Ten days to get the Chirac’s Attention and still no comparisons to Katrina

What? No prattling on about a pretzel or a plastic turkey? Will they go back and rewrite articles like this one while they’re at it? Not likely. But the tone is already sounding quite different “Intramuros” behind the ramparts of the left wing press. From today’s Guardian what may be the beginning of a continental wave of “leftist mugged by reality”:

«The suburbs of Paris are ablaze and the fever has spread uncontrollably to Lyon, Strasbourg and Rouen - political mismanagement fuelling the rage of the most impoverished of France's citizens and belying its claim to be a modern, racially integrated society.

More broadly, from Britain to Italy, the riots have raised urgent questions about multiculturalism and why successive models of integration over 30 years have gone wrong. The continent has woken up to its inability - frightening in the age of radical Islam - to embrace the destinies of thousands of youngsters estranged from the societies their parents entered into.

The past week has also shown that many of the 14- to 25-year-olds now rioting, as distinct from those who took to the streets a decade ago, are not crying out for jobs, training or integration. Amid unemployment rates of 20-30 per cent on the housing estates and racism outside, they have given up. Crime, especially drug dealing and petty theft, has become a means of survival.»

Seriously, the only thing missing is the left wing making of Martyrs, one of the reasons they feel right at home in a Palestinian shanty-town. Oh! Wait!

« Last week, on the day Bouna and Ziad were killed, Jean-Claude Irvoas, 51, got out of his car in Epinay-sur-Seine to take a photograph. As his wife and daughter sat in the car, Irvoas was attacked by three men, said to be Arabs from a nearby housing estate, and savagely beaten. He died in hospital later that evening. While speaking of the perpetrators, Sarkozy speaks to France's 'victims' - and they don't live in Clichy-sous-Bois or Aulnay-sous-Bois.»

The article also takes the beginnings of a cold and direct look at a possible political subtext. It could be that de Villepin is trying to let Sarko play the heavy and fall on his own sword making deVo the obvious Presidential shoe-in, and that Chirac has been avoiding dirtying his hands with this crisis for the sake of his legacy: a boulevard, a museum, hey, maybe even a subway station! We can expect political maneuvering quite shortly, but for now, the Guardian will find some of it’s own.

«The Interior Minister's rivalry with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has probably worsened the spate of riots.

Not only do suburban youths loathe Sarkozy's rhetoric about them, but in the past week they have seen evidence that the Interior and Prime Ministers are obsessed only with their own ambitions to be become the next President.

It became so intense during the past week that both politicians cancelled foreign trips to position themselves at the centre of the riots issue. On several occasions, Sarkozy made comments about the Clichy-sous-Bois deaths that were, at worst, ill-informed and at best sought to blindly defend the police.

Yet in a country where 28,000 cars have been burnt on housing estates this year alone, Sarkozy's gamble for the intolerant right-wing vote could still pay off. In today's Le Monde, the Interior Minister is unrepentant in a personal opinion piece titled 'Our strategy is the right one'.»

As painful as it might be for Guardian staff, I'm sure they'll make an exception to their usual distaste for concepts of maintaining law and order, possibly even avoid discussion of class struggle for a few moments when it relates to one of their readers’ favorite travel spots. Finally, we find out just what it is that evokes a fear response from a leftist: take away his ease of mind on vacation. The mugging might start there . . .

« Sonia Mabrouk, a 45-year-old secretary with two children, says she regularly confronts young troublemakers on the estate when they have set fire to dustbins or cut off the electricity in her building.

'For them, vandalism is something to do in the evenings. The vandalism has simply taken a new turn in the last few days because they feel provoked by [Interior Minister] Nicolas Sarkozy's comments about "louts". They are blaming everything on Sarkozy, but the problem is much bigger.'»

They still managed to fit in their obsession with "multi-culturalism". No doubt, some in the British left will declare French integration, or ANY sort of integration a failure, call I tribalism, and likely point to some other dopey Socialist concept as a way forward. (Just for fun, try to think of one problem all the diversity programs in the past 15 years have solved?)

« For years, French integration policies have been based around the republican tenet of secularism. On the basis that France should be indivisible and able to assimilate all its components by officially erasing their particularities, the government does not allow official statistics to be broken down by ethnicity and religion.
[ . . . ]
Christophe Bertossian, an immigration specialist at the French Institute for International Relations, believes it is time for a rethink: 'Part of the problem is the French approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal. The idea that we are equal is fiction. Ethnic minorities keep being told they do not exist.'»

After all, if the left had not spent 30 years infantilizing the population, they couldn't call them "youths" right now. Then again there is also the distrust of non-government entities, say, trying to keep the neighbors from behaving like idiots:

«'The fathers have the least authority of all,' he adds. 'They sometimes have no work and live on benefits, or have a very traditional outlook so are out of phase with France. The mothers can be a powerful influence, but they are hamstrung by the very macho culture that prevails on the estates.

'Schoolteachers in these zones are very often young and inexperienced. The grands-frères play a role, but they are self-appointed peacekeepers, which is dangerous.'

Many - but far from all - of the rioters have been children of North African immigrants. France is home to Europe's largest Muslim population and a third of its estimated six million people of Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian origin live in the ghettos.

But also among those arrested last week were children of French parents and grandparents and the offspring of sub-Saharan immigrants. What they all have in common is their alienation from mainstream society and, often, an Islamic upbringing.»

The irony is that it’s the lack of good parenting and the undermining of fathering that leftism accepts as an article of faith that creates the socially dislocated monsters that have become the predators in this managed society.