The Other Charlotte already has commented (here) on the media’s refusal to admit that the rioting in France is not being done by disaffected French youths mired in poverty and joblessness.
The clear-eyed historian Victor Davis Hanson, speaking with radio host and blogger extraordinaire Hugh Hewitt, however, faced up to the real implications of what is happening in France.
Hanson also gets to the root causes of the violence. Here is one:
“[W]e can see what happens to a society that doesn’t ask the immigrant to integrate, and the immigrant doesn’t feel that he has to integrate, or to learn the language, or learn the traditions of the West. So you have this Orwellian situation when thousands of people are rioting, you want to say let me get this straight. You do not want to go back to the country, an hour or two away by air, that you praise in the abstract, but you surely want to stay in a country that you want to burn down to the concrete. It doesn’t make any sense, other than this strong, psychological urge of envy, jealousy, wanting something you can’t have. Then, besides all that landscape, you get the impression there’s something very wrong in Europe that has high unemployement and generous joblessness benefits, so that it allows people not really to have to go look for a job, because there isn’t any, but to stay home and sort of nurse these wounds, with enough money to survive.”