Rioting across France hit a new peak during the 11th night of rioting last night, as the violence — initially centered in the Paris suburbs — worsened elsewhere in France. From the original outburst of violence in suburban Paris housing projects, the violence has expanded into a widespread show of disdain for French authority from youths, mostly the children of Arabs and black Africans who are the products of high unemployment, poor housing and discrimination in French society. This Opinion.Telegraph piece provides a British perspective on the current situation.
Interestingly, Theodore Dalrymple — the pen name of British psychiatrist and author, Anthony Daniels — predicted all of this back in 2002 in this City Journal piece on the developing European underclass:

Whether France was wise to have permitted the mass immigration of people culturally very different from its own population to solve a temporary labor shortage and to assuage its own abstract liberal conscience is disputable . . . Indisputably, however, France has handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences; it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed; and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them to create their own lawless order.
No one should underestimate the danger that this failure poses, not only for France but also for the world. The inhabitants of the citÈs are exceptionally well armed. When the professional robbers among them raid a bank or an armored car delivering cash, they do so with bazookas and rocket launchers, and dress in paramilitary uniforms. From time to time, the police discover whole arsenals of Kalashnikovs in the citÈs. There is a vigorous informal trade between France and post-communist Eastern Europe: workshops in underground garages in the citÈs change the serial numbers of stolen luxury cars prior to export to the East, in exchange for sophisticated weaponry.
A profoundly alienated population is thus armed with serious firepower; and in conditions of violent social upheaval, such as France is in the habit of experiencing every few decades, it could prove difficult to control. The French state is caught in a dilemma between honoring its commitments to the more privileged section of the population, many of whom earn their livelihoods from administering the dirigiste economy, and freeing the labor market sufficiently to give the hope of a normal life to the inhabitants of the citÈs. Most likely, the state will solve the dilemma by attempts to buy off the disaffected with more benefits and rights, at the cost of higher taxes that will further stifle the job creation that would most help the citÈ dwellers. If that fails, as in the long run it will, harsh repression will follow.

Following up on one of those themes, Dalrymple writes today in this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed that France’s economic policies that end up encouraging unemployment have much to do with the current situtation:

A French employee works 30% fewer hours than a British worker, and a much smaller percentage of the French population than the British works at all, yet total French output is very nearly equal in value to British. In other words, the French are much more efficient economically than the British. But their relative efficiency has been bought at a price: the creation of a large caste of people more or less permanently unintegrated into the rest of society.
A Martian observing France dispassionately, without ideological preconceptions, would come to the conclusion that the French had accepted with equanimity a kind of social settlement in which all those with jobs would enjoy various legally sanctioned perks and protections, while those without jobs would remain unemployed forever, though they would be tossed enough state charity to keep body and cellphone together. And since there are many more employed people than unemployed people in France, this is a settlement that suits most people, who will vote for it forever. It is therefore politically unassailable, either by the left or the right, which explains the paralysis of the French state in the present impasse.
The only fly in the ointment (apart from the fact that the rest of the economies of the world won’t leave the French economy in peace) is that the portion of the population whom the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, so tactlessly, but in the secret opinion of most Frenchmen so accurately, referred to as the “racaille” — scum — is not very happy with the settlement as it stands. It wants to be left alone to commit crimes uninterrupted by the police, as is its inalienable right.
Unfortunately, to economic division is added ethnic and cultural division: For the fact is that most of Mr. Sarkozy’s racaille are of North African or African descent, predominantly Muslim. And the French state has adopted, whether by policy or inadvertence, the South African solution to the problem of social disaffection (in the days of Apartheid): It has concentrated the great majority of the disaffected paupers geographically in townships whose architecture would have pleased that great Francophone (actually Swiss) modernist architect, Le Corbusier, who — be it remembered — wanted to raze the whole of Paris and rebuild it along the lines of Clichy-sous-Bois (known now as Clichy-sur-Jungle).
If you wanted to create and run a battery farm for young delinquents, you could hardly do better. But as one “community leader” put it when asked whether he thought that better architecture might help, there’s no point in turning 15-story chicken coops into three-story chicken coops.

Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson reminds us in this City Journal piece that the core problem remains radical Islamic fascism, the importation of which America remains strangely tolerant:

Some say, reassuringly, that Islamic extremism has little appeal to Americaís growing Muslim population. America prides itself on being unlike Europe in its powers of assimilation. Thanks to the melting pot and a vigorous economy, this argument goes, we have no Marseilles-like Muslim ghettos or Rotterdam-style ìdish cities,î blighted Islamic suburbs where assimilation remains rare and terrorist sympathies widespread even after generations of living in the West. We certainly donít have the difficulties in assimilating Muslims that England experiences. A chilling Daily Telegraph poll, for example, found that one in four British Muslims sympathized with the motives of Julyís subway killers, about one in five voiced little loyalty toward Britain, and a third felt that Western culture was ìdecadentî and that they should help ìto bring it to an end.î
Yet U.S. self-congratulation is premature. Before we condemn Britain as hopelessly retrograde, we need to recognize that we have no idea how much some American Muslims support jihadist causesócomprehensive polls donít exist. Of the few surveys taken, the results arenít encouraging. The Hamilton College Muslim America poll of April 2003 revealed that 44 percent of U.S. Muslims had no opinion on whether Usama bin Ladin was involved with the September 11 attacks. Only one out of three blamed al-Qaida. . . .
If we really are in a war against Muslim terror, our enemies and those who support or appease them pose a quandary on the home front unlike anything we have faced in past struggles. . .
Yet immigration controlóas the Dutch and French have learnedómay be the most powerful tool in the war against the jihadists. Not only does it help keep terrorists out, it also carries symbolic weight. In the Middle East, America is worshipped even as it is hatedóconstantly slurred even as it proves the Number One destination for thousands upon thousands of would-be immigrants from the Islamic world. Once we have deported the Islamists, and Middle Easterners and other Muslims find it much harder to enter the U.S. because of their governmentsí tolerance for radical anti-Americanism, the message will resound all the more loudly in the Muslim world itself that terrorism is intolerable.
Such toughness opposes the current orthodoxy, which holds that curtailing immigration from the Arab and Muslim world will cost us a key opportunity to inculcate moderates and eventually send back emissaries of goodwill. Maybe; but so far, the profile of the Islamic terrorist is someone who has paid back our magnanimity with deadly contempt. Just as bin Ladin, Dr. Zawahiri, and the Pakistanis suspected of bombing the London subways were not poor, uneducated, or unfamiliar with the West, so too we find that those arrested for terrorist activities on our shores seem to hate us all the more because of our liberality.
Perhaps if the message does begin to be heard that America is as unpredictable as it is merciless toward the advocates and supporters of radical Islam, then the much praised but rarely heard moderates of the Muslim world will at last step forward and keep the few from ruining things for the many. Meantime, we should stop allowing illiberals into the United Statesóilliberals who either wish to undermine Western tolerance or wonít worry too much when others in their midst try.