Last year's Ramadan riots in Paris and other major French cities were widely covered as a one-time event. After all, as Jacques Chirac explained at the time of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, such violence “could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs.” But it did happen in France, and as in the days of New York Mayor John Lindsay, when riots were described in a compliant press as “disturbances," the French press referred to the eight days of young Muslim men burning cars, attacking civilians and even burning a nursery school not as a riot, but as troubles in quartiers sensible.
    
This year, with the taboo on attacking cops broken, 2,500 French policemen have been wounded in a rolling riot of ongoing incidents with the “youth” of the banlieue. But while Paris has been spared from further overt revolts, Ramadan rioting broke out in Brussels, in Gothenberg-- the second largest city in Sweden, which was hit by vandalism and attacks on the police-- and in London, where white and Muslim gangs battled each other in Windsor. 

Each had a different trigger—the arrest of a young criminal in Brussels, the power dimming in Gothenberg, and the plan to build a large new Mosque in Windsor, but the underlying conditions are similar.  In all three cities, young men brought up on welfare, cut off from jobs by rigid economic regulation, and  embittered by the teaching of radical clerics and the anti-American and anti-Israeli mainstream media (al Jazeera’s coverage of the recent Hezbollah war was balanced compared to that of the BBC) have become a combustible mass.

These problems are unlikely to subside anytime soon, but a first step in reducing the threat of rioting by young Muslims would be, in the words of Lee Bowes of America Works, to “capture their time” by putting them to work in the private sector economy.