Informed Speculation

With the hat tip to the great Tim Blair, Anne Applebaum positively skewers the French response to the riots in a column from a few days back:

There are major differences, of course, between President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina and Chirac’s response to the extraordinary wave of rioting that began in the impoverished suburbs of Paris almost two weeks ago and has now spread across the country. One difference is that it took two days for Bush to respond with a belated televised speech after Katrina made landfall, while it took Chirac 11 days to respond to the riots at all. Another difference is that Katrina inspired Americans to donate $2 billion to charity. But when Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, called the rioters “scum,” he failed to dent his own popularity, even though his words apparently spurred the rioters on to greater excess.

The deeper difference is that however ignored or mistreated America’s black underclass may be, most Americans do think of its members as Americans. By contrast, I doubt whether most Frenchmen even contemplate the possibility that the African and Arab immigrants and their offspring who make up their underclass, and who are both perpetrators and victims of these riots, could ever be truly French, even if they hold French passports (and millions do). Thus when the French trumpet the many successes of their social-market economy or their enlightened political culture, the many failures in the immigrant neighborhoods somehow don’t count. Famously, the late French president Francois Mitterrand once said that the Los Angeles riots could never happen in Paris, because “France is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world.”

If there weren’t dozens of cars burning across France even on ordinary weekends, Mitterrand’s delightfully blind comments would be funny.

Ouch! Ze truth, she hurts…