An excerpt from the latest piece by Mark Steyn:
"In fact, "rage" seems the least of it: it's the "glee" and "contempt" you're struck by. And "rage" in the sense of spontaneous anger is a very slapdash characterisation of what, after two weeks, is looking like a rather shrewd and disciplined campaign. This business of car burning, for example. In Iraq, the "insurgents" quickly got the hang of setting some second-hand Nissan alight at just the right moment so that its plume of smoke could be conveniently filmed from the press hotel balcony in time for NBC's Today show and Good Morning, America. For a while, every time you switched on the television in America, there'd be some doom'n'gloom anchor yakking away in front of a live scene of a blazing Honda Civic - as reassuring in its familiarity as that local station somewhere or other in North America (Thunder Bay, I think) that used to show a roaring fireplace as its test card all night. What the Aussie pundit Tim Blair calls the nightly Paris car-B-Q looks great on television, but without being sufficiently murderous to provoke the state into forcefully putting down the insurgency.
Indeed, it's an almost perfect tactic if your aim is to have the entire French establishment dithering in grievance-addressing mode until you've extracted as much political advantage as you can. Look at it this way: after two weeks, whose prestige has been more enhanced? The rioters? Or Mayor Debré, President Chirac and Prime Minister de Villepin? On every front these past two weeks, the French state has been tested and communicated only weakness."
Read the whole article here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1517586/posts
I believe it is a mistake to underestimate what is occurring simply because the rioters are not a well-disciplined Muslim army intent on sacking Paris. The question remains just how the French government intends to reassert control over these areas: the answer so far seems to consist largely of a hefty dose of wishful thinking; namely, that a combination of police restraint and a more lucrative dole will somehow convince these barbarians of the government's benevolence, and that this, in turn, will assuage the hostility so many of them so eagerly displayed towards their host country.