What jobs would these people accept that could reward them as much as drugs and crime? To quote a teacher who works with,”special needs” immigrant youths.”Several of mine(students)have been shot,but what can I offer them when their older brothers drive around in BMWs have girls on the street, earn(sic) as much in a month as I do in a year?”..”Work hard and you can be like me?”

First,they have to weened off their habits,criminal proclivities curbed,a basic lifestyle discipline instilled,then you can begin to educate them.Many will never rise above menial jobs,so they have to be kept interested,after all there is another option.It is worth bearing in mind that they are not used to taking orders,unless there is a real or implied sanction.

It has to been borme in mind that these young men have an adolescent macho respect culture to the nth degree,this is enhanced by their culture,the patriarchical societal structure of North Africa and the Middle East in general.

That culture precludes the civilising effect of women,yes the young men avail themselves of the host societies more open sexual mores,but their culture causes them to despise the girls they use.

When the youths do eventually marry,it is within the closed community to which they belong.

Why were the 19 hijackers at least middle class and educated?

Because those yuppies, unlike the impoverished rioters we’re seeing now, were totally uninterested in jobs or economics or assimilation. They were jihadists. The kids rioting in the projects today are not. Thanks for making my point.

Jerry, there’s utterly no evidence that islamists are driving these acts, which are totally uncoordinated, pointless, spontaneous, adolescent, dumb. It’s really all about access to jobs and being treated like equals rather than pariahs, aka n*ggers.

Please tell my why it is only the Muslim poor who are rioting and not Black African Christians from the former French colonies who also poor? Why is it that Hindu’s assimilated in England but not the Paksistanis? Why were the 19 hijackers at least middle class and educated? Why were the London bombers educated, not poor and to large degree apparently assimilated? What makes those who have all the Coca Cola and blue jeans they need become suicide bombers? You have no answer because you have no values.

Finally, in case you haven’t heard, Muslims attack Jews all the time. This about who controls the neighborhood Islam or the Government.

As to your rather hilarious notion that secularism is destroying Europe– a notion you share to a T with the islamists, btw– try visiting today’s very secular, very wealthy Ireland, and then read any of the dozens of (very well-written) accounts of the hellhole that was the Church- and priest-dominated, pisspoor Ireland that prevailed well into the 1980s. And then tell us which Ireland is more stable, prosperous, confident, and sane. Hint: it wasn’t the Ireland in which pregnant girls used to cross the Irish Sea for their abortions.

These riots are all about Kulturkampf. Rich or poor Muslims will gravitate toward their own culture. There is no desire to assimilate; rather they seek to assimilate others. Why must we continue to remind the Thibauds of the world that 19 terrorists who attacked America on 9-11 were not poor and ignorant? They were at least middle class and well educated. I repeat “MAN DOES NOT LIVE BY BREAD ALONE.”

Over the years people from the Indian subcontinent migrated to the UK. They often arrived with a lack of skills. The Hindu element worked hard, went to school and became British. The Muslims pretty much stayed poor and unassimilated. Interestingly enough, the subway bombers were better educated and better off then run of the mill “Asian

Given the very heavy emphasis that Palamas Media contributors and editorialists place upon the menace of extremist Islam and Islamist terror, it seems that a perennial danger for PJM’s credibility will be the tendency, as seen with this and related threads, to slant analysis and, in future, reportage toward the Islamist Menace meme– even when that meme is not accurate and unsupported by facts or context.

A word to the wise: not every sparrow that falls, or apartment that burns, reveals the islamofascist hand. The world is a large and complex place. Best to try to understand it on its own terms before opining on its deeper meanings.

best,

t

Everyone here is so obsessed with Islam that you can’t even see the obvious, 800-lb gorilla staring you in the eyes: France is a deeply racist country that holds back its african population from any significant participation in politics or wealth creation or intellectual life.

In generations past, when unskilled african immigrants could easily find factory jobs and when those immigrants’ memories of the hellholes they escaped in Africa were still fresh, the exclusion of africans from a track to wealth and power did not breed resentment. The african immigrants were in fact and in perception far better off than they could have imagined themselves elsewhere.

In today’s information-based economy, in France as in the US, there are few jobs available to the unskilled. Another major change is that youths raised in the hellish cites around Paris, Marseille etc do not remember the even worse hell that was (is) Algiers or other African nightmare cities. Yet another change is the sharp rise in French racism toward nonwhites, resulting in an openly racist, fascist presidential candidate’s edging a sitting Socialist PM in a presidential election in 2002.

The issues here are race mixed with an economic model that guarantees mass unemployment among the young, the nonwhite, and the unskilled–period. If you’re all three of the above, then you are utterly screwed in France. The kids in the cites know this well and are behaving the way angry, uneducated, unsupervised, unpoliced kids always do in such a situation. Islam and islamism are nothing more than epiphenomena here.

We have Amir Taheri’s piece, quoted at length above.

We have the episode of October 30th:

A tear gas grenade was launched into a mosque. Police denied responsibility, but acknowledged that it was the same type used by French riot police. Speaking to 170 police officers at Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture in Bobigny (the local authority overseeing Clichy-sous-Bois), Nicolas Sarkozy said, “I am, of course, available to the Imam of the Clichy mosque to let him have all the details in order to understand how and why a tear gas bomb was sent into this mosque.”

