C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre (yet)

UPDATE: Thanks for the heads up Mike—the riots show no sign of slowing down as they enter day eleven:

“This is just the beginning,” said Moussa Diallo, 22, a tall, unemployed French-African man in Clichy-sous-Bois, the working-class Parisian suburb where the violence started Oct. 27. “It’s not going to end until there are two policemen dead.”

ORIGINAL POST:

There is something peversely satisfying in the French riots: the far left must grugingly accept that Muslim rage isn’t all about the Iraq War and US foreign policy. In fact, underneath the Madrid and London bombings was something far beyond the aftermath of 9/11, and instead speaks to the demographic changes taking place inside Europe. Kaplan’s words about the United States in the early 1990s come to mind:

Writing about his immigrant family in turn-of-the-century Chicago, Saul Bellow states, “The country took us over. It was a country then, not a collection of ‘cultures.’”… America began a slow but unmistakable process of transformation. The signs hardly need belaboring: racial polarity, educational dysfunction, social fragmentation of many and various kinds. Africa may be marginal in terms of conventional late-twentieth-century conceptions of strategy, but in an age of cultural and racial clash, when national defense is increasingly local, Africa’s distress will exert a destabilizing influence on the United States.

Robert D. Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy

Kaplan later said his dire predictions about racial clashes in the United States were wrong, but the concept holds true: societies that do not properly integrate minorities and immigrants socially and economically will result in the disenfranchised resenting the society they live in. They will lash out, often in bursts of coordinated violence. Europe has a serious problem on its hand that it must figure out by itself.

Interesting tidbits that haven’t shown up in many the mainstream news resports: rioters are coordinating their attacks with text messages and email and that similar riots are taking place in Denmark. And the comparative press coverage is revealing. When Katrina struck, it was evidence of imperial hubris, racial injustice, global warming, overemphasis on terrorism at the expensive of disaster recovery, and all the rest. The European media was less critical of French society, as noted by the EU Referenfum blog:

Just imagine the coverage if this level of rioting was happening in downtown Washington. Just think of the commentary little Claire Balderson would be enjoying if, after a full six days of escalating riots, the president had to take time out to appeal for calm, as indeed Chirac had to do yesterday. The TV would be full of it and the “Washington riots” would be front page of every newspaper, with ponderous articles in The Guardian and Independent about the failure of race relations and the inadequacies of the US capitalist model. But, of course, this isn’t downtown Washington, thousands of miles away. It is in Paris, only just over a hundred from our shores, a neighbour, ally and “partner” in the European Union – champion of the “social model” of which the Guardianistas and the Beebees so approve.