Good point. BTW, how many days did we allow our cities to burn after Martin Luter King and Rodney King? Believe me, there is nothing that I despise more than the French, but if I recall correctly, we also stood by and watched our cities burn.
Luter = Luther
Good point - very good point.
Under the surface of these monster issues - there are usually hard decisions based on no-win scenarios.
The French are knee-deep in a mess of their own making.
Solving it is way way hard...
Letting the cities burn - you could stand in Upper Manhattan and watch the smoke rise from the South Bronx, day after day - was one of the stupidest tactics of liberal policy. The Dinkins policy of letting black thugs have an occasional riot and tear up their own neighborhoods and destroy the only successful businesses (Korean and Lebanese owned) in them was an extension of this.
Once the grownups got back in charge - with the election of Giuliani - all this stopped. Strangely enough. Of course, the press fought it tooth and nail, and did everything to hunt down the cops and destroy anyone who opposed its favorite thug-class. But it worked, and after awhile, the good people in the thug neighborhoods began to emerge and the general consensus was that nobody liked having the lowest elements running their lives.
The thing that complicates it with the French is that this is connected with an international movement (radical Islam) and connected with, in fact, a cult based on the visions of a petty bandit who initially used his "religion" to excuse and justify his criminal career. Banditry and destruction are part and parcel of Islam, whereas they were not a fundamental part of some ideology shared by American blacks. The black rioters were criminals, and they were in it for what they could get, both in terms of city payoffs and criminal proceeds, but they didn't have the ideological motivation to keep it up very long.