Appeals to multiculturalism only deepen the alienation of the children of immigrants, who understand that their alien culture and the poverty their parents brought with them keep them separate and apart from authentic participation in the nation. France, as other nations of Europe, depends on assimilated immigrants with skills and good attitudes to keep the economy moving. That isn't happening, and the riots won't make it so.
Paris burning ignites a fierce debate among Europeans over immigration and integration of the 5 or 6 million Muslims living elsewhere in Western Europe. Sporadic fires have spread to Belgium and Germany. "One of the greatest dishonesties of European policy and intellectual discourse," observes the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "has been that multicultural issues can only be discussed in one direction -- the 'accepting society.' Whoever calls on the immigrants themselves to integrate better is seen as a nationalist monster who lacks 'openness.'"
Out of work adolescents isolated in ghettos become rebels with a cause to create a Baghdad on the Seine. Francis Fukuyama draws parallels with other radicals, of other times, other places. "We have seen the exact same forms of alienation among those young people who in earlier generations became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Bader-Meinhof gang," he writes in The Wall Street Journal. "The ideology changes but the underlying psychology does not."
The current disturbing ideology is radical Islam, and the French -- who never lose an opportunity to criticize America and Israel, and who embraced Arafat, and who sneer at American aims in Iraq -- encourage the mentality of the mobs in their midst crying "jihad" and "war" while setting fire to cars, buses, stores, warehouses and beating up the occasional man and woman who happen to be in their way.
For an American to look realistically at the problem is not to indulge in schadenfreude, but to suggest that it's time for France to look to America as a better model for a growing economy. It's too late to shoot the messenger.