Coming of Age

The New York Times, meanwhile, sees the story of integration of the French media as somehow more important than the three weeks worth of rioting. In fact, the article can't even come to say the r-word:

The disparity between the country's monochromatic image of itself and the multicolored reality frustrates young citizens from non-European immigrant backgrounds and has added to their sense of alienation, which was expressed most graphically in the arson attacks that have swept the country this month.

It's not arson attacks, but rioting on a countrywide scale. More than 10,000 cars were torched. Hundreds of businesses damaged, schools destroyed, and dozens of police and firefighters injured. There have been several thousand arrests, but the Times calls it 'arson attacks.'

Figures.

It's the multiculturalism argument that the Times is fixated on, despite the fact that there are serious problems with a group of Muslims who do not want to assimilate but rather force their own cultural mores on French society at large. By trying to keep the focus on multiculturalism, the Times does everyone a great disservice because there are real serious problems with the French society, government, and how they deal with immigrant populations, especially those that refuse to assimilate.

It's all relative after all. From No Pasaran:

It's all relative. The State of Emergency is prolonged for 3 months. Last night, 160 vehicles were torched, 40 arrests were made, and a church was partially destroyed by fire in Romans (Drome). The French are settling into a comfort zone of 150+ cars burned per night just to be able to say that this thing is over.

One has to wonder whether the US media would be so forgiving of continuing violence and rioting in a major urban area going on for nearly three weeks to declare the violence ebbing even though it continues at a rate of 150+ cars torched a night, with additional buildings - churches, mosques, and other buildings damaged or destroyed.

Heck, it's all just harmless fun. We now rejoin our regularly scheduled programming.

In the eastern French city of Strasbourg, youths ring in each New Year by burning cars.

"Little by little, it has become a sport," said Patrice Ribeiro, national secretary of the Synergie police officers' union.

While there has been a history of torching cars in France and some other European countries, experts say youths have an array of motivation, ranging from revenge to marking territory or simply having fun.

Has anyone bothered to check out whether the owners of those cars think that this is a sport? The owners of the torched cars have lost their valuable property, their mode of transportation that takes them to work and school. And the French media wants to treat this as a sport?

The French are burying their head in the sand hoping that the problems go away; writing it off as the youthful indiscretions of a group of teenagers isn't going to solve the problem of the riots.

It only means that the riots will come back at the convenience of the rioters. And the rioters will know that they can take action whenever they want, and will have free reign to do so.

And we have this tidbit that really ought to be investigated more thoroughly:

National police said Tuesday that 8 810 vehicles - cars, buses, trucks - had been set afire since the October 27 start of the urban unrest that began in a northeast Paris suburb and spread to poor suburbs and towns around France.

About 30 000 cars are burned each year in France. This year, between January and the end of October, 30 000 cars had been set alight, National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said in an interview published Tuesday in the daily Le Monde.

Each morning since the start of the unrest, police have issued figures for the overnight arson attacks - which have also hit businesses, schools and other institutions - but limited the count to vehicles, seen as a barometer of the nocturnal marauding.

Of the 30,000 cars torched, how many are due to rioting (wanton violence) and how many are for insurance payoffs or as revenge against the owners of the vehicles. More importantly, how many businesses, schools, and institutions have been damaged by arson and has that number increased since the rioting began. It would seem that even as the car torchings have declined, the number of schools, churches, mosques, and other businesses damaged have increased. That's a sign not that the rioting has lessened, but that the rioters have shifted targets.

The article also goes into the pathology of which cars are singled out for torching and which ones are not touched. Not unexpectedly, high-end cars belonging to drug traffickers aren't touched because whoever would try would likely end up in a hospital. For anyone else living in those areas, their cars are fair game.

UPDATE:
Wrechard of the Belmont Club also notices the heads in the sand, though he calls it the Night of the Living Dead because the riots are still ongoing despite the utter disinterest in the coverage.

