His cops were enrolled early in his campaign – the media and Sarkozy voters love these “cops team crashing doors at dawn in some suburbs” sequences, but it seems to generate tensions rather than ease them (whoddathunk?). So people have begun to say that his police-as-spectacle is bad for the cops, and to pay attention to his – bad – results.

So he’s quiet these days : i think its because he realises that his arsonist-fireman pattern begins to show.

Of course this is only my interpretation, and I just can’t stand the guy.

an alliance with other racist groups in France – looking for some pro-Israel Le Pen type

Mr Le Pen has a problem with Jews, not Israel. He was even saying how he liked Sharon’s style, iirc.

In the US mainstream media it is still a relatively minor component, but if you take a wider view – I don’t think it’s minor at all.

I have heard that Arabs were a minority among the more violent of last fall’s rioters, “more violent” meaning the ones who were stoning the police and burning cars, not just yelling and shouting. By some estimates about 60% to 70% of the violent rioters were African rather than Arab, and some of them weren’t Muslim at all.

On the bigger issue of Muslims in Europe, Spain is an interesting example. It has many Muslim immigrants, particularly from Morocco, but for the most part they are not considered much of a problem. The (non-Muslim) immigrants from Latin America, in contrast, are proving to be a major headache. al-Qaeda has very few if any followers in Spain, but the Latin Kings have thousands.

There’s plenty to be said about the apprehension that things islamic are wrong in europe. An unwillingness to call the problem “the problem” doesn’t make the problem go away for anyone. Trying to shift this into a problem with Zionism is ridiculous on its face.

Race is a relatively minor component of modern anti-Islamism, so most of the Nazi pathologies don’t come into play. On the other hand, the rhetorical and stereotyping patterns of anti-Islamism have some striking parallels to the earlier, religious and culturally-based anti-Semitism. Muslims are portrayed as both dangerous radicals and the secret rulers of the world; they are stereotyped as an alien and unassimilable minority that must be made to give up its backward customs for its own good; their religious texts are cherry-picked to make them appear to be enemies of humanity; they are vengeful of slights real and imagined; they engage in shadowy conspiracies against civilization as we know it.

There’s almost a one-to-one correspondence between Bat Ye’or and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Anti-Islamism isn’t anti-Semitism, but sometimes it can be a very anti-Semitic type of prejudice.

Yes, that’s exactly how I see it.

This is the normalization or routinization of chaos. The French government is at wit’s end. It is also the revenge of the colonized over the imperializers. … This is the permanent condition of France.

Maybe the rioting will stop and other forms of violent and anti-social behavior, too, when the muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from Notre Dame.

This is a porn movie for people like Peretz.

What’s fascinates me here is that boundless capacity to phantasize the world. Tnr readers know that :

They live in a movie.

In other words if you a have country like the USA with a historical ideology of open immigration and a universalist political rhetoric as well as a distaste for the state regulating religion, the demographics of religion is a critical issue.

The European mindset seems so much to me like “the world will be OK as long as everyone stays in the culture where they belong.” Its very border historico-border-centric.

Yes, the Eurabia worries may be a caricature, but how else but with relatively different rates of immigration and reproduction does one explain the American influence that these same doubters dislike.

Isn’t America at 2006 proof that demographics and ideology matter?

So while I think fear may be an important element, I also think we shouldn’t underestimate the appeal of hatred, wishful schadenfreude and a desperate desire for vindication.

(In an effort to prevent this from starting the thread on the usual downhill slide, I specifically do NOT intend this comment as an attack on the State of Israel per se. It is proverbial, in fact, that many matters relating to Israeli government policy and the Middle East in general can be and are discussed far more openly and rationally in Israel itself than they can in the US.)

No, of course not. It doesn’t have much to do with France; quite simply they are pursuing every opportunity to illustrate that the Arabs and Muslims are dangerous, untrustworthy, destructive, and basically wicked in every respect.

That the magazine is not read doesn’t matter, as long as it can function as a thinktank of a sort: linked to, quoted, provides catchphrases, examples, talking points and so on.