OpinionJournal - French Lessons

Again, the worthies at The Wall Street Journal miss the point. The lessons they draw from the now finally subsiding spectacle of cars burning in the streets of France are these:

1. The French are so supercilious toward everybody else that they wouldn't know how to assimilate their immigrants, even if those immigrants wanted to assimilate.
2. The French imported those people when labor was short. Then they destroyed their economy's capacity to create new wealth and jobs, don't know what to do with those imported people, and basically left them to their own devices.

Result: disaster. And with the same confidence that the Journal offers the above analysis, they brashly claim that that sort of thing would never happen here, because we do let people into the mainstream if they want to join it, and we don't wreck our economy as thoroughly as the French wrecked theirs.

That's all very well. True enough, disaster never results from one factor only, but rather from a cascade of factors. (Which is why post-disaster analysis rapidly breaks down to a great game of "If only.") Equally true, the French are guilty of both varieties of negligence whereof the Journal accuses them. But the Journal has never understood the human capacity for stone cold evil. Nor have any of their editors read the Koran, and translated the "fighting words" that a new generation of Muslims is increasingly taking very seriously.

What has happened in France is this: You have a generation born to immigrants who were never anything more than temporary workers, and never meant to be anything more than that. You have an economy that shuts people out--and has to do the shutting-out because it's a creaky old machine that, to paraphrase Will Durant, can help people cope with poverty (at least, those whom it does not shut out) but cannot get them out of that poverty. Thus you have a bunch of young toughs with no discipline and nothing better to do. Into that volatile community, such as it is, step Muslim fundamentalists who preach not discipline in one's daily life, but war--actual physical war against anyone who is not Muslim.

That explains why the riots are happening now, at a time and in a manner that can only bring disgrace to Muslims everywhere, just by letting the cat out of the bag. And it explains why this re-fight of Charles the Hammer's War has taken place in such an undisciplined fashion all around.

Not that I expect the French to be able to cope with it nearly as well as Charles the Hammer did. Jacques Chirac is no Charles Martel. But if he were, I would never expect him, nor advise him, to take advice from The Wall Street Journal.