Comparing the French & LA riots: Number of casualties, why?

steve

I do empathize re the London bombings. As you may know, I live in Manhattan presently and we ride the subways regularly along with most everyone else here. Clearly, the bad guys would love to mess up our day. And yet, I have not had even a single conversation with other New Yorkers fretting the matter, even though 9/11 hit right here. Nor have I had, nor overheard, even a single conversation regarding threats emerging from the large Muslim population of NY.

Nimh wrote


That is a choice the rioters must make. Cease and desist or pay the price.

ya shoulda been with me the final morning of my recent trip to Manhattan. we went to Teany for tea. it's across the street from a large synagogue <the pix of that morning are almost on the blog> - which is next door to a Pakistani Muslim grocery store. it was the final day of the high holidays - and our companions in Teany included a number of New York's finest, who were assigned to protect temple-goers that morning. there was considerable discussion of possible problems from within the local/ international Muslim community - among the rest of the customers and staff there that morning.

there did seem to be some differentiation made between the local and international groups - some feeling that terrorists from outside of the U.S. would take advantage of the local communities to hide within. others felt that a threat might already exist within the local communities.

Well, perhaps a bullet in the head is a bit stringent as regards car-burning.

A well placed bullet would be more effective towards putting an end to the anarchy. Than all the pleas to stop.

Ah hell, let's just load them all up in rail cars and get the job done.

Seeing how much you get around on these little trips suggests I ought to have been with you lots.

Of course as you surely noted, many of the larger synagogues are now protected with large concrete emplacements out front. And that would be the part of the community here most alert, and alarmed. But it is the case that I have not encountered any such conversation.

LA riots v French riots. Is it possible that the fact that many of the rioters were Muslims? If so then could it be that being adherents to Islam gave them some sort of commonality, perhaps even a communication network which allowed a form of distributed control which was missing in the LA riots? Could it be that is the reason that the French riots continued while the LA riots stopped after a few days?

And I do mean Islam and not religion in a generic sense. The sense of being a member of a religious minority in what is apparently a secular state but which is composed of people of a Christian majority, may have helped the riots not only start but continue in the fashion they have.

If your thesis is correct, Goodfielder, then one is obliged to conclude that that same aherence to Islam made the riots less lethal--hardly a thesis to endear itself to the conservative nutcases at this site . . .

I hadn't thought of that Set - thanks for the insight.

Now I'm starting to think that the LA riots were spontaneous, uncoordinated and totally without a deeper reason for existing other than frustration leading to violence and looting on the back of the violence.

That also might have meant that they were bound to produce a high casualty rate because of the untrammelled and unguided violence.

And taking your point, if there was some sort of coordination of the French riots (even if it was a sort of decentralised coordination) the common factors of Islam, membership of a minority (racial, religious, economic class) may have allowed a guided approach which, as you indicate, may have had some sort of moderating effect on the actions of the rioters.

It is an interesting question and one which I know I cannot easily answer.

There is is little doubt that violence has a stronger grip on modern American culture than it does on modern European culture. Is this because Europe has had that much longer to burn through their attraction to violence than has America?

Perhaps, and perhaps not, but one thing is for certain, there are no grounds here for Europeans to claim moral superiority.

I am not prepared, however, to acknowledge that the strength of such a grip is indirectly proportional to the success
or even health of a modern culture.

The Pollyannas among us would insist that violence is, without question, a bad thing.

Evolution suggests otherwise.

I remember reading a quote many years by, I think it was in Time magazine and by H. Rap Brown, "Violence is as American as cherry pie."
I think he wasn't trying to claim it as an original but was saying that violence is deeply embedded in American culture. I don't know if that's fair or even accurate and it's absurd to suggest that any culture has a monopoly on violence. But we're discussing violence in a particular context here and I thought this was an interesting insight into a specific aspect

Compton gangs

I woke up this morning listening to an iterview with Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali. If ever there was a heroine its her. Her analysis of the problems of muslims within Europe and the problems within Islam itself struck the nail on the head for me. A real shaft of light amid the gloom.

In summary she said faith based schooling must stop. Muslims should be encouraged to be citizens, not merely a cog within Islam. That wider society must reach out to muslim women and persecuted minorities such as gays. That religion should be a private matter.

For these view she is of course under 24 hr armed guard from those who wish her dead.

Interesting info Steve - now I find myself asking if Islam has to be an all-encompassing religion that has no room for the secular or if that's just the interpretation of a few religious nutters and that there is a more moderate Islam that can co-exist with other religions and within secular states.

To answer my own question I think that at least the latter part is true.

There are historical examples of Islamic communities which have been like that and in my own city the first mosque was completed in 1888 and to the best of my knowledge our Islamic community has existed peacefully.

So I have to go with the nutter theory.

Of course it really would be great when faith based schools are stopped.
The main (and only) bigger Muslim school in Germany has been closed since some time already.
(On the other hand, the only primary school in our village is the only faith based school in the whole town - Catholic.)