UPDATE:
Multilinked to: Don Surber, who notes that the French alert system has been upgraded from "run" to "hide." To the Point, Bertrand Pecquerie, who thinks that the level of blogging has been poor. Pecquerie's focus seesm to be those bloggers who saw the rioting as a French intifada. For starters, intifada means struggle or shaking off, and a large percentage of the rioters are Muslim. It was not entirely unwarranted to make the connection, especially as the riots persisted in largely Muslim communities. The rioting may not have started as Muslim riots, the Islamists definitely tried to exploit the situation to their advantage. The French are continuing to crack down on smartmobbing, which uses text messaging and blogging to get the word out. Melanie Phillips notes that the Muslim identity of many of the rioters is purely coincidental. That observation is also made by Mark Nicodemo, and the IRIS Blog.

UPDATE:
The Washington Post weighs in with some new details on the rioting. They note that more than 8,500 cars have been torched as have about 100 public buildings. Again, we see the excuse that the violence is heading towards acceptable levels of 200 cars a night.

Police said Tuesday that 215 vehicles had been destroyed the previous night, an "almost normal" level. The torching of cars by gangs has been common for years in France's depressed and sometimes lawless immigrant neighborhoods.

How that ever became an acceptable level of violence is beyond me. I guess some people tolerate a level of criminal activity. Someone in the French government should contact the NYPD on how to institute Compustat and the other quality of life criminal tracking software and then begin community policing of the very communities that were previously ignored.

Villepin said that the car torchings cannot be tolerated yesterday, though one has to wonder where the heck he's been for the past decade as these torchings became so commonplace that they escaped media attention until the riots began in earnest last month.

More to the point, will anyone in the French government at any level be held accountable for the inability to police these communities?

UPDATE:
I wonder if Bertrand Pecquerie's head would explode if he read this Newsweek article, which states:

Statistically true, perhaps. But "normal"? In hundreds of French housing projects and ghettoes populated by mostly Muslim Arab and African immigrants and their French children and grandchildren, "normal" has been for years a sort of chronic intifada, even if it was invisible to most of France and the rest of the world. According to research conducted by the government's domestic intelligence network, the Renseignements Generaux, French police would not venture without major reinforcements into some 150 "no-go zones" around the country—and that was before the recent wave of riots began on Oct. 27. In France's "immigrant" neighborhoods, to borrow a phrase from the American military, "situation normal, all f—-ed up."

Snafu pretty much describes the situation in France [memo to self to use that in next installment of riot coverage- ed.] though Newsweek wonders what this means for the rest of Europe.

It isn't pretty. No one wants to deal with any of these issues in a meaningful and substantive way. The French are hoping that throwing a few euros to the unemployed might help, but that's a pittance compared to the significant cultural, political, and religious divide that has emerged over the past decade. And don't get started on the demographics either:

The core of the time bomb is demography, and the detonator is racism. The native populations of Europe—let's say it, the white populations—are reproducing slowly and aging fast. Without continued immigration, according to the European Union and United Nations statistics, by 2050 the number of Germans will have shrunk from 83 million to 63 million, Italians will go from 57 million to 44 million. In the same period, among the North African and Middle Eastern countries surrounding Europe, the population will double.

No amount of money will solve that problem overnight either.

Immigration may be part of the problem, but it is also part of the solution. The trick is to get the immigrants assimilated into the countries that they are seeking to enter. It's not easy. In fact, it's quite difficult, especially with the whole notion of multiculturalism making it ever more difficult. However, that's the only way people coming into a country will adopt the cultural and social mores of the nation that they're adopting as their own.

UPDATE:
Other European leaders are taking notice of the French riots. And some of the conclusions they're drawing are bizarre, and downright scary:

Jean Francois-Poncet, a French senator and former foreign minister, said progress on major EU initiatives might be difficult until after the next elections in France and Italy. He also said the rioting, which often pitted police against Muslim youths, tarnished France's image in Arab countries where Paris has long considered itself influential.

Yet Francois-Poncet observed that France, for all its troubles, could take comfort from looking elsewhere in Europe.

"When everybody is weaker, you all come out even," he said.

Sorry, but not everyone is going to be weaker for all the tumult. Someone is going to benefit from the violence. Whether it's a subgroup of a country (Islamists) or countries outside Europe (China, US, India, or the Asia rim), someone will exploit the weaknesses to their own ends. That exploitation can be in the form of expanded economic opportunities or to cause military mischief.