Is Paris Burning?

It now looks as if we know the answer to a perennial question about the media: How long do riots have to take place in a major European city before the US MSM pays attention? Today's headlines give us the answer: seven days. That's how long Paris suburbs have been aflame.

Here are some points that our gentle readers should realize as this story makes its way into the public consciousness on this side of the pond:

• When we say "suburbs" about Paris and many other continental cities, we refer not to the places that have newer, more spacious houses, but the places where poor people, mostly immigrants, live. Paris and many other European cities have developed in the opposite direction as compared to American cities: the best places are in the city center, while public housing developments are pushed out to separate enclaves orbiting the city.
• The MSM is paying little attention to the fact that the rioters are Muslims of North African extraction. This is an uncomfortable but salient truth.
• Something like this has been expected for years. Serious public affairs monthlies have for years been reporting on the significant segregation of North African Muslim immigrants in these Paris suburbs and of the inherent problems of assimilating immigrant populations in European nations that have viewed themselves as largely homogeneous ethnically for centuries.
• We will hear much about how "far right" parties like Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front will benefit from these events because of their anti-immigrant, nationalist and racial politics. And that's true. But calling them "far right" distorts the political reality. Le Pen and his ilk have virtually no common cause with the alliance of free-market and moral conservatism that represents the "right" in the United States. It is the Europeans' lack of a significant alliance of such views that makes their politics so different from this country's.