WSJ: Repression of Muslims in Europe may be coming

The closing passage of Theodore Dalrymple’s “An Update From France,” Wall Street Journal Online, February 11, 2006:

The French do not go to the banlieues, but what they fear is that the banlieues will come to them. Perhaps it is starting to happen. My nephew and a friend of his were walking through the Bois de Vincennes, overlooked by elegant Parisian bourgeois apartment blocks, when they were set upon by two Africans and three Arabs. They were not badly injured, but at the hospital their mothers were told by the staff that such attacks, carried out not for gain but for the sheer pleasure of revenge upon the hated comfortable French, were now commonplace.

How strange it is to go to the bakery every day, and be charmed by the politeness of ordinary people and the suavity of everyday life in France, and yet be thinking concurrently that the time for some serious repression may not be far off!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 15, 2006 08:13 PM | Send