The Youths of Unknown Ethnic Extraction are rampaging through the suburbs of Paris again. This time, they’re aggrieved because two youths were killed after their speeding moped struck a police car. They’ve taken to their normal process of airing their grievances, destroying the buildings around them and injuring police officers. Last night they wounded 77 officers. The violence has been ongoing since Sunday.
I’d not shed a tear at all if President Sarkozy decided to come down hard on the rioters. You can not have a civilized society when a rather large segment of it instantly leaps to violence when it is offended. France itself is far from blameless here; it created an underclass of immigrants from Muslim countries to fuel its faltering and aging social welfare system. France also needed people to do the work its own people had gotten to lazy to do (which, as it happens, is quite a lot). So it turned to the flood of Muslims coming to Europe and welcomed them. The problem is, France never attempted to absorb the new immigrants into the country. It didn’t offer a ready means of citizenship and treated them like a permanent underclass. That certainly contributed to the problem France is having now and had last year in the same neighborhoods.
Nidra Poller is reporting the events from Paris and has periodic updates.
