I’ve been following the rioting in France rather casually. Yesterday I played a little game where I read several MSM stories on the subject and counted how many paragraphs into each article you had to read before the word “Muslim” or “Islam” or a similar variant was mentioned (note: the average was 5-6 paragraphs in). I saw a different and interesting take last night, however, on Jay Reding’s Single Malt Pundit blog.
Jay links a post by Gregory Djerjian that describes the riots not as a rising of Arab militancy but the predictable and crashing fall of the Socialist model and attempts of class equality. After citing a very interesting passage in Djerjian’s post, Jay says:
While it’s certain that radical Muslims are taking advantage of this situation, it wasn’t radical Islam that started it – it was the failure of the French social model that provided a perfect breeding ground for this terrorism. A state with an unemployment rate in the double digits cannot expect to have a stable and prosperous society. A society in which enterprise is systematically stifled by paternalistic regulations cannot hope to keep their level of unemployment down. A state with a low birth rate cannot sustain its economic base, but importing foreign labor and not assimilating them into society creates tensions. Everything about the current French societal model has led to this breakdown, and after 11 days the government is still looking powerless and confused.
For all the Gallic moaning about the terrors of the “Anglo-Saxon” model, their supposedly more “humanistic” French model has produced vast concrete ghettoes with levels of unemployment that makes the American inner city look positively prosperous in comparison. The state socialist model is failing in France, it’s failing in Germany, and the most prosperous parts of Europe are that way precisely because they’re either too small to experience the shocks of their larger siblings, or they’ve abandoned state socialism for free market reform.
For myself, I’ve wondered about how well coordinated the riots appear to be and if the escalation in violence by the rioters might not be an effort to provoke a violent response from the French government that can be leveraged into an even greater rallying point. I’ve also wondered if the French reluctance to impose even a curfew might not be driven by memories of the 1961 Paris massacre where largely peaceful protests by Algerians against curfews led to as many as 200 people being killed by police (and then complicitly hushed up for 30-odd years).
There are lessons to be learned from all of this, I’m sure, and Jay Reding’s and Djerjian’s takes should be part of the curricula.
