The Future of France...

The French had their opportunity to assimilate their muslim immigrants....now, it's probably too late.

"With current trends," Professor Bernard Lewis has said, "Europe will have Muslim majorities in the population by the end of the 21st century." The future? "Europe will be part of the Arab west, of the Maghreb [Muslim northwest Africa]." Today's rioting youth are just a bit ahead of their time in claiming their upcoming patrimony.

The ethnic underclass, jobless and futureless, warehoused in sterile and isolated block housing, has been seething for decades. France has responded with willful blindness (even before this intifadeh, France was experiencing dozens of car arsons a night, but you did not hear about it because official France just accepted this as the norm) and pacification, creating a lavish welfare system to keep its angry youth well clad, well fed and well provided with cell phones.

But they want more than cake for eating. They want a future. The rest of France has for decades been wanting only a present--just a few more years of fine wine and steady work in a superregulated, 35-hr.-workweek, cozy social compact that makes it almost impossible for a worker to be fired and almost impossible for the offspring of immigrants to be hired.

The only possible way out for France is to undertake the kind of self-reformation that America did in the 1960s, when it finally began welcoming African Americans into mainstream society and spent two generations pursuing that goal. But the prospects for success in France are far fewer, because even if France changed, woke up and welcomed those it had once invited, it is very late. The grandparents who first came would have eagerly accepted the invitation. But their young have grown up in an alienated monoculture that has contempt for the godless decadence of French secularism with its empty churches, sexual license and existential ennui. France doesn't want them. They don't want the France they are throwing rocks at. But they are not leaving. And they are growing.

France always thought it had one last resort, one ready strategy for fending off the rage of its Arab street: beyond avoidance lay appeasement. No country in the West has done more to cultivate world Arab opinion, to appease Arab terrorists, to ostentatiously oppose American Middle East policy (Iraq above all), to champion the signal Arab cause of Palestine. It was no accident that Yasser Arafat chose Paris as his place to die--Paris, after Jerusalem, his second holiest city.

Paris burns anyway. As the French seem to learn every 70 years, appeasement does not work. It merely whets the appetite. And the angry alien young were already hungry.