It's connect-or-die time in France

Good story on the riots in France:

As Youth Riots Spread Across France, Muslim Groups Attempt to Intervene

By Molly Moore

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, November 5, 2005; A01

SEVRAN, France, Nov. 4 -- By dusk Friday, the streets of Sevran were deserted. Inside high-rise apartments and stone cottages here on the outskirts of Paris, residents waited for the explosions and sirens to begin.

"Last night I thought I was in Baghdad, not somewhere in France," said Nabila Chaibi, a 22-year-old sales clerk, her angular face swathed in a white head scarf. Her eyes displayed the fatigue of a sleepless night.

Sevran is at the epicenter of violence that has convulsed many of the poor immigrant areas in Paris's northern suburbs for nine days. After the sun set Friday night, the violence resumed, with youths setting fire to two buildings, including a bakery, and 10 cars in the northern community of Val d'Oise, police reported.

Night after night, youths armed with rocks, sticks and gasoline bombs have confronted police and set cars, businesses, government buildings and schools on fire. Police officers said Friday that approximately 1,260 vehicles had been torched in the Paris area in the past week, including 23 buses parked in a depot near Versailles.

The worst unrest in France in recent years has paralyzed the government, setting senior officials bickering over how to curb the violence. President Jacques Chirac has not publicly addressed the country other than to issue a statement through his spokesman appealing for calm.

The attacks have underscored anger and frustration among immigrants and their French-born children who inhabit the country's largest and poorest slum areas. A large percentage of this population is Muslim, and Islamic neighborhood groups have been trying to dissuade young people from taking part in the rioting.

Thursday night into Friday morning, the violence spread to other parts of France for the first time. Attacks and fires were reported in Normandy on the northwest coast, Dijon in the central Burgundy region and Provence in the far south . . .

Muslim leaders who have been talking with young rioters say that many are driven by anger at the government over the neglect of the housing projects, where unemployment and crime are rampant. A statement by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that rioters were "scum" particularly incensed many of them.

They are also frustrated at job and social discrimination against the neighborhoods' residents, many of whom were born in France to immigrant parents. . .

This is classic Marxist-Leninist stuff: lower-class workers segregated and ghettoized in crowded urban conditions, pulled from the moorings of their previous, far more orderly lives (typically as rural poor), and eventually the revolutionary spirit moves them to action against the indifferent authorities.

The solution? Easy. Allow the rise of Islamist parties through which these concerns and demands and anger can be acceptably challenged. Create political connectivity to cover the gap in economic and social connectivity in the short run. Buy them off with some real recognition. Feel their pain.

No kidding. That's how it works.

The answer isn't the established parties speaking out more. The answer is an Islamist party that both speaks for the community and helps to police it.

Connect or die. End the disconnectedness or suffer the violent consequences.