa policies, perpetrated the evil deeds of September 11, 2001. The hijackers had 63 valid driver's licenses.

And while most of the Mexican illegals are at least nominally Christian, the Mexican migration is rending the American social fabric. It has reordered our culture and is draining us economically.

Last October, a high-school student in Chicago was reprimanded for not standing when the Mexican national anthem was played at student assembly. And it is now settled custom for automated teller machines to feature an option for Spanish, for businesses to run unemployment classifieds in Spanish, for the voice on the other end of an 800-number to say "press 2" for Spanish, for governments to provide employees who palaver in Espanol. Banks and some states accept the matricula consular, a Mexican identification card, for official business, even though only illegals need them.

As well, Mexican and Salvadoran gangs run amok. Many illegal immigrants are chronic drunk drivers and violent criminals who fill our prisons. Mexican immigrants are a ponderous load on the welfare dole and fill our public schools, demanding costly special-education classes. Despite the welcome they have received, Mexican immigrants seem quite unhappy.

At a World Cup soccer match in Los Angeles in 1998, Mexico played the United States. The predominantly Mexican crowd not only booed the American team and cheered for Mexico, but also attacked the American players. Among other things, the Mexican crowd tossed water bottles and beer at the American team, as well as glass bottles, trash, and food. They also urinated in cups and tossed those. One target? The U.S. Marine Corps Band. The Mexicans booed them during the American national anthem and displayed the American flag upside down.

Like those British Muslims who place loyalty to Islam above loyalty to Britain, many Mexicans, illegal or not, consider themselves Mexicans, not Americans. As Trifkovic concludes of French Muslims, assimilation for these Mexican immigrants in America is virtually impossible. Too many Mexicans are here for assimilation to occur. So large are their communities, as are other communities of foreigners, they can meander through life without ever hearing or speaking a word of English, or in any appreciable way shucking the Third World culture they left behind. The latest data compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies show that immigrants comprise 35.2 million, or 12.1 percent, of the population, the highest percentage since 1910. And 29 percent are freeloading on the dole.

Another part of the problem is cultural cowardice. The ideology of multiculturalism has dissolved the sacred bonds of nationhood; the cultural and social fabric is too far unraveled to absorb and acculturate a horde of militant, angry immigrants. A healthy country knows itself. It knows its history. Its citizens speak a common language and share a past that tells a common story.

Our common language is English (or should be), that which permits us to live in peace. Our common story is the story of Western Civilization, of Christendom. That story includes the European mariners searching for a route to the Far East, which led to the journey of Christopher Columbus, the Genoan. It is the story of the Carta and the evolution of British common law, of the English and other European settlers who landed at Jamestown and claimed New Netherland, New France and New England for their monarchs, then tamed the wilderness in the East, built the 13 colonies, staged the Boston Tea Party, fired the shot heard round the world, and tossed off the ermined arm of the British sovereign. Our tale is the tale of the Alamo, the war against Mexico, the War Between the States, the pioneers going West; it includes sagas of our heroes, from Washington, Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark to Boone and Crockett, Lee and Jackson, and York and Murphy.

Too many immigrants, particularly Mexican immigrants, expect to us to pitch it all. They speak Spanish and raise the Mexican flag and play its anthem at our athletic events and in our schools. They boldly proclaim la reconquista. Like the French, Americans no longer know why their nation is worth defending or that it is culturally unique. And they fear defending it. Americans have functionally surrendered. The end not only of our borders but also of English as the American language proves it.

Like the Muslims in France, militant Mexicans here expect us to dismantle our language and common culture to accommodate their demands. This raises the question of whether our Mexicans, who surely know this, will follow the example of French Muslims. A militant writer for La Voz de Aztlan, Ernesto Cienfuegos, uttered the warning that the war was about to begin.

Writes Cienfuegos:

   Today, here in Los Angeles. we are
   already seeing ominous signs of an
   impending social explosion that will
   make the French rebellion by Muslim
   and immigrant youths seem "tame"
   by comparison. All the ingredients are
   present including a hostile and racist
   police as in France. In fact, we
   came close to having major
   riots on three separate occasions
   just this year alone....

      There is a strange feeling
   here in Los Angeles that
   something sinister is about
   to happen but no one knows
   when. All it will take is for a
   "bird-brain cop" to do something
   stupid and all hell will
   break loose. If another major
   rebellion breaks out here in
   L.A. it could rapidly spread
   throughout the USA as it has
   spread in France.

      The social and economic
   conditions that exist in France
   that adversely affect its immigrant
   and Muslim populations
   also exist here in the USA.
   The rebellion that is occurring
   in France can and will most
   probably happen here.

Another writer, less militant but equally anti-American, is Jorge Ramos, a star commentator and newsman for the Spanish language network Univision. In his columns, Ramos suggests that the millions of illegal Mexican immigrants must simply be given legal status, that illegal immigrants be given the right to attend American state colleges and universities, and that the United States must begin a "Marshall Plan" for Latin America.

In his book, The Latin Wave: How Hispanics Are Transforming Politics in America, the telegenic Ramos frankly admits, reports the website of Americans for Immigration Control, that the horde of illegal Mexicans will not, and need not, assimilate. "The [Latino] community has grown so much that it now seems impossible that it could ever assimilate into the Anglo-Saxon culture at large." As well, he continues, "[Is this] an invasion? No. A cultural reconquest? It could be, at least in part.... Latinos are culturally influencing the United States in ways never seen before, and this leads us to conclude that we're becoming a Hispanic nation." Americans for Immigration Control likens his book to a congenial version of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Naturally, Ramos avers, real Americans concerned about immigration are bigots. The Minuteman volunteers who manned the ramparts of the border with Mexico last year, he wrote in a column posted at his website, were "hunters fueled by hate" posturing with "churlish xenophobic gestures."

Undoubtedly, when the explosion comes, "racist" police will take the blame, not the incorrigible hoodlums who start the riots. One can already hear American officials copping the same excuses for Mexican rioters should they set Los Angeles ablaze. They can't get jobs. They don't feel welcome. They are ghettoized.

Perilous storm clouds are gathering. In France, we see the future that awaits us: anarchy, riots, burning cities, national and cultural annihilation. The political elites will not stop it; they are promoting it. No, it falls to us, the American people, the middle class, the regular, taxpaying citizen-patriots, to stop this invasion and reclaim our land, our culture, and our rapidly eroding freedoms.

R. Cort Kirkwood, a columnist on American politics and culture for more than 20 years, is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia.