Quote of the Day

Mark Steyn on the Paris riots:

We kept hearing all this stuff ever since September 11th, you know, the Muslim street is going to explode in anger. Well, it finally did, and it was in Paris, not in the Middle East.

Steyn also has some thoughts which echo both Ed Morrissey and Dr. Dalrymple:

I’m actually thinking of going to Paris. I went to one of these suburbs that’s currently ablaze three years ago. And what was interesting to me is I had to bribe a taxi driver a considerable amount of money just to take me out there. They’re miserable places. But what was interesting to me is that after that, I then flew on to the Middle East, and I was in Yemen, and a couple of other places. And what was interesting to me was that I found more menace in the suburbs of Paris than I did in some pretty scary places in the Middle East. I mean, there is a real…this, I think, is the start of a long Eurabian civil war we’re witnessing here.

HH: Now that’s a pretty provocative statement. Let’s begin by…describe these for us. Are they like the Moscow or the Leningrad or the St. Petersberg tenements that stretch on and on?

MS: Well, actually, I would say they’re more miserable than that…

HH: Wow.

MS: …because a lot of them are like concrete bunkers. They have very strange things there…these public buildings that you have to have a kind of security card to get into. So, you’ll be going to see someone, and you’ll be frantically sticking this kind of key card in the door, while you’re standing outside on this very exposed sidewalk. They’re places where people who are not Muslim feel very ill at ease. They’re places where the writ of the French state does not run. The police don’t police there. They basically figure if you go there, you’re on your own. You’re taking your own chances there. I mean, I don’t think Americans understand quite the degree of alienation of some of these groups. You know, there’s a French cabinet minister whose title is the minister for social cohesion. And I think that would be a pretty odd title to have for a cabinet secretary in the United States.

However, as La Shawn Barber noted, it’s possible in the future that title won’t sound quite as strange to American ears.