France and the car burning cult dithering

Fred Siegal:

FRANCE today is a lot like New York City was before Rudy Giuliani: Its government is so large it crushes the economy - yet also too weak to stem widespread criminality. As with pre-Rudy New York, the fear that France's best days are behind it prevails.

For the moment, the French are breathing a sigh of relief, as the anniversary of last year's three weeks of rioting by Muslim youth passed with much fanfare but no widespread disturbances.

Yet - with the nation approaching both a presidential election and the Fifth Republic's 50th anniversary - the French elites worry that their famously unstable country is headed for breakdown and a Sixth Republic.

The 2005 Ramadan Riots, which saw some 10,000 cars torched and 300 buildings firebombed, have been followed by a yearlong, lower-grade rolling riot - what some in the French police are calling a "permanent intifada." Nationwide, this works out to 15 attacks a day on police and firefighters, and 100 cars set ablaze nightly. And for the first time, the police are being subject to well-planned ambushes.

So when the Oct. 27 anniversary of last year's violence was met with "only" 277 torched cars, the Interior Ministry declared it "relatively calm."

But the trends are not good. While last year's violence was disorganized (rioters armed only with bricks, crowbars and Molotov cocktails) and largely confined to heavily immigrant Muslim and African neighborhoods, this past week saw a half-dozen well-organized attacks on public buses in non-immigrant neighborhoods by "youths" armed with guns. In some cases, they ordered passengers out at gunpoint, then firebombed the bus. In others, they've tossed Molotov cocktails into buses with the passengers still aboard.

The French press ardently insists there's no link between Islam and the unrest in the streets. But there is a connection, albeit complex, between the rioters and Islam's Jihadi elements.

Some of the rioters of 2005 and car bombers of recent clashes have shouted Allah Akbar (God is Great). But other rioters are drawn to Islam less as a faith and more as an off-the-shelf oppositional ideology that has replaced Marxism as the intellectual drug of the alienated.

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The Fifth Republic's foreign policy, which sees the Arab world as a counter-balance to U.S. and Israeli power, has unintentionally legitimated some of the violence. French television, its perspective an extension of the nation's ruling elites, has tried to incorporate young Muslims by depicting the conflicts in the Middle East largely from a Franco-Muslim perspective. On many nights, the TV news glorified the intifada against Israel. In the "al Dura affair," French TV went so far as to fabricate images of a Palestinian boy supposedly killed by Israelis.

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The question for France is do they have their own Guiliani to save them from themselves. There is little reason for optimism. The French response has been dithering and more failed social programs. Religious bigotry cannot be bought off that cheap.