The 9/11 Wars (39 page)

In addition to the role and nature of al-Qaeda and the effects of the Iraq war, the 7/7 attacks thus naturally focused attention on the British model of multiculturalism. Much of the debate picked up on themes broached following the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam nine months previously. This time the debate took place in an extremely polarized environment that left very little room for reasonable commentary. It was perhaps inevitable that during a period of intense violence – or at least fear of intense violence – the debate was dominated by aggressive and extreme voices and characterized by an astonishing disregard for facts. This was the case on all sides. Iqbal Sacranie, the general secretary of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, repeatedly claimed that ‘95 to 98 per cent of those stopped and searched under new anti-terror laws are Muslims’, though the true total was around 15 per cent.
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Others compared the situation of Muslims in Europe to that of the Jews in pre-Holocaust Germany, an ugly and insulting exaggeration. Diatribes of extraordinary vitriol, many soaked in a primary anti-Americanism or sophomoric analyses of American imperialism, were directed at President Bush and Blair. Conspiracy theories were rife. In France a book by a Marxist polemicist called Thierry Meyssan which argued that 9/11 was set up by the American ‘military-industrial complex’ was a bestseller. Similarly, in the UK such views were not simply restricted to the 45 per cent of the British Muslims who thought that 9/11 was a conspiracy between the USA and Israel but bled inexorably into the mainstream.
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Even usually relatively sensible newspapers like the centre-left
Guardian
printed a 2,000-word comment piece by Michael Meacher, a former government environment minister, which suggested that the Bush administration had, at the very least, allowed 9/11 to happen so as to be able to execute a new strategy of global domination formulated by American conservatives in the late 1990s. The US were not seriously pursuing bin Laden as he was too useful a pretext for their plans to seize key strategic resources across half the Middle East, Meacher argued, and implied that the response to the hijacking of the planes that would go on to strike the Twin Towers had been deliberately slowed to allow them to reach their targets.
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There was no shortage of extreme voices on the right either. For conservatives, attacks on multiculturalism blurred with criticism of welfarism and the general moral decadence of the West. If many left-wing voices lapsed into uninformed rhetoric about ‘the Americans’, the right reverted to the most basic essentialist vision of a monolithic and unchanging Islam and a weak and emasculated Europe. For many of these commentators, Arabs and Muslims were conflated into a single body of civilizational enemies whose millennium-old war against the West was an historical fact rejected only by those who were at best naive and at worst criminally negligent collaborators. In Italy Oriana Fallacci’s
The Rage and the Pride
, replete with descriptions of Muslim immigrants as ‘terrorists, thieves, rapists. Ex-convicts, prostitutes, beggars. Drug-dealers, contagiously ill’ and of ‘Arab men’ as ‘disgusting to women of good taste’ sold over 1.5 million copies.
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The oldest stereotypes of the Turk, Mohammedan, Saracen and Muslim were recycled and, as was usual in a time of perceived threat, it was the most negative representations that prevailed. Other popular works on similar themes included Bruce Bawer’s
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within
, Mark Steyn’s
America Alone
and Melanie Phillips’
Londonistan
.
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Much of the argument of these books, particularly those from American authors, was based on the idea of Europe being ‘flooded’ by Islamic populations. This idea had already been proposed at various moments of ethnic tension since the mid-1960s but had been focused most recently on Europe’s Muslim communities by right-wing politicians such as Holland’s Fritz Bolkestein and the populist maverick Pim Fortuyn. ‘Current trends allow only one conclusion: the USA will remain the only superpower. China is becoming an economic giant. Europe is being Islamicized,’ Bolkestein said in Leiden in September 2004.
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Bernard Lewis, the highly respected conservative American historian of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab world, breezily told one audience a month or so later that within a few decades Europe would ‘be part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb’.
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For one columnist in the neo-conservative
Washington Times
, writing shortly after the 7/7 bombings, ‘the threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s’. Europe, he wrote, would soon become pockmarked with ‘little Fallujahs … effectively … impenetrable by anything much short of a U.S. Marine division’.
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Nor was this kind of rhetoric limited to cranky or partisan publications. The prestigious
Foreign Affairs
spoke of ‘distinctive, bitter and cohesive’ European Muslims forming ‘colonies’ on the continent.
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Charles Krauthammer wrote in
Time
of ‘this civilizational struggle taking place in France’.
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In the
New York Times
, Niall Ferguson, the conservative British historian, posed once more the great counterfactual questions asked by his Georgian predecessor Edward Gibbon: ‘If the French had failed to defeat an invading Muslim army at the Battle of Poitiers in A.D. 732, would all of Western Europe have succumbed to Islam?’ Back in 1788, Ferguson wrote, ‘the idea could scarcely have seemed more fanciful … Today, however, the idea seems somewhat less risible.’
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Ferguson spoke of how ‘a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonize … a senescent Europe’
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and, along with conservative commentator Barbara Amiel, approvingly cited the Egyptian-born writer Bat Ye’or. Bat Ye’or’s book
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
, published in 2005, had outlined an extraordinary conspiracy theory by which a secret organization known as ‘The Euro-Arab Dialogue’ at the heart of the European Union has ‘engineered Europe’s irreversible transformation through hidden channels’ into ‘a fundamentally anti-Christian, anti-Western and anti-Semitic … cultural appendage of the Arab/Muslim world’.
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That even the concept of ‘Eurabia’ could be taken seriously let alone seep into the mainstream conversation was a sign of the times.
The Economist
even devoted a cover story to exploring Bat Ye’or’s propositions, though happily decided that her thesis was ‘alarmist’.
³³

