France's connect-or-die moment (part duh!)

■"10 Officers Shot As Riots Worsen In French Cities: Clash In Suburb of Paris; After a Meeting With Top Officials, Chirac Vows to Restore Order," by Craig S. Smith, New York Times, 7 November 2005, p. A1.

■"Youths' simmering anger, despair fuels crime in Paris' inner suburbs," by Scheherezade Faramarzi, USA Today, 7 November 2005, p. 8A.

■"Muslim Groups May Gain Strength From French Riots: Islamists Try to Mediate Peace But Encourage Isolation From Secular Society," by John Carreyrou, Wall Street Journal, 7 November 2005, p. A1.

France has ten dead cops and 5 million Muslims, far too many of which lives in slums and are pissed off about it and won't take it anymore.

Listen to this description and see if it reminds you of anything in America:

Families break down in the pressure cooker of crime, poverty and unemployment. Many single mothers are left to fend for themselves, said Imloul, a single mother whose Algerian parents divorced before her father's death.

"Fathers do not play any role in their children's lives. (It's as if) the father doesn't exist at all. French justice gives full right to mothers," Imloul said.

Coming to France has given some Muslim North African women new freedoms.

"They want to lead a similar life as their French counterpart," Imloul said. "But it is very difficult to leave a patriarchal culture all of a sudden. Women take on the responsibility of both mother and father while they are not at all suited for it. In the end, it is their children who suffer."

Estimates of these Muslim slums are that 40% of the families there are dysfunctional in some way, leading to dropouts, drug abuse, crime, etc. It's the 12-year-old on the street at midnight that drives too much of this.

Fools will rush in with promises of crackdowns of all sorts (like Chirac), but we'll also get the separatists from among the Muslims who argue that salvation is cultural apartheid, a view that will get your serious cancerous tumors within your society, unless the Martin Luthers are replaced by the Martin Luther Kings.

In short, we need more than Reformation. We need political connectivity.

Or we'll see more death and destruction in France.