John Hawkins: "The French Intifada Continues On"

Yes it does. An average of 112 cars burned--A DAY. A day, people. That is insane! In addition, the police are now being marked as targets. They are called into a neighborhood for help and get rocks thrown at them.

It's an undeclared civil war. And I had a friend suggest that "France might be a good place to live, they have socialized medicine and we don't."

Update: Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarters has more:

Even the larger police unions have started to rethink their previous denials of organized resistance in the banlieus. One union official talks about the escalation from individual and spontaneous rock-throwing to complicated ambushes, and calls them "an act of war". And with the anniversary of last year's riots about to arrive, the police believe that organizers want to re-enact and expand them.

These actions have had a distinct political effect in France and across Europe. The multiculturalism that Europeans practice has been sorely tested and now has subsided in place of a more practical understanding of the importance of shared culture. Jack Straw in the UK has called for an end to the veil for Muslim women, as France did in its schools earlier. Both nations, with significant and vocal Muslim minorities, have begun to demand assimilation from their transplants rather than understanding and accommodation from the natives. The National Front's slogan of "France, love it or leave it" has gained traction in mainstream French politics, with Nicolas Sarkozy remining unhappy residents that the screen door won't hit them on the way out of France.

This shows the limitations of multiculturalism. No one has a problem when people engage in their own cultural rituals and speak their own language; it becomes a problem when they force native populations to adopt them for themselves. Immigration should exist where people want to assimilate into the culture of the nation they adopt, and not where people arrive to set up enclaves of the Old Country and then demand that their hosts recognize their authority to do so. America's success with immigration came from the impulse of its immigrants to join in the American culture and the American dream, not because we started printing ballots in eighteen different languages to accommodate people who didn't want to learn English.

Amen, Captain Ed. Assimilate. Or, go home.