These rioters are also in need of adequate representation. France should immediately arrange for the importation of their revolutionary leadership. Muslims must be given civil autonomy over their communities; this will necessitate the French to train and arm their militia which of course will be exclusively used for defensive purposes.

As a goodwill measure to bolster their leadership's standing, Paris must immediately release all treasonous Muslims who may have been convicted of criminal or civil offences.

Merely having their civilian population under siege by marauding gangs does not give the French the right to retaliate. This would only encourage the cycle of violence. Better to have a few hundred dead or maimed French citizens than risk the humiliation of these people. Being under fire is no excuse to stop the negotiating process, if anything; it ought to encourage the French to carve out a deal more quickly. Continue reading...

A good companion piece to Raphi's article appeared in the Jerusalem Post on November 7:

The firebombers and marauders in today's riots do not feel any significant commonality with the people they are rioting against. As Theodore Dalrymple explained in his Autumn 2002 City Journal essay, The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris, the Muslim youth rioting today feel nothing but nihilistic or Islamic hatred and alienation from their country and their countrymen. In his words, "They are of France, but not French." Dalrymple explained that the bloated French welfare state houses, clothes, feeds and pays its unassimilated immigrant communities in a manner that enables disaffected youth to "enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in countries of their parents' or grandparents' origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity."

At the same time, he observed that in the ghetto housing projects that ring the major cities of France where these rioting young men live, "The state, while concerning itself with the details of their housing, their education, their medical care, and the payment of subsidies for them to do nothing, abrogates its responsibility completely in the one area in which the state's responsibility is absolutely inalienable: law and order." Today both the absence of law and order and the total alienation of the burgeoning Muslim immigrant population of France have coalesced in a manner and an intensity that has motivated some observers to write of the violence of the past week and a half as "the fall of France." France has fallen, these mordant observers tell us, because the multicultural overlords of the French chattering and governing classes are unable to muster the will to contend with either the problem of violence or with the problem of social alienation.

I think you'll enjoy the comments there, as well.

Cross-posted by Hyscience