We have Reuters reporting on the “big brothers” trying to mediate:

Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose policy includes a tough police response and dialogue with ‘big brothers’, had to defend himself in a radio interview against suggestions he had allowed Muslims to organise their own security squads.

Dalil Boubakeur, head of France’s official Muslim Council, said unofficial authorities such as imams and ‘big brothers’ were a fact of Muslim life in the poor suburbs.

And in the IHT story linked above:

Leaving the afternoon prayer at a makeshift outdoor mosque, Hocine, 23, a soft-spoken young man of Algerian descent in religious attire, said he was resigned to never having his culture and his religion truly accepted in France.

The man, who would only identify himself as Awax, said looking Arab in France was more than just having darker skin: It was also a ticket to a societal pigeon hole from which there was no escape.

“Looking Arab means you either spend all day at the mosque or you are criminal scum,” he said. “People generalize all the time, but you can’t. Nobody talks about white French people as Christian.”

In few places is the separation of religion and state as strict as it is in France, where all conspicuous religious garb like the Muslim head scarf is banned from schools.

The law has intermittently prompted some Muslim groups to complain, and last year many cases of Muslim girls refusing to take their scarves off made headlines.

While sociologists and immigration specialists say that the religiousness of immigrants is often exaggerated, they say it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Many of these guys are no more Muslim than other French people are practicing Christian,” said Christophe Bertossi at the French Institute of International Relations in Paris.

“But if they are given no other identity the Muslim label risks becoming the thing they fall back on.”

Moreover, it appears that this already has been happening, with youth in the depressed areas defining themselves more as Muslims than by ethnicity. The evidence from the IHT piece is mixed, but given the amount of press now criticizing France for discriminating against Muslims, imposing the hijab restriction, etc., you can’t also claim that Islamism has nothing to do with the current state of affairs there.

When looking at the pre-existing lawless nature of the depressed areas, you have the intimidation of the shopkeepers to which Taheri referred, but you also have the assaults and rapes of young women whose dress or behavior is deemed improper by Islamist gangs. And you had a government that had made these neighborhoods “no-go” areas, leaving a vacuum for the imams and “big brothers” to become the de facto authorities.

While we should be careful not to stereotype Muslims in general, it seems reasonable to look at all of the above and conclude that the fundamentalist, separatist Islamists have been and are a factor in this situation.

Percentage of non-white students in the entering class of California’s most prestigious university: 45.

Estimated Percentage of non-white students in the entering class of France’s most prestigious universities, the Grandes Ecoles: less than 1.

Estimated percentage of non-whites and immigrants among Californians with a net worth of >$500 million: 25-30% (cf Khosla, Omidyar, Yang, Brin, Shriram et al).

Indians and Chinese as a percentage of CEOs of Californian high tech companies (as per Dun & Bradstreet): 29%.

Estimated percentage of non-whites among France’s most powerful businessmen: zero.

Estimated percentage of most powerful political posts in California during the last 20 years (Gov., Senators, Supreme Court, Speaker of House, mayors of LA, SF, SD, SJ) held by nonwhites: 10 (Hayakawa, Willie Brown, Tom Bradley et al).

Percentage of most powerful political posts in France during its history that have been held by nowhites: zero.

France and California are both thoroughly modern, advanced polities with a long tradition of progressive political and social behavior. Why does one of these entities welcome nonwhites into every facet of its power structure while the other freezes them out– utterly, totally, ruthlessly?

Are you beginning to understand where the problem lies?

“Russia in 1917″

“Kristallnacht”

“pre-Nazi Germany all over again”

Folks, can we please have a moratorium in laughably ignorant, over-the-top hysteria? Y’all are turning Roger’s Place into a right-of-center version of Daily Kos.

Let’s start with a reality check. To date, fewer people have been killed in these riots than are typically killed during the trauma of victory that regularly occurs after a Detroit sports team wins a championship. This doesn’t even come close to the loss of life, property destruction and criminality that the US experienced during its own urban uprisings in 1965, 1967 or 1968.

Next, to those making the ridiculous bolshevik and weimar and intifada analogies, please put the bottle away, give your face a good hard slap and then start doing a little googling to begin educating yourself about contemporary France. If that’s demanding too much, then consider the following obvious facts:

Unlike Russia in 1917, France is not fighting a disastrous war that’s taking the lives of thousands of its young men every week. The French government, unlike the tsar, has not ordered its troops to charge upon and slaughter an assembly of hundreds of pro-government men women and children demanding nothing more than bread from a tsar whom they revered. The French government is not confronted by a rival political authority like the Petrograd Soviet. The French economy is not facing collapse.

Unlike Weimar Germany, France is not enduring either a depression or hyperinflation or massive, punitive obligations imposed by nations that defeated it during a recent, disastrous war.

Unlike Israel, France is not at war, or struggling with an occupation, or facing organized, armed opposition from a nation whose population is several times larger than its own.

Please, please educate yourselves before you drag this thread, and Roger’s blog, further into cuckoo-land.