The al-Qaeda senior leadership, from the distant Pakistani tribal areas, exploited the febrile atmosphere as far as they could. The various communications released by al-Zawahiri and bin Laden at this time have a far more confident air than a year previously. Four weeks after the July 7 London bombing and two weeks after the so-called 21/7 abortive attacks that had followed them, al-Zawahiri, on a videotape broadcast on al-Jazeera, explained that the ‘volcanoes of wrath’ were the consequence of Britain rejecting an earlier offer of a truce from bin Laden that was conditional on the withdrawal of its troops from Iraq. ‘Blair’s policies will bring more destruction to Britons after the London explosions, God willing,’ he promised.
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A RIOT OF MY OWN

Four months after the London bombings, a banal incident in the outer suburbs of Paris sparked rioting, predominantly involving French immigrants of ‘Arab or African origin’ and of nominally Muslim denomination, which continued for three weeks. The disturbances were of a violence and extent unprecedented in recent decades and seemed to support all the most alarming predictions of the conservative commentators, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Suri alike.

Late in the afternoon of October 27, 2005, three teenagers were coming home from a game of football in the run-down, overcrowded town of Clichy-sous-Bois, 10 miles north-east of Paris, when they heard police sirens and saw other youths running. Worried about being late home for the
iftar
dinner which breaks the fast of Ramadan and because they did not have their identity papers on them as French law requires, the teenagers ran too and then decided to hide. Scaling the gates of a local electricity transformer, they waited thirty minutes, hearing the voices of police officers, barking dogs and more sirens outside. In trying to climb back out, they received massive electric shocks. Two, fifteen-year-old Zyed Benna and seventeen-year-old Bouna Traoré, whose parents came from Tunisia and Mauritania respectively, were killed. The third, also seventeen, was badly injured but managed to call for help. For decades in the
cités
– as the vast complexes of public housing built around urban edges in the 1950s and 1960s are known in France – such incidents have been followed by riots. Usually disturbances follow a fairly well-worn pattern. Cars are burned, there may be some minor looting and arson and, though warm weather may prolong the fairly ritualized confrontation longer, everything is over after three days and two nights.
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At first, it seemed like the riots –
émeutes
in French – sparked by the deaths of Benna and Traoré would follow the normal course. On the first weekend after the deaths a silent march was organized through Clichy-sous-Bois, and the following night was relatively calm. But then the rioting started again, shifting up a gear in intensity after a tear-gas canister fired by the police landed in the forecourt of a mosque in the town during prayers, and spread over subsequent nights across much of the Seine et Saint-Denis department, an area north-east of Paris with a population of nearly 1.5 million packed into 95 square miles. It then flared in Yvelines, 40 miles to the south-west, an area with broadly similar social and economic characteristics, and then spread out across much of the Ile de France region, home to around 15 to 20 million people and of course the economic, cultural and political centre of France. Soon hundreds of vehicles were being burned every night, and there were long and violent clashes with the police as well as attacks on public transport and firemen. The centre of Paris itself – with a largely wealthy population of 2 million – was almost untouched with a very small amount of violence in the relatively poor and mixed eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth arrondissements in the north and east of the city. But as the rioting died away in the belt of
cités
around the capital it flared up elsewhere, starting during the night of November 3 and 4 in Lyon, in the western cities of Rouen and Rennes and in the northern former mining and steel towns along the Belgian border. The peak of the rioting came three days later, when 1,500 cars were burned in a single night in around 300 cities and towns.
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For the first time in the contemporary history of France, a riot in one town had sparked similar events hundreds of miles away.
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Only Marseille, where one in four of the population was born outside France and which has a huge Muslim population living in vast expanses of tough public housing projects, remained calm. No one appeared entirely certain why.

The
émeutes
provoked two totally different debates inside France and overseas. Domestically, the argument was about whether or not the rioters were ‘70 to 80 per cent’ hardened criminals fomenting trouble the better to protect the ‘no go areas’ which they needed to continue their cocaine and cannabis businesses as Nicolas Sarkozy, the then minister of the interior, claimed.
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The row continued for a week or two but died down when Sarkozy modified his language as it became clear that his denigration of the rioters as criminals had an immediate inflammatory effect and after judges told the press that in fact the vast majority of those the police brought before them were first offenders.
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In fact, later detailed studies revealed a complex picture of three types of rioters: a hardcore with criminal records (though not for serious offences) who took the initiative, then a larger number of youths mainly without records who refrained from active involvement in the more spectacular criminal acts such as arson but did join in when it came to attacking the police, and a third group, by far the most numerous, who simply enjoyed ‘
le spectacle
’, running when the police charged, taunting them from afar but not actually engaging in any confrontation or destructive acts.
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Outside the country, the debate was framed very differently. It revolved, fairly predictably given the febrile atmosphere at the time, around religion. That it was France that appeared to have a problem with its Muslim minority – the largest such minority in Europe – provoked an extraordinary outpouring of bile from right-wing commentators who immediately linked the rioting with French opposition to war in Iraq, theorizing that France had tried to block the conflict to avoid angering its Muslim minority. Thrown into the mix was further criticism of French welfarism, which was now seen as a way of buying off a truculent and violent Muslim population, and a series of reheated and long-established stereotypes of French decadence, double-dealing, laziness and lack of virility. The end result was a perfect morality fable of the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ facing at home the very threat against which they had actively impeded the Americans fighting abroad.
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That the riots were indeed ‘Islamic’ in origin and nature was taken as a given. That they were part of a broader uprising or potential rebellion by Europe’s Muslim population was apparently evident. ‘What we are seeing is, in effect, a French intifada: an uprising by French Muslims against the state,’ said Melanie Phillips in the
Daily Mail
.
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‘The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of schedule,’ Mark Steyn told readers of the
Chicago Sun Times
.
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Some terrorism experts even argued that the rioting was ‘jihad’ by other means.
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