Not So Sweet November

November hasn't been kind to France as the riots continue for a nineteenth straight night. Only about 200 cars were torched last night, which is fewer than the night before, and law enforcement concedes that this is nearing the normal rates for any given night.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin made an unexpected visit on Tuesday to a Paris suburb that has been hit by riots as parliament prepared to approve an extension of emergency powers.

Villepin traveled to Aulnay-sous-Bois northeast of Paris a day after President Jacques Chirac said in a national address that the worst civil unrest in almost 40 years pointed to a deep national malaise and identity crisis.

The prime minister met local residents, teachers and business leaders during the previously unannounced visit, his first to an area that has been hit by rioting by youths who feel excluded from mainstream society.

What is left unsaid is that there are many among those rioters who don't want to be included in the mainstream society and want to impose their version of society on the French. That would be the Islamist contingent, which poses the most difficult questions for the French government and none of the French plans for dealing with the problems actually addresses that issue at all.

National Police service chief Michel Gaudin told Le Monde newspaper that 80 percent of those arrested for rioting were already known to police. In future, more officers would have to work at night when troublemakers were most active, he said.

I leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions, but logic would dictate that if these troublemakers were in jail instead of being on the streets, they wouldn't have been available to riot.

The French keep trying to redefine the normal. No Pasaran notices, as the violence and rioting may approach normal summer weekend figures, but they're doing this in the late fall on a weekday. That's not normal. Well, it's the new normal. Twice the old normal. With extra flair.

UPDATE:
Beautiful Atrocities puts California up against France, and finds the similarities frightening (it's satire folks).

Elsewhere, according to the car-b-que metric, the riots are lessening, but again that isn't the full story. Once again, there are reports that rioters tried to torch a mosque near Lyon. The article points out the peak number of cars torched, but not the culmulative total, which is probably past the grim milestone of 10,000. Nor does the article state the number of schools or businesses damaged or destroyed by the rioters. Why?

Linked to Mudville Gazette's Open Post.

UPDATE:
Others noticing that the riots haven't gone away - only subsided to the new normal: Diggers Realm, which also has an interesting posting about who was involved in the riots.

UPDATE:
Bruce Thornton drops 50 and fires for effect at the NYT and other liberal papers that seek out root causes for the rioting that does nothing except provide excuses for the rioters' behaviors.

In the case of the Paris rioters, there are other explanations for their behavior that are more accurate than liberal clichés about “frustration.” As Dr Jack Wheeler puts it, “The problem is not that these Moslem kids are unemployed, but that they are unemployable. They are illiterate, unskilled except in crime, don't speak French well, refuse to assimilate into French culture and think being Moslem is more important than being French. Worse, they are paid by the French welfare state not to work, living well off the dole (and crime). The problem was epitomized by these words of a young Moslem rioter to a French reporter: 'In the day we sleep, go see our girlfriends, and play video games. And in the evening we have a good time: we go and fight the police.'”

But don't expect the Times to explore these alternative interpretations. The Times endorses the opinion consistent with the liberal-left world-view of the paper's editorial board, a vision of human nature in which notions like free will and unmotivated evil are superstitions that have been unmasked by science. People in reality are just passive victims of the larger forces controlling their destinies. Thus the unjust economic system (i.e. capitalism) and its oppression are to blame for destructive actions, for man does live by bread alone, and so if he acts up it's only because he doesn't have enough bread. All those Muslim youths have no autonomous wills, no values or ideals they hold dear, no spiritual beliefs that justify their actions. They are just passive victims who can only react to the injustice around them.