The Redhunter

France has been detecting, or at least fearing, loyalty problems among the fifteen percent of its soldiers who are Moslem. The military insists that these second and third generation soldiers of, for the most part, Arab descent, are loyal. But many Christian soldiers, NCOs and officers are not so sure. Harassment of Moslem troops by Christian soldiers is common. There have been no major incidents of soldiers turned terrorists, but the abuse from paranoid soldiers, NCOs and officers might push Moslem soldiers to go bad. This is believed more likely because there are no Moslem chaplains. Thus Moslem soldiers seek spiritual advice from clerics with no military experience, and possible a radical agenda. More worrisome is that radicalized soldiers will leave the army equipped with skills they can use for terrorist attacks.

Daniel Pipes has a typically insightful article on the riots. He asks why, if the rioters are motivated by bad economic conditions and racism, they cry "Allahu Akbar". Rather, he sees the riots as part of "a new form of jihad"

Indigenous Muslims of northwestern Europe have in the past year deployed three distinct forms of jihad: the crude variety deployed in Britain, killing random passengers moving around London; the targeted variety in the Netherlands, where individual political and cultural leaders are singled out, threatened, and in some cases attacked; and now the more diffuse violence in France, less specifically murderous but also politically less dismissible. Which of these or other methods will prove most efficacious is yet unclear, but the British variant is clearly counterproductive, so the Dutch and French strategies probably will recur.

Read the whole thing.

Wretchard of Belmont Club fears that the French will react precisely in the wrong way:

What I am afraid will happen is that the French authorities will apply the worst possible combination: a short-term crackdown based on profiling together with an agreement to cede the governance of these ghettos to some kind of Islamic councils. That will make the banlieus more opaque while at the same time making them more alien. Yet the attraction of this policy mix is obvious. It throws a bone to the extreme right and left wings of French policy and may quell the disturbances for a moment. It kicks the can down the road into a minefield. It's a soothing gargle of antiseptic mouthwash prior to flossing with a razor blade.

Indeed. Czar Nicholas II combined both personal weakness and a determination to maintain absolute power for himself. This proved a fatal combination. While it would be premature at this point to predict that we are seeing the "end of Europe", these riots, combined with ominous demographic trends, can only make one fear for the future of that continent.

Wednesday Update

StrategyPage says that ethnicity and economics are the main factors driving the rioters. They point out that Islmac clerics have issued a fatwa condemning the violence, but that the rioters are not very religious so don't listen. They also point to 10%+ unemployment, and laws that make it hard to fire, and thus hire, employees. Add to this a lax attitude towards property crimes and a existing Muslim-run criminal gangs, and you have trouble.

There are some Islamic radicals running around in all this, but they are a minority. The Moslem kids like to talk about respect and payback, but very few see this as a religious war. It’s become a sport, with various groups competing to cause the most destruction. Text messaging, Internet bulletin boards and email made it possible for the rioters to stay in touch and compare notes. The media coverage also encouraged the violence, giving the kids some positive (for them) feedback.

My guess is that there is a little of everything going on. And we cannot forget that there is a tendancy to see what you want to see. Thus conservatives look for Muslim extremism, and liberals look for criminal and ethnic alienation. StrategyPage shoots straight, and although in this case I think they underplay the religious angle, I do admit that economic and ethnic factors play more of a role than I had initially considered.

Either way, the French response, which seems to be that if they buy off the rioters they'll stop, is precisely the wrong one. On Bloomberg today (via Michelle Malkin):

De Villepin's call for increased spending on training programs comes amid rising unemployment among immigrants. Last year, 17.4 percent of immigrants were unemployed, compared with 9.2 percent for non-immigrants, says Insee, the Paris-based government statistics office. For the same education level, immigrants are more likely to be unemployed, it said.

``Youth unemployment reaches almost 40 percent in some areas,'' de Villepin said. He added that the goal of the government will be to give unemployed youth living in France's ``sensitive urban areas'' a work contract, an internship or training in coming months.

De Villepin also said he will restore government subsidies to local associations scrapped by his predecessor and aims to triple scholarships and improve links between universities and students living in poor areas.

The prime minister said in the interview that students must be able to join vocational training programs at the age of 14 instead of 16. Almost 150,000 students drop out of school without a diploma or a skill each year, according to the prime minister.

De Villepin also called for businesses and the population as a whole to fight ethnic discrimination. The government wants to make sure that the riots aren't used by ``radical Islam,'' which is not the ``main'' concern at the moment, he said.

Some people just never learn.