The Fury in France and Across the West | The Free Press

The most recent riots in France are winding down. It took the deployment of 45,000 police officers nationwide to quell the violence and arson that erupted in response to the June 27 police shooting of Nahel M., a teenager of Algerian and Moroccan descent. Between that day and this one, rioters destroyed hundreds of buildings, set thousands of cars on fire, and attacked the home of a suburban mayor, injuring his wife and one of his children before they fled. 

According to reports, the rioters were mostly young, and many of them seemed to be ethnic minorities. Such details, along with the event that sparked the violence, make it easy to place the riots neatly in one of several categories depending on your ideological framework. This was either about failing Muslim assimilation, police brutality, systemic racism, or some combination of the bunch. And since we are so often made to understand that racism is the defining issue of the West, you can explain what just happened as another spasm on the way to our long-overdue reckoning. 

This is true as far as it goes: Immigrants to France from North Africa and the Middle East do face discrimination. Many Muslims who reside in housing projects live in a country far removed from the France of the American imagination. Their lives in the banlieues are marked by a chronic lack of social services, from childcare to medicine to education. 

But none of this goes anywhere near far enough to explain the orgy of violence we ve just witnessed. The latest riots are only a piece of a larger mass fever sweeping not just Paris or France or Europe but all of the West.

via www.thefp.com

Not sure how to say “Ai Chihuahua!” in French.