British blogger Melanie Phillips puts the happenings in France in a broader context in this post:

The Muslim riots in Paris have now been going on for eight nights. How is Britain reacting to these disturbing events just across the English Channel, four months after its own ‘wake-up call’ from last July’s bombings? With almost total indifference, since far from having woken up Britain is still sleep-walking in its own little trance. Media coverage has been sporadic and downplayed, and the disturbances have been portrayed as caused by deprivation and race. The fact that the rioters are Muslim has been mentioned, if at all, only in passing. But in Denmark, as Viking-Observer has reported, Muslims have also been rioting for days in Arhus, apparently over the publication of cartoons satirising the Prophet. The cartoons were in turn a response to the difficulties encountered by a children’s writer, Kare Bluitgen, who couldn’t find an illustrator for his book on the Koran and the Prophet’s life since all the artists he approached feared the wrath of Muslims if they drew images of the Prophet. The daily Jyllands-Posten which published the cartoons reported:

“Rosenhøj Mall has several nights in a row been the scene of the worst riots in Arhus for years. ‘This area belongs to us’, the youths proclaim. Sunday evening saw a new arson attack. Their words sound like a clear declaration of war on the Danish society. ‘Police must stay out. The area belongs to immigrants…We have planned this for three weeks.’”

In line with routine contemporary moral inversion, in which the perpetrators of violence are excused and their victims blamed instead by an alliance of Muslims and western decadents (Britain was blamed for the July bombings of its citizens because of Iraq) the French authorities are being blamed for fanning the flames of discontent by discriminating against the country’s Muslims. Should we also blame the Danes for refusing to accept self-censorship and asserting their own values of freedom of expression?

And later she refers to the quite astonishing figures that Interior Minister Sarkozy provided to Le Monde about life “before” the riots:

…twenty to forty cars are set afire nightly in Paris’ restive Muslim suburbs, and no fewer than nine thousand police cars have been stoned since the beginning of 2005.

It is, of-course just like Iowahawk’s comedy, where the cats became enraged on being accused of being “easily enraged.”

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On a happier note, some photos taken in Baghdad in the last few days of ordinary Iraqis enjoying some ordinary life.

May there be much, much more of it.

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