WASHINGTON, Nov. 10 (UPI) -- For 10 years since 1995, no one in France had access to more secret intelligence about a coming racial earthquake and the anticipated tsunami it would trigger than Dominique de Villepin.
As chief of staff to President Jacques Chirac for seven years, de Villepin went on to become foreign minister in 2002, then interior minister in 2004 and finally prime minister in 2005. The final prize of the presidency itself to succeed Chirac in 2007 is within his grasp.
In all his high-ranking portfolios, de Villepin read warnings from the DST, the French FBI, and Renseignements Generaux, an intelligence service that monitors the pulse of public opinion, about the deteriorating conditions and rising anger in the Muslim ghettos on the outskirts of major cities.
Former French intelligence chiefs, like their opposite numbers in other European Union countries, complain, albeit off the record, their political masters adopted the ungainly posture of the proverbial ostrich - and then expressed surprise when they got kicked in the most obvious place.
France's internal intelligence agencies reported in the past two years that 40 percent of the imams in France's 1,000 principal mosques had no religious training and were downloading material from pro-al-Qaida Web sites for their Friday sermons. These fiery harangues were designed to attract young jobless Muslims to the mosques - and the extremist causes many of the imams espoused.
The tinder had long been in place. All it required was the match that was struck Oct. 27 when two Muslim gang teenagers, running from what they believed was a police chase, stumbled into a power sub-station and triggered their own electrocution.
Satellite dishes protrude from almost all the apartments in the cankerous Muslim housing projects. The Qatar-based Al Jazeera reaches neighborhoods in Europe's Muslim and sub-Saharan African suburbs. For the past two years, youngsters have been recruited as jihadis for the Iraqi insurgency through the Internet. They also use the Internet to get the location of mosques in Syria and Jordan where they can find shelter on their way to Iraq, as well as the places where they should report for training and combat assignments.
There are some 4,000 pro-al-Qaida Web sites, most of them online since 9/11. Some European Muslim jihadis, bearing European passports, have returned from Iraq with newly acquired guerrilla and bomb-making skills.
The French government has deliberately downplayed, even denied, any connection between nationwide riots and the torching of some 5,000 automobiles, schools and even a couple of churches, and the jihadi phenomenon. Jean-Louis Debre, the speaker of the National Assembly and mayor of Evreux, called the unrest "a true episode of urban guerrilla." The national police union was even more alarmist: "Nothing seems to be able to stop the civil war that spreads a bit more every day across the whole country." The union also advocated the intervention of the regular army.
Actually, curfews, states of emergency in Paris and 30 other cities, and the expulsion of some 200 foreigners involved in the mayhem, sharply reduced the number of incidents. But trouble still flared in some 100 towns from the English Channel to the Mediterranean.
Much as the authorities try to avoid lending credibility to Islamist influences, the cops on the beat say Islamist beliefs coupled with desperation over a hopeless future are a major motivating factor. They scoff at their parents for accepting menial jobs, and belong to criminal gangs with a religious identity to feed their drug habits and steal mobile phones. And since Oct. 27, they tell one another that their neighborhoods are Baghdad in France.
Gang leaders can also see the left in France - socialists, communists, Greens and intellectual elites - is sympathetic and blame the tough Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy who called them racaille (or riff-raff, not the widely quoted "scum"). Le Monde, France's leading liberal publication, said "the stupidity of teenagers" was "an answer to the provocations of Sarkozy."
The left ignores riots to emphasize "police harassment" and refers to drug trafficking as a "parallel economy." Lawless zones, says philosopher Jean-Francois Mattei, become "sensitive neighborhoods."
L'Humanite, the communist newspaper, wrote, "Sarkozy's arrogance evidently knows no limits" and explained, "after having deliberately lit the fuse, he happily surveys the damage."
Michael Radu, co-chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Homeland Security, says, "For many years, in the Paris region, Islamist ideology has tried to take advantage of unemployment and unrest. ... Now, youths crying 'God is great' rampage and demand that areas where Muslims form a majority be reorganized on the basis of the millet (religious community) system of the Ottoman Empire, with each millet enjoying the right to organize its life in accordance with its religious beliefs.
"In parts of France," says Radu, "a de facto millet system is already in place, with women compelled to wear the hijab and men to grow beards; alcohol and pork products forbidden; 'places of sin' such as movie theaters closed down; and local administration seized. Suddenly 'big brothers' - devout bearded men from the mosques who were long traditional robes - positioned themselves between the authorities and the rioters in Clichy-sous-Bois, calling for order in the name of Allah."
This is not coming through in print or electronic reporting from France. Muslims are 10 percent of France's 60 million, but they are between 60 percent and 80 percent of the prison population in major cities.
Security service chiefs in other EU countries say similar developments in their countries are not a matter of if, but when. Tragically for the continent, EU's Eurocrats, in a fit of political correctness, are in deep denial about "Islamist terrorism."
Already forgotten is a European Commission report about a "crisis of identity" among young European Muslims whose radicalization is "a modern kind of dictatorship," where the Internet, university campuses and mosques are recruitment tools.
