Riots, by largely Islamic young people, in Paris, have spread dramatically:

Police have fought with protesters every night since last Thursday, when two teenagers were electrocuted after running into an electricity sub-station in the mistaken belief that they were being chased by the police. More than 150 fires have been reported, and tensions were increased after police fired tear gas into a mosque.

The battle to contain the riots, which have spread from the neighbourhood of Clichy-sous-Bois to nine other districts, has divided French opinion and M Chirac’s Cabinet.

Some observers feel a degree of sympathy with the protesters, many of whom are North African immigrants who live on dilapidated estates among endemic crime and unemployment.

Meanwhile, Francis Fukuyama at OpinionJournal, says this is the nature of European society:

We have tended to see jihadist terrorism as something produced in dysfunctional parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan or the Middle East, and exported to Western countries. Protecting ourselves is a matter either of walling ourselves off, or, for the Bush administration, going “over there” and trying to fix the problem at its source by promoting democracy.

There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In addition to Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Mohamed Atta were radicalized in Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem.

The same is not true for a Muslim who lives as an immigrant in a suburb of Amsterdam or Paris. All of a sudden, your identity is up for grabs; you have seemingly infinite choices in deciding how far you want to try to integrate into the surrounding, non-Muslim society. In his book “Globalized Islam” (2004), the French scholar Olivier Roy argues persuasively that contemporary radicalism is precisely the product of the “deterritorialization” of Islam, which strips Muslim identity of all of the social supports it receives in a traditional Muslim society.

The identity problem is particularly severe for second- and third-generation children of immigrants. They grow up outside the traditional culture of their parents, but unlike most newcomers to the United States, few feel truly accepted by the surrounding society.

[…]

Since van Gogh’s murder, the Dutch have embarked on a vigorous and often impolitic debate on what it means to be Dutch, with some demanding of immigrants not just an ability to speak Dutch, but a detailed knowledge of Dutch history and culture that many Dutch people do not have themselves. But national identity has to be a source of inclusion, not exclusion; nor can it be based, contrary to the assertion of the gay Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn who was assassinated in 2003, on endless tolerance and valuelessness. The Dutch have at least broken through the stifling barrier of political correctness that has prevented most other European countries from even beginning a discussion of the interconnected issues of identity, culture and immigration. But getting the national identity question right is a delicate and elusive task.
Many Europeans assert that the American melting pot cannot be transported to European soil. Identity there remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory. This may be true, but if so, democracy in Europe will be in big trouble in the future as Muslims become an ever larger percentage of the population. And since Europe is today one of the main battlegrounds of the war on terrorism, this reality will matter for the rest of us as well.

While, short term, the hemorrhaging must be controlled, police-state tactics will prove to be counter-productive in the long run. Fundamental changes – to usher Muslim immigrants into the greater society – are in order.