I've my difficulties with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Not that she polically is on the other site of my position but I'm not that sure how much her engagement contributes 'reasons' for what she is fighting against.

However, she's doing a great and courageous work for democracy, human and women's rights.

I admit to not being a student of Islam so I really dont know if it can be compatible with modern liberal "secular" democracy. I would hope for all our sakes that it can. But it seems to me that within Muslim communities here, the elders and the "old school" who were basically just pretty glad to be in England with a job have lost their authority and respect to the new assertive school of radical political Islam.

Perhaps it is time once again for a little history lesson. When Mohammed and his followers fled persecution, the "Companions" asked him if they were not polluted by living among pagans. Thanks to the Aramaic merchants, many, perhaps most, Arabs were confessional Jews. But by no means all--many were pagan, and in fact, Mecca was a site of pilgrimage for pagans because of the presence of the meteor, the Kaba. Mohammed's reply was to assert that there was a sunna, a modus vivendi whereby righteous men could live among pagans. The sunna is a concept more ancient than Islam, and was the means by which proud desert warriors, very jealous of their honor, had been able to move among the people of the oases and the cities without resorting to violence for imagined slights to their honor. Mohammed adopted and adapted the concept to assert that righteous men could behave in such a manner as to live among the infidel believers in god (i.e., Jews and Christians) and pagans without suffering pollution.

Subsequently, when after Mohammed's death, the Companions set out upon the conquest of the world (a goal of which they fell far short--and a contention continually thrown up against Islam as though it were any more dangerous than any other crackpot set of religious assertions), the concept of the sunna was modified slightly. The Companions had it that the infidel believers in god--the Jews and Christians--would be tolerated in a Muslim community, while suffering certain public debilities such as a head tax and exclusion from certain institutions. Pagans were, however, not to be tolerated. Ali, cousin and son-in-law to the Prophet (he had married Fatima, around whom another sect of Islam would soon flourish) was a spiritual visionary, and upon his return from Persia and "the mother of all battles," he disputed this interpretation of sunna, asserting that the need for the sunna was now gone, and that neither pagans nor infidels should be tolerated in the Muslim community. His spiritual quest was the shi'a, the true path to god--and he is the first Imam of the Shi'ites. For the "average" Muslim, the sunna is acceptable, and they are known as Sunni Muslims as a result. For some among their number, however, the concept of the eventual triumph of Islam is not to be abandoned--a prime example are the Wahabbis of Saudia Arabia, of which bin Laden is an adherent. Some of the Shi'ites, sectarian enemies of the Sunni, also subscribe to a radical notion of Islamic triumph.

The evidence of history is that the majority of Sunni Muslims, and a bare majority of Shi'ites, are willing to accept the status quo, and will not insist upon Islam triumphant, will not necessarily take a militant and violent attitude toward infidels. The likelihood of violent rejection of the west and its "values" depends in large measure on the perception of relative injustice on the part of the west toward Muslims, as perceived within the communities of the sects of Islam.

In all of this, it is worth noting that among Christians, similar attitudes long were prevelant. The old Christian church of Europe (now referred to as the Roman Catholic church since the Reformation), referred to the Church Militant (the church on earth) and the Church Triumphant (the church in heaven). In canon court proceedings against those charged as heretical, the necessary proof was almost always provided by the refusal, real or apparent, of the accused to submit to the authority of the Church Militant. John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli's institution of presbyters--elders--was the bedrock of authority in their vision of a righteous reformed community, inculcated into the many sects descended from their teaching (largely embodied in Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion). Calvin's Institutes were promulgated immediately after Luther's rebellion, and were first published in 1536, within a generation of Luther's nintey-five theses. The same lack of tolerance for other creeds which is said to characterize Islam, and the same murderous persecution which was alleged against the Roman church, are equally hallmarks of the followers of Luther and of all the sects descended from Calvin and his Insitutes.

The probability of murderous militant Muslims is reasonably to be asserted to be about what it is with Christians or Jews. The great mitigating factor, as is shown in the riots in France, is a perception of injustice. Those with nothing to lose--even if the condition is more apparent than real--will dare anything.

The funding to the mosques and educatuional schools by Wahhabi's of Saudi Arabia is what is causing all this fundamentalism in the Muslim world. There are many who are just nominal Muslims, the majority I'd say just like Christians, Buddhists, Jews or Hindus.

Those madrassahs are the first thing that should go--but neither the Islamic hierarchy, nor the general Muslim population will allow it--and that bodes ill for us all. <Especially those in close proximity to large Muslim communities.>

I'd like to see Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali's comments.
I'll browse a bit.

Many Muslims are living in strict Muslim communities called millets. They have their own Islamic law, judges, language, customs, and they <some> do not allow police from the host country.

They claim independance. When you segregate a vast, intolerant cult--and give up your sovereignty over them, of course there will be consequences.

There is no such thing as an Islamic hierarchy, except in the minds of racists with a hateful religious agenda . . .