France is burning …

… and Mark Steyn suggests that Europe wake up:

Ever since 9/11, I’ve been gloomily predicting the European powder keg’s about to go up. ”By 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,” I wrote in Canada’s Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday’s edition of the Guardian reported in London: ”French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest.”

”French youths,” huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the “youths” are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn’t take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ”French”: They’re young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you’re likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ”Arab street,” but it’s in Clichy-sous-Bois.

Have you seen some of the images coming out of France? It’s almost surreal to see. And sad. But not entirely unexpected … as Steyn points out.

As a side note, I have it from a very reliable source (and no this is NOT a leak ;) ) that French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy is the man to watch, as the time nears closer to the elections there (2007). He’s said to be more pro-US (even though he opposed the war in Iraq), and not too fond of French President Jacques Chirac (the feeling is mutual).

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