FRANCE’S URBAN INSURGENCY: CAN WE STOP CALLING THEM “YOUTHS” NOW?[ UPDATED]

The French government is having an inordinately difficult time suppressing riots and arson which are spreading like inkblots of disorder throughout French urban areas. Organization, coordination and pre-planning have been suspected in the rioting that began in predominantly Arab-Muslim and North African suburban ghettos but not concretely proven until the discovery today of a gasoline bomb making safe house in Paris. At this point, it is now time to set aside the comforting conceit of out of control “youths”. Amidst the far more numerous opportunistic rioters, France has its own urban, Islamist, insurgency. One that is well-disciplined, experienced, ideologically committed and highly mobile.

France has a tradition of providing asylum to foreign political dissidents that reaches back two centuries. Today that open door includes Islamist extremists the way the doors of the Republic once opened for Eastern European anarchists, antifascist refugees fleeing Hitler and Franco and 1960’s Third World revolutionaries who lionized Franz Fanon. Ayatollah Khomeini directed his 1979 revolution from Paris and his regime’s agents assassinated Shahpour Bakhtiar there in 1991 the way Stalin’s OGPU once iced White Russian emigres in cafes and coffee houses. In the French Muslim community, there exist those with ties to the GIA, Call to Combat, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Hezbollah, various Palestinian factions and other groups more obscure (Chirac has been particularly ingratiating in terms of policy toward Arab-Muslim extremists in Lebanon and among the Palestinians). If these organizations are there, then so is al Qaida.

I think it would be a serious error to conclude that such a movement is very large in terms of numbers. One byproduct of sheltering the planet’s political misfits is that French counterintelligence, both police and state security, is very, very, good . Moreover, with 10 % of the French population coming from Muslim ethnic groups in former French colonies, the language skills and cultural intelligence capabilities are there for French security services in a way the United States can only envy. If these insurgents were numerous they would have been penetrated already. So their elusiveness speaks to the insurgents being a small, tightly-compartmentalized but decentralized network of cells, quite possibly less than 100 people.

The reason the hard core of insurgents directing the rioting in French cities do not need to be numerous is that mob psychology is such that they can rely on being just a spark, rather than a flame:

“Conversely, a crowd is not an incipient riot merely because it assembles a great many people with the predisposing demographic characteristics. For example, every Fourth of July in Chicago’s Grant Park there is a fireworks display that usually attracts about a million spectators. In certain parts of the grounds, people are packed together like sardines, so that individuals substantially lose their ability to decide where to go. One goes where the crowd goes. Going against it is impossible, and even leaving it (unless one is near the edge) may be difficult. Some people dislike the experience, but whatever its discomforts, the Fourth of July crowd at Grant Park is not a riot in the making. The crowd is big, it is loud, it is unmanageable, it is filled with people who have suffered from racial discrimination and economic deprivation, it has, in aggregate, drunk a lot of beer (which is legally for sale at dozens of kiosks at the event); but it is only a crowd, not an incipient riot.

…For a riot to begin, it is necessary but not sufficient that there be many people who want to riot and who believe that others want to riot too. One more hurdle has to be overcome. Even in an unstable gathering, the first perpetrator of a misdemeanor is at risk if the police are willing and able to zero in on him. Thus, someone has to serve as a catalyst–a sort of entrepreneur to get things going–in Buford’s account usually by breaking a window (a signal that can be heard by many who do not see it).

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