France Adrift

Rioting continued in France last night, and today police are out in force to thwart daytime disturbances. Meanwhile, the nation continues to struggle with both context and response. For example, from AP:

On Friday evening, two Molotov cocktails were tossed into a mosque in the southern city of Carpentras, slightly damaging the porch, local officials said. It was not immediately clear whether the attack was linked to the unrest that has wracked the poor suburbs and towns of France since Oct. 27.

President Jacques Chirac asked investigators to find those behind the incident in Carpentras, a town grimly remembered for a 1990 neo-Nazi attack on a Jewish cemetery that sparked national outrage.

With the French government not effective in shutting down the riots, the native French are beginning to strike back, not surprisingly. And also not surprisingly, the press can't write about it without figuring a way to get the word "Nazi" into it. Scan all the coverage to date for the word "Islamofascist," and you won't find it. But one act against a mosque, and mon dieu!

Then there's this:

Some two weeks ago, in Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois where the recent violence started, fumes from a police tear gas grenade spread into a mosque and heightened the anger that has fueled the worst suburban unrest in the country's history.

Mosque-goers, your kids are out of control. If they weren't burning down businesses and churches, beating old men to death and shooting at cops, there wouldn't be tear gas in your mosque.

Misdirected Muslim anger and reprisal attacks by frustrated natives will only make things worse for France as it struggles to contain this insurrection.