Headline in the Sunday Times, (London): India fences off Bangladesh to keep out Muslim terror, [Dean Nelson, Dhaka, November 13, 2005]

Yes, another country is discovering that good fences make good neighbors. All part of what Colby Cosh has called the New Muralism. Would someone please tell President Bush?

French President Jacques Chirac has complained vaguely of his country’s “profound malaise” regarding the current unrest, but we culturists can be more precise about the cause, namely the bonehead choices France made regarding immigration a few decades ago.

Interestingly, French leaders thought they were getting “cheap” labor, which would conveniently self-deport when the post-war rebuilding was finished. Au contraire, as we have seen. Furthermore, a pro-Arab tilt was announced in 1967 by Charles De Gaulle for political reasons of the moment.

As a result, France is now petri dish #1 demonstrating how destructive culturally inappropriate immigration can be. The French mix has blended the worst of both worlds — the impatient materialism of the west combined with the misogyny and Muslim hatred for anything deemed unIslamic.

Remember Ayatollah Khomeini declared, “There is no fun in Islam.” (Like we haven’t noticed!)

Take France’s spineless response to polygamy, which was made illegal in 1993. But today somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000 persons live in polygamous households in France. Turning a blind eye to polygamy has created toxic housing situations because of families with dozens of people crammed into monogamy-sized flats.

In fact, France’s appeasement on multi-wifing may be at least somewhat at fault for the ongoing civil unrest. Consider this item ["France's black anger"]:

Experts who work with France’s black community point to a different kind of family breakdown. Sonia Imloul of Respect 93, a non-governmental organization, says one of the biggest problems is polygamy, and cites the example of one family she knows with one father, four wives and thirty children, all living in the same standard 4-room apartment of French public housing.

“The kids sleep in shifts, and when others are asleep, they are on the streets because there is nowhere else to go,” she says, adding the new curfew imposed under the government’s state of emergency regulations is simply adding to the pressure.

Forget about jihad against the west, those “disaffected youth” are just grumpy from not getting enough sleep!

But seriously, the loss in the quality of life for average French is not shown so much in the daily Car-B-Q stats (down to a mere 215 on Monday) as in the decreasing freedom in activities previously considered normal. ["French Losing Patience"]

“We wanted to decorate our store with big, gift-wrapped boxes for the Christmas season, but we don’t dare. They might set fire to them,” said Nathalie Normand, a clerk at an eastern Paris toy store.

“After 5 or 6 at night, most women won’t go out on the streets,” she added. “I won’t drive my car to work now because I’m afraid they’ll burn it when I drive home.”

Has multiculturalism been declared dead yet?

The WSJ’s editorial on the Muslims rioting in France focuses not on what’s wrong with Muslims, and certainly not on what’s wrong with mass Third World Immigration but on what’s wrong with France.

And then they stop in the middle of the attack on France to criticize “nativist groups.” Their economic argument seems to be that Muslim immigrants weren’t allowed to take jobs away from Frenchmen, but should have been. The way they are in that immigrant’s paradise, the United States of America:

Among immigrants, [in the US]median family incomes rose by roughly $10,000 for every 10 years they remained in the country.

These statistics hold across immigrant groups, including ones that U.S. nativist groups claim are “unassimilable.” Take Muslims, some two million of whom live in America. According to a 2004 survey by Zogby International, two-thirds are immigrants, 59% have a college education and the overwhelming majority are middle-class, with one in three having annual incomes of more than $75,000. Their intermarriage rate is 21%, nearly identical to that of other religious groups.

It’s true that France’s Muslim population–some five million out of a total of 60 million–is much larger than America’s. They also generally arrived in France much poorer. But the significant difference between U.S. and French Muslims is that the former inhabit a country of economic opportunity and social mobility, which generally has led to their successful assimilation into the mainstream of American life. This has been the case despite the best efforts of multiculturalists on the right and left to extol fixed racial, ethnic and religious identities at the expense of the traditionally adaptive, supple American one.OpinionJournal - French Lessons |How to create a Muslim underclass, November 11, 2005

First, the reason that US Muslims are more successful than those in France is because the US gets the upper classes of the Arab world. They might have inappropriate influence on Karl Rove and Grover Norquist, they may fund terror, they may, for all I know, have been the anthrax mailers. I do know that nineteen members of the Arab upper classes destroyed the World Trade Center. But I don’t expect them to burn any cars, unless they set their own cars on fire for the insurance.

Since the US doesn’t have a border with North Africa, or a previously existing Muslim ghetto, it doesn’t get the banlieu types. What the United States has instead is a border with Mexico, and and previously existing barrios. And that’s where riots may come from.

The economic argument the WSJ seems to be making is this: America’s immigrant underclass isn’t rioting because they’re being allowed to take jobs from Americans.

And the horror of French “discrimination” is that this isn’t being allowed in France. If the United States manages real immigration enforcement, and there are riots as a result, is the WSJ going to make the same argument?

But the real point here is that there is nothing immigrants can do that will make the WSJ admit immigration is a problem.

• Not 9/11.
• Not serial killing.
• Not sniping in the streets of the nation’s capital.

And now, not riots all across Europe. Nothing.

But in response to all those events, the WSJ’s staff didn’t attack the immigrants who did the crimes, or the system that let them. They reserved their sharpest criticism for us “nativists.”