No, not in Iraq (thought that may be the case). In France. Charles Martel spins in his grave.

France has a long history of this sort of unrest. I'm not convinced there is a story here.

I should provide some background. There's been rioting and such going on in Paris since the 18-th Century. Some of it has been really bloody (eg, the French Revolution and the Paris Commune) with tens of thousands of people dead mostly as a result of executions by the victors. Further, rioting and such is far more common and I gather, better respected than the equivalent in the US.

Karl, if that's true, how come people in Europe are so terrified now?

In my opinion there is some legitimate reason for fear, but most of the current fear is out of proportion to the degree of danger.

My thought is that Europeans do not fear for their lives (in France), because there is very little actual murder going on (note that they burn cars, but aren't killing people). They fear for the loss of their way of life - which they will almost certainly lose. (Their way of life involves the natives leeching off the newcomers, and the newcomers are unlikely to support that way of life for long). Even if it doesn't come to violent revolution and sharia, they will just be out-reproduced.

Seems that the French will riot anything. Including the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring:

"The complex music and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first drew catcalls and whistles from the crowd, and there were loud arguments in the audience between supporters and opponents of the work, and were soon followed by shouts and fistfights in the aisles. The unrest in the audience eventually degenerated into a riot. The Paris police arrived by intermission, but they restored only limited order. Chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance, and Stravinsky himself was so upset due to its reception that he fled the theater in mid-scene."

I'd love to see that scene recreated in a Stravinsky biopic. Somebody call F. Murray Abraham's office.

Uh I don't think that you quite get what is going on.

This is not the French people fighting each other, the welfare state took care of that tinderbox. The fight here is between to separate civilizations, the French and the Muslim. That is a completely different animal and is a foretaste of what Europeans are deathly afraid of.

There will be much more blood in their future, not less.

Dennis

Dennis is correct, what is going on in Europe is more akin to an invasion by hostile forces than to a traditional civil war.

Mr. Summers,

You fail utterly to grasp two essential facts of the situation in France.

First, the "newcomers" are not mostly recent arrivals but teen and 20-something males born and raised in France. They are "French" by birth and governmental convention but are not, crucially, in any way "French" in attitude or outlook being the products of an insular immigrant culture.

Second, the natives are not "leeching" off the "newcomers" - it's mainly the other way around. The pitiful level of job creation in France means that large majorities of citizens from non-Gallic backgrounds are essentially permanently unemployed. A fairly large minority of the native Gallic young adults are also idle long-term. French social welfare payments are of indefinite duration. The "natives" are, thus, subsidizing the increasingly homicidal criminal class of "newcomers" who are waging what is clearly an embryonic civil war.

This is going to get much worse before it gets better - if, indeed, it ever does.