Reaction: Paris is burning

When the French stiffed us in the lead up to the Iraq Invasion, I did as my Sicilian brother-in-law did: I boycotted French wines and pretty much everything else. It was discussed extensively in this blog that the reason they avoided that little foreign entanglement was precisely because they thought that this sort of thing would happen. If they avoided Iraq, the reasoning went, things would stay quiet at home.

There is a wee part of me that states, for the record, that this is the payback and I'm sort of glad that French politicians have a huge mess on their hands.

However.

However, this is really a huge mess and possible portent of things to come. Look at what happened in the wider middle east -- disaffected young men, with time on their hands and hatred in the hearts lashed out at the "decadent west". The main difference between the men rioting in Paris and the folks that drove those airplanes into the World Trade Center is that latter came from comfortable backgrounds.

That's it. Same hatred. Same resentment. Same ideology. Different means.

Do I still think that Iran is pulling the strings? You betcha. Are the radical imams that spew anti-western bile funded by wealthy Saudi citizens. Yeppers. Is French socialism -- with stratified employee laws and overgenerous welfare entitlements -- the fertilizer that allowed this resentment to burst into flames. Sure. But how did this happen?

Simple: decades of appeasement and amnesia. The French have attempted to buy off every enemy in the Middle East rather than face the truth. They feel that the terror of suicide bombing in Tel Aviv can't happen there. No, that only happens in places like America and those other countries foolish enough to be friends with Israel. And that somehow, they don't need to defend themselves when an enemy honestly speaks their intentions, and then begin to act on those words.

They are fighting the last war. They always have. They think this is a race riot, a spasm of economic disillusionment. Wrong.

This is the fight for their lives. And I'm not sure they are up to the task.

dpny