Day 18
On the one hand, Google News page reads, Riots dwindling in France, but on the other hand, the Chicago Sun-Times actually titled it French extend state-of-emergency measures. Two more schools were set on fire, and France to extend anti-riot powers by 3 months

Although the violence dropped again overnight, police said youths destroyed 284 vehicles in petrol bomb attacks in the 18th straight night of unrest in poor suburbs in the Paris region and major provincial cities.

At SFGate:

More copycat attacks were registered in neighboring countries Sunday, with 29 vehicles torched in Belgium, four cars burned in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, and two cars burned in the Swiss town of Martigny.

The riots in France put the apologist industry into overtime

Though fewer than 10 percent of Frenchmen are Muslims, more than 30 percent of those under age 20 are.

The French riots so far have been more Watts than West Bank. But that’s changing.

“A vast army of young unemployed Muslims … stands at the disposal of the would be Napoleons of radical Islam, and they have no choice but to lead it,” wrote the Asia Times commentator known simply as “Spengler.” “The outcome well might be a new Algerian war, fought on French soil.”

Going up in smoke along with thousands of Peugeots are liberal illusions. Multiculturalism is social poison. Toleration of intolerance isn’t sophistication, it’s suicide. Work, not welfare, is the key to social integration. Making excuses for violence begets more violence.

The New York Times Implicitly Declares French Rioting Over, Sorts Through Winners and Losers (via Roger L. Simon), as it engages in its own special version of denial.

At the BBC, however, one finds this: On the BBC News page, it reads, The growth of political Islam, and when you go to that link, the article is titled French struggle to build local Islam. One interesting sentence:

French Islam, he contends, does not have to be beholden to its foreign backers.

This is not a moot issue, considering how the article states

FRENCH ISLAM
Second largest religion
Five million Muslims (estimate)
1,600 places of worship
35% Algerian origin (estimate)
25% Moroccan origin (estimate)
10% Tunisian origin (estimate)
Concentrated in poor suburbs of Paris, Lille, Lyon, Marseille and other cities

and ends in a statement from the director of the Lille mosque, Rachid Hamoudi(emphasis mine), “Eventually we will have really democratic, truly French elections.”

Jonah Goldberg, however, says,

They aren’t Les Muslimerables so much as Les Invisibles.

The Islamic leadership in France would clearly and dearly love this to be a Muslim riot. They could then stop it and become true Left Bank Arafats, able to fire up a rent-a-mob whenever convenient and thereby shake down the government for one concession after another. That’s why the French government is so desperate to prevent the imams from becoming middlemen. If the riots are stopped by Islamic clerics, they will become Islamic riots — even though they didn’t start as that. And once the conflict is Islamified, the conservative Nostradamus scenarios kick in and we can all get ready for talk of “two-state solutions,” the need to make Paris an “international city,” and so forth.

It’s hard to see how the French goverment’s efforts towards building local Islam will prevent the imams from becoming de facto middlemen, though.

Update: This is the French banlieu criminal union going on strike. The Husband agrees 100%.