Here are some commentaries on the French riots that probably won’t be linked on rightie blogs.

Jonathan Freedland writes for The Guardian:

The riots themselves are not hard to fathom; several French commentators have said the only mystery is why they didn’t break out 15 years earlier. If you corral hundreds of thousands of the poor and disadvantaged into sink estates and suburbs in a misery doughnut around the city, expose them to unemployment rates of up to 40%, and then subject them to daily racial discrimination at the hands of employers and the police, you can hardly expect peace and tranquillity. Cut public spending on social programmes by 20% and you will guarantee an explosion. All you have to do is light the fuse.

And this fire has been building for decades. It was after the second world war that - just as health minister Enoch Powell went recruiting for NHS staff in the Caribbean - France went shopping among its foreign colonies for labourers and factory workers. It brought these mainly Arab migrants in, then dumped them on the outskirts of the big cities. It did the same to the Harkis - Algerians who had collaborated with the French colonial authorities - and the next waves of North African immigrants, warehousing them like an unwanted commodity in high-rise ghettoes on the périphérique, out of sight of the white folks of the city. And there they have stayed for a half century.

Their anger could not stay pent-up forever. And the official reaction to the first outbreak of violence clearly inflamed it. Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy promised to “Karcherise” the “scum” who were burning cars and torching buildings: Karcher is the brand name for a kind of sand-blaster, the sort of machine one might use to remove bird droppings from a wall. According to former Libération columnist Doug Ireland, to speak of Karcherising the North African youth on the streets was “as close as one can get to hollering ethnic cleansing without actually saying so”.

The motives of the man they call Sarko are not hard to divine: he wants to run for president in 2007 and has clearly decided his constituency is the white right nurtured by Jean-Marie Le Pen. His hardman language during these last 10 days has been a nakedly Powellite bid for those National Front votes.

Now his rival, prime minister Dominique de Villepin, has taken the initiative, reviving a 1955 curfew law which allows local authorities to impose a state of emergency. He may succeed where Sarkozy failed, restoring a semblance of calm. But the move itself has caused disquiet. For the 1955 law was passed to quell Algerian unrest at the height of the independence struggle. That the same legislation should now be used to put down the children and grandchildren of the Algerian rebels has prompted some glum reflection in France - as if that bitter war never really ended.

Freedland goes on to describe France as a deeply racist society that refuses to recognize its own racism. French law treats everyone equally, which is commendable. But French law makes no provision for the effects of racism; it simply pretends racism doesn’t exist. “France’s refusal to see the ethnicity of some of its people as relevant translates into de facto racism,” Freedland says. “If human beings were free of prejudice, the French republican ideal would work beautifully. Because we are not, it allows racism a free hand.”

France is in flames because the French made all the mistakes American conservatives wanted to make since the 1950s. Righties fought desegregation; they fought antidiscrimination laws; they are still fighting Affirmative Action. Fortunately, they didn’t get their way. Yes there are still racial tensions in the U.S., as we saw recently in New Orleans. And this takes us to another perspective, by Olivier Roy in today’s New York Times.

THE rioting in Paris and other French cities has led to a lot of interpretations and comments, most of them irrelevant. Many see the violence as religiously motivated, the inevitable result of unchecked immigration from Muslim countries; for others the rioters are simply acting out of vengeance at being denied their cultural heritage or a fair share in French society. But the reality is that there is nothing particularly Muslim, or even French, about the violence. Rather, we are witnessing the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culture that reaches from Paris to London to Los Angeles and beyond.

To understand why this is so, consider two solid facts we do have on the riots. First, this is a youth (and male) uprising. The rioters are generally 12 to 25 years old, and roughly half of those arrested are under 18. The adults keep away from the demonstrations: in fact, they are the first victims (it is their cars, after all, that are burning) and they want security and social services to be restored.

Yet older residents also resent what they see as the unnecessary brutality of the police toward the rioters, the merry-go-round of officials making promises that they know will be quickly forgotten, and the demonization of their communities by the news media. Second, the riots are geographically and socially very circumscribed: all are occurring in about 100 suburbs, or more precisely destitute neighborhoods known here as “cités,” “quartiers” or “banlieues.” There has long been a strong sense of territorial identity among the young people in these neighborhoods, who have tended to coalesce in loose gangs. The different gangs, often involved in petty delinquency, have typically been reluctant to stroll outside their territories and have vigilantly kept strangers away, be they rival gangs, police officers, firefighters or journalists.

Gangs, did he say? As in Crips and Bloods?

Now, these gangs are for the most part burning their own neighborhoods and seem little interested in extending the rampage to more fashionable areas. They express simmering anger fueled by unemployment and racism. The lesson, then, is that while these riots originate in areas largely populated by immigrants of Islamic heritage, they have little to do with the wrath of a Muslim community.

France has a huge Muslim population living outside these neighborhoods - many of them, people who left them as soon as they could afford it - and they don’t identify with the rioters at all. Even within the violent areas, one’s local identity (sense of belonging to a particular neighborhood) prevails over larger ethnic and religious affiliation. Most of the rioters are from the second generation of immigrants, they have French citizenship, and they see themselves more as part of a modern Western urban subculture than of any Arab or African heritage.

Just look at the newspaper photographs: the young men wear the same hooded sweatshirts, listen to similar music and use slang in the same way as their counterparts in Los Angeles or Washington. (It is no accident that in French-dubbed versions of Hollywood films, African-American characters usually speak with the accent heard in the Paris banlieues).

But … but … aren’t the French riots part of worldwide Islamic jihad?

There is no reference to Palestine or I