Riots in France: The Economic Component...and the Threat

While the leaders and suicidal raiders of Islamofascism have, by and large, come from the upper- and middle-class intelligentsia in places like Saudi Arabia, they engender support on the street by playing to the resentments, legitimate and fanciful, of poor Muslims.

This is why the rioting in France, continuing three weeks after they began, albeit at a lower level of destruction, is an important warning to all of Europe. The seemingly permanent Muslim underclass fostered by indifference and cradle-to-grave socialism has bred resentment. The resentful, in turn, become a breeding ground for new generations of Islamofascists.

There is evidence to suggest that some Muslims in Europe don't want to assimilate into a pluralistic Europe, of course. But that isn't the whole story.

Read this interesting analysis from the Boston Herald.

A taste:

...clearly at the heart of these riots is a rotten European economic and social model. It seeks to insulate people from the rigors and anxieties of the marketplace through generous pensions, unemployment and health benefits, mandatory vacations, limits on the length of the work week, and protections against low wages and layoffs.

Whatever the noble intentions of the social model, its results – especially in Germany, Belgium and France, where it’s been taken to absurd extremes – have been disastrous. Businesses simply don’t want to hire new workers, and the consequences are complacency, enervation and despair. The Euro Zone economies have grown in the past year at 1 percent, compared with nearly 4 percent for the United States. The unemployment rate in France is 9.8 percent, nearly twice that of the United States. That’s been the norm for a decade.

Good jobs are slipping away from Europe. In the ultimate knowledge-based, non-polluting industry – pharmaceuticals – research has flowed decisively to the United States.