As we approach the November 5th anniversary of last year's Ramadan riots in Paris, the Times' coverage of Muslim issues in Europe has been as grievously flawed as a year ago. Nothing has been learned—the Times still can’t talk about the connection between multiculturalism and thuggery by young Muslims.

Take Sunday's front page account of the ongoing violence in Clichy-sous-Bois, the town where the rioting began last year after the death of two teens who may or may not have been running from the police, which read like a virtual replay of the paper's coverage of America’s urban riots in the 1960s. The piece lays blame for the ongoing escalation of crime on an uncaring skinflint central government, the commuting distance to Paris and the lack of jobs—without once in over 1,600 words using the words "Islam" or "Muslim".  

Across the Channel, Alan Cowell, writing in the Week in Review, dutifully recounts how Britain's most recent tensions were triggered three weeks ago, when former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw explained that it was hard to communicate with constituents who came to his offices wearing the full veil, or niqab. Straw didn’t call for the niqab to be banned, but made the elementary distinction between public and private spheres and noted that that the niqab exacerbated tensions between  Muslims and non-Muslims because it was, “such a visible statement of separation and difference.”  “The counterargument,” wrote Cowell, “emerged at a labor tribunal in Yorkshire where Aishah Azmi, 24, a teaching assistant, challenged a school board’s decision to suspend her from teaching because she wore the full veil.”  Mr. Cowell didn’t note that Azmi, 24, plays a key role at the fundamentalist Markazi mosque in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire—which was attended by suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan.  

The job issue is the one difference from the U.S. riots, which occurred during the economic boom of the 1960s. But while the lack of jobs is important, it’s not conclusive—Ms Azmi, like most of the French jihadists, is, as John Rosenthal points out in a strikingly interesting dispatch in Policy Review, both well educated and employed. Sciolino nonetheless approvingly quotes Socialist mayor Claude Dillian's lament that “Ours is a population that truly has been abandoned to its sad fate.”

In fact, a massive infusion of money was scheduled for Clichy-sous-Bois before the 2005 riots, and Chirac’s Prime Minister Dominic De Villepin has been pouring money in since, if only to undermine hard line Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, his rival for the party’s presidential nomination in 2007.

In the Times' telling, it is of course the police who “humiliate” the youth and thus provoke a violent response.  It’s true that the French police are often thuggish, but this may be a case of the rustling of the leaves moving the winds since it was the youth of Clichy-sous-Bois who firebombed the town's non-descript synagogue during the Jewish High Holidays in 2001 and attacked it again a year later.  Had the youths been roughed up by the local Jews as well?
   

Anyone who still doubts the Times' inability to come to grips with the facts on the ground needs only consult the picture above, which ran with the Clichy-sous-Bois story on A1 above the fold with the caption, "A photo exhibit of young people tries to counter stereotypes in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, where riots broke out a year ago." Given the menacing shots, it's hard to imagine what stereotypes they counter.