Hmm, that's certainly a bold, unconventional approach. I'm not sure the lawyers will go for it, however. ;-)

I took Bart's suggestion to be that the army (possibly with tanks) should be deployed to restore order. As I gather from watching French news broadcasts, people are already talking about this option, perhaps because so far the police have failed to bring the disturbances to an end, and it's now been almost two weeks since the beginning of the troubles. You can agree or not, but it's not exactly unheard of for democratic governments to use the army in such circumstance. So, if the curfew and other emergency measures that were just introduced fail to produce the desired results, what would you suggest as an alternative?

Oh, may I add one other point? Israel has in the past bulldozed the homes of suicide bombers, not of rioters. There's a significant difference, wouldn't you agree? But perhaps this distinction is not given much emphasis in European press coverage of the Middle East.

Yes, of course, we must get in a dig at the Zionist entity, even when the subject is rioting in France.

Actually, France doesn't seem so very different from the West Bank, if the parameters on which we're comparing them are the extent of Islamic extremism and hatred of the authorities.

Also, given France's lavish funding of Arafat, and its diplomatic support for Hamas and Hezbollah, we could also say that the French government is at least partly to blame for the problems in both places.

This article is fear mongering at best, fascist propaganda at worst.

France is a member of NATO and an ally. What happens there is a concern of all of us. That the violence spreads to other allies is also a concern.

The solution is limited by western beliefs in equality and the separation of church and state/religious freedom. However violence is violence.

The Frence and others should put up their UAVs and monitor/video tape violent areas. Use the video tape as evidence in court. And start putting people away and/or deporting them until they get the idea.

Poverty and discrimination are not an excuse for the criminals/rioters or the politicians. Inaction is weakness.

The politicians need some spine.

Thanks to Matt and Bart for a good back and forth exchange that actually leads to some serious thought by both participants on the events being considered!

I don't want to sound wishy-washy, but I think you're both right in many ways. The Muslim poor throughout Europe are alienated and angry for many reasons, some of them quite justified. The Europeans brought many over as guest workers, but made little provision for what to do when those workers descendants also needed work.

They then compounded that error with a welfare state which provides everything you need for human life, and nothing which makes life worth living. In so doing they basically created the society of Clockwork Orange, where young men engage in extreme violence not because they need anything but because their lives are so utterly devoid of meaning.

That same meaninglessness is also the most fertile ground you could imagine for the Islamists, and so you see these Islamic radicals spread like wildfire through communities of young men. Couple that with the warrior's creed that is at the heart of Islam, and you have an explosive situation.

The important difference with the riots in LA is that the rioting there was fundamentally secular, with the religious elements largely urging calm. In Europe these riots are a volitile mix of secular and religious causes. As a result, the religious moderates urging calm are attacked and shouted down, not only by irreligious but also by equally religious extremists.

I also agree that any solution will take a long time, far too long to make a difference in the near term. In the near term, rule of law must be imposed by force, or these disturbences will simply grow as both secularly and religiously motivated rioters sense success. But I also fear that the only real solutions: real economic mobility and opportunity and real cultural coexistance are both antithetical to modern Europe.

I look at the violence spreading across Europe with sadness. To see so many unhappy with their lives lashing out. To see those who see an opening to take advantage make things worse by their actions. Each one of the families who has lost an automobile now has that much harder of life. Unable to perhaps get to work, shop or go to school in the way they had before. I am sure there are a huge number of personal stories which will not be seen in the gross coverage of the cities on fire.

Good luck to us all

Tico,

You're quite right, unfortunately: it would take time for social reforms to pay off, and anyway, no one (except possibly Sarkozy) seems to be interested in them. But my point was simply that we should avoid casting these riots in sweeping civilizational terms. Suburban louts in France are not fated to be Islamofascists because their grandparents came from the Arab world any more than contemporary European Christians have to burn witches or conduct inquistitions. The ideological component to the riots is real, and as you say, entrenched. However, if there are policies that have strengthened radical Islam in Europe, then presumably there are also policies that would weaken it.

Bart,

Unfortunately, I think you're on to something. It's true that (so far) disgruntled black teenagers in American urban slums haven't turned en masse to extreme ideologies, whereas in the current French riots there does seem to be some kind of feedback between ordinary criminality/thuggishness and radical Islam. However, naive American that I am, I continue to think that giving people decent jobs would solve a lot of the problem. You can say a lot about Clinton, but under his administration, we had almost full employment for the first time in decades, and lo! the violent crime rate dropped dramatically. I think if something similar happened in Europe, you would discover that young Muslims' interest in extreme religion would diminish.

Watching the French media, I noticed that they seem to avoid using the word I remember learning as the translation for the English "riot," which is "emeute." (Sorry, can't get the acute accent on my keyboard.) Instead, they keep using the phrase "violences urbaines" ("urban violence," but in the plural, which doesn't work in English). Can some francophone shed some light on this? Does anything turn on the distinction? (My hunch is that they think that an "emeute" is something so nasty that it only happens in bad countries like the USA, therefore it can't be happening in France.)

The riots are bad enough as they are. We don't need to blow them out of proportion. So far there has been a total of one death. Mainly, a bunch of unemployed young thugs are burning and stealing stuff. That doesn't mean they want to overthrow the French government and establish an Islamic caliphate.

Where's the President of the EU? Somebody explain to me how the Eurotrash Press blames the U.S. President for a natural disaster, while this man-made catastrophe grows and grows, and ...

For when the tanks and armored vehicles?
I'm sure if the "youth" were white skin heads (also usually from destitute and poorly educated backgrounds) the government would not have been so slow and hesitant to respond or afraid to "anger" them further...
These "youth" need to be taugth a loss, and soon, unfortunately.
Bart