Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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�meutes � Paris
(Riots in Paris)

Rich Galen

Monday November 7, 2005

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While the entire American Cable News Cabal was running wall-to-wall coverage of the professional rioters in the Argentine city of Mar Del Plata, most of the rest of the planet was watching in horror the night-after-night of ethnic rioting which has been rocking Paris and its suburbs.

The unrest at the Summit of the Americas in Argentina was so spontaneous, that the press was pre-positioned prior to the riots' beginning every day. The daily "escalation" from peaceful marching to trained operatives throwing Molotov cocktails were so linear as to look as though they were working from a written script.

Meanwhile in Paris, the government of Jacques Chirac is on the verge of collapse because of the 10-straight nights of escalating violence there. While I join you in applauding anything which causes Chirac heartburn, we should be careful of what we wish for.

In America, the phrase "inner-city" is synonymous with the word "ghetto." The suburbs are where the middle and upper classes have their single-family houses, Borders, Starbucks, high-end malls, and organic supermarkets.

In Paris, the city itself is like our suburbs, and the Parisian suburbs - or at least some of them - are the ghettos and are the bastions of the hoi polloi who cannot afford the prices in the 16th.

The rioters in Paris are, or are the descendents of, immigrants from Northern and Western Africa. According to Bloomberg, "The violence reflects tensions in neighborhoods marked by youth unemployment of more than 30 percent and large immigrant Muslim communities in the majority Catholic nation."

The riots have spread to the city of Paris proper as well as the cities of Nice, Strasbourg and Toulouse. According to the BBC, "Rioters burnt nearly 1,300 cars and more than 300 arrests were made on Saturday night."

This series of riots started when two young men were electrocuted while climbing a fence around an electrical substation. The rumor started immediately that they were being chased by the police and things went downhill from there.

But there is a growing sense that these riots have their roots in the Chirac government's intolerance of Muslims extremism as defined by things like Muslim girls wearing headscarves to school - which is now against the law.

You can't think about these riots without wondering how smart Chirac and his beautifully coiffed hatchet man, former Foreign Minister and present Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin think they are now.

In the run up to the war in Iraq, they were the toasts of Europe and curried favor with Islamic countries for playing Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax to President Bush's Franklin Roosevelt, and Colin Powell's Cordell Hull.

Chirac may have taken solace that the attack on the trains in Madrid were a reaction to Spanish participation in the coalition in Iraq. He may have taken somewhat less comfort in the attacks on the subways and bus in London, if only because they occurred in spite of the high quality of British security services.

The rioters in Argentina were professionals. The rioters in France are somewhat less organized, but with the police and other security forces distracted in trying to contend with them, do not be surprised if al Qaeda or one of its related groups seizes on what it perceives as a target of opportunity.

I don't know if you can make the case that the Chirac/de Villepin appeasement caused these problems, but it certainly didn't help avoid them.

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On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Zounds! A translation of the title, a link to the lyrics to the Mamas and the Papas tune, a surprising definition of "hoi polloi," an explanation of that complex historical reference including Chamberlain and all that, a pretty good Mullfoto and a Catchy Caption of the Day you'll want to clip and save.

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