France unveils its new Tourist Highway Map
Posted on 11/08/2005 7:53:22 PM PST by nickcarraway
Washington - France's explosion of rioting has captivated Americans, who tend to view the French as smug, snooty and quick to point fingers at what\'s wrong with the United States.
Now it's payback time, and influential media outlets and analysts can barely conceal their gloating.
Conservative newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times are proclaiming a blow to European self- righteousness and the continent's welfare-state economies, which they say are partly to blame for immigrants' misery.
'Just two months ago, the French watched in horrified fascination at the anarchy of New Orleans, where members of America's underclass were seen looting stores and defying the police in the wake of Hurricane Katrina,' the New York Times reported from Paris.
'Every night for more than a week, the suburbs of Paris have been a showcase of Europe's failure to integrate its immigrants,' said the Wall Street Journal.
U.S. politicians have publicly remained mum on the riots that have spread from Paris to all across France, though the State Department has warned U.S. citizens to stay away from the worst flashpoints.
But U.S. television networks are showing nightly images of burning cars and riot police - which Fox News TV reporter Greg Palkot said 'looked like nothing short of Baghdad'.
There's a sense of vindication among conservative writers who like columnist Mark Steyn have darkly predicted 'burning buildings, street riots and assassinations' in Europe's major cities, with their African and Arab minorities.
For the U.S. right wing, it's no coincidence that the violence is erupting in the European nation with the largest Moslem minority. They have long claimed that Europe has underrated the explosiveness of an immigrant population they view as nearly impossible to integrate into society.
Others even charge that Europe has become a breeding ground for international terrorism, alluding to the Hamburg-al-Qaeda cell that helped carry out the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Many U.S. politicians across the spectrum share political scientist Samuel Huntington\'s theory of a \'clash of civilizations\' - or the view of British essayist Theodore Dalrymple that \'the sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced ... by the nightmare of permanent conflict\'.
Another reason cited in the U.S. for France\'s unrest is the economic system.
\'In a country where short workweeks and early retirement are sacred, there is little emphasis on creating new jobs and even less on grass-roots entrepreneurial activity,\' economist Joel Kotkin wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
He says the overregulated welfare state itself is an obstacle to integrating immigrants into France\'s society and economy.
Clearly, part of the problem is economic, said Stanford University political scientist Niall Ferguson. \'But the second problem is that Europeans do not try hard enough to make immigrants integrate culturally,\' he wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Many commentators say that, at the very least, the French riots show that social problems and a bungled or aloof government response are not limited to the United States.
\'Yet until now, many in France assumed that what they regard as a superior \'social model\' protected them from the eruptions of lawlessness that in recent years have touched Los Angeles, Miami and New Orleans,\' said the Washington Post.
Some are also reminded of the argument that France\'s Moslem minority was a reason why Paris opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq, a stand that infuriated the Bush administration and U.S. conservatives and led to a French-bashing orgy a few years ago.
'you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside Americans?' Steyn said in the Washington Times.
My gloating is not thinly veiled, in fact it is not veiled at all. I'm happy as a cow in clover about it.
The French are only reaping what they sowed and I hope that they have a bumper crop.
And I hope that the same thing happens to any other Nation or group that kisses the muslims asses.
That's a Russian proverb!
Alright, I must be completely ignorant, but what in blazes is
schadenfreude?
Here's the definition from Dictionary.com.
Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.
All the good it did them... you NEVER appease barbarians.
Thinly?
How about conspicuous, blatant, overt, marked, noticeable, loud, cheerful, sanguine, sangfroid, gloating, snickering, chortling, vociferous.....
for starters.....
Think I'll actually go buy a bottle of French wine tonight in their honor.
Trendy German word for pleasure at another's distress.
Thinly veiled? What veil? It must be the smoke drifting by.
Gloating? Nah. I'd say more like just laughing at just one in a string of absurdly nonsensical denials of reality over the decades and one that has visible and tangible negative ramifications to it.
It's more of a shaking one's head in utter amazement at the lack of wisdom and understanding over in that nation and in Europe in general.
But gloating, nah. I do think it's funny but only in the sense of that one kid on the playground that just didn't know when to quit and kept coming after the guy that just dusted him marginally yet politely just throwing him to the ground on his repeated attempts to avenge himself. At some point it simply steps out of the serious and into the comical. We've reached that point in a certain sense.
I agree with everything you've said. I can't speak for all of my peers, just me. I personally would refuse to deploy, as I would refuse to take a subordinate position with a UN commander. I truly hope it never comes to that as I love my career and my nation, as misguided as we sometimes are. But I would never deploy to save France from anything or anyone.
Gotta have morals and standards, and that doesn't pass muster in my eyes as France has been a true enemy of ours for about the past ten years, and I have proof of that in writing and first hand from equipment (read weapons) that has been used against me (personnaly) made in France, and sold with direct knowledge of French government personnel to Iraq before the second gulf war. I'm not smart, but smart enough to know they are not our allies, and not even a member of NATO anymore last I checked. They are worse than Al Quaeda because they refuse to acknowledge the hostilities that have already commenced against us, begun with their policies and equipment.
Oh, I'm a-gloatin' Ernest. Are you gloatin'?
Gloatin' in a moat as the French float by.
Thinly veiled?
I'll try to be more overt about it...
"Thinly veiled"? Come on, we aren't that subtle.
Any less veiled and it'll need to be a 2x4 upside the head. Time to add another extremely dense element to the periodic table.
France unveils its new Tourist Highway Map
Liberty City/Arthur McDuffie Riots of 1980 are I think what they were referring to in Miami. That's not what I would call "recent."
Gloating.? MOI !!
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