Europe's Muslim Migrant Problem

When in doubt, blame social media. And certainly, blame video games. 

If you want to take control of the mind, and if you want to shut down content that contradicts your deeply held convictions, blame it all on social media.

As you know, some very serious American thinkers look at the current state of America’s young people and conclude that the fault lies with social media. After all, children get addicted to video games and their schoolwork goes to shit. 

As for the failure of parents to regulate access to video games and social media, the country seems to be willing to give said parents a pass.

And then there is France. As you know, France has undergone something that closely resembles a real insurrection over the past couple of weeks. The violence, perpetrated by disaffected migrants, went on for days on end. 

If you believe the stories, it did not stop until the drug dealers, people whose business requires law and order in the migrant communities, told everyone to stop. Apparently, riotous insurrection was bad for business. 

What the police and the government could not do, the drug dealers could.

Anyway, the French president Emmanuel Macron failed to suppress the rioting. One understands that the French police could have stifled it much more easily if they had been given orders to do so. They did not receive such orders and were powerless to tamp it all down.

Now, President Macron, who, in contradistinction to our own president, is neither senile nor demented, and who, in contradistinction to our vice president, is not a blithering idiot, had declared that the fault for the riots lay in video games and social media.

Daniel Greenfield quotes the story from NPR:

President Emmanuel Macron has mostly blamed social media for the devastation, but he has also claimed that video games have inspired copycat violence and vandalism.

"It sometimes feels like some of them are experiencing, on the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them," Macron said in a press conference on July 1.

He added that protesters are using Snapchat and TikTok to organize themselves and spread "a mimicking of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnect from reality."

As NPR notes, studies have shown that video games do not produce violence; but politicians cannot help themselves, one assumes.

Of course, the problem in France is unassimilated and disaffected Muslim youth. France opened its doors to migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, and now it is paying the price.

Greenfield suggests another cause:

Islam does not need video games to inspire violence in its followers and the clash of civilizations in France is not just a misfiring reptile brain. Everything else is a distraction from that simple reality.

Indeed, the more cogent explanation lies in the possibility that Muslims do not want to assimilate into European culture. They want to destroy it. As you know, France has “NoGo” zones in the suburbs around Paris, places where the police and civil service employees do best to avoid. 

Writing in the Spectator, Jonathan Miller explains that the problem is not limited to France. Take Sweden, for instance:

Sweden, once a quintessential example of an open-minded society that welcomed immigrants, has become one of the most violent countries in Europe, as measured by gangland shootings. It’s a rare night in Stockholm that passes without some violent event. Police estimate that there are now more than 50 gangs, many in heavily immigrant communities. 

Of course, it goes beyond France and Sweden. Miller continues:

In Brussels last week, police and angry immigrants clashed. Belgian police said they arrested 64 people. Perhaps more surprising is the experience of Switzerland, not a country associated with rioting. In Lausanne, there were clashes last week between police and youths. Young people threw paving stones and at least one Molotov cocktail at officers. Swiss police detained Portuguese, Somali, Bosnian, Swiss, Georgian and Serbian citizens.

And, of course, Germany has similar problems, the fallout of a policy enacted by former Chancellor Angela Merkel:

In Germany, where Angela Merkel opened the doors to refugees from the Middle East, the number of criminal offences across that country’s 16 federal states has skyrocketed, up by 12 per cent last year, with authorities recording some 5.6 million crimes. Incidents of rapes, sexual offences and fatal assaults all rose by more than 20 per cent last year. Robberies jumped 27 per cent.

The party line has it that the fault lies with the white people who refuse to offer opportunity to the Muslim migrants. Of course, this is nonsense. First, because the opportunities do exist. Second, because the migrants do not want to take advantage of them. Third, when the average European sees that migrants have unleashed a crime wave, he is far less likely to want to hire a member of a group that disdains the local culture and that wants to undermine it.

When you burn down the neighborhood, you are telling people that you do not want to participate in their stinking culture. In time, they will have little choice but to respect your wishes.