Speaking of France and Muslims:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's worth bringing up a dirty little politically incorrect secret here.

At least a significant portion of the problem of Muslims in France is an entirely self-inflicted wound and the lingering traces of what happened with this. France went into Algeria in the 19th Century. It proceeded tthe Algerians into a tiny minority on their own soil, reduced to third-rate residents of a country deliberately engineered in the image of La Belle Republique. All the lovely and charming rhetoric of liberty, equality, and fraternity shown in the most merciless and pitiless kind of colonial imperialism. Naturally when nationalism hit the region the Algerians had quite enough of that bullshit and told the French to get out. France just as naturally refused given that there were many long-term invaders who'd established homes as thoroughly as anyone in the modern-day New World has over the bones of prior inhabitants.

Which led to incidents like this:

http://www.france24.com/en/20121017-paris-massacre-algeria-october-17-1961-51-years-anniversary-historian-einaudi

And this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/1/newsid_2995000/2995283.stm

Rather than accept changing with the times, the French Fourth Republic self-destructed over an attempt by the generals to overthrow the Republic in the name of exercising naked merciless force with an iron fist. In the process all the charming Orientalism and savage anti-Islamic rhetoric and dehumanization that underpinned the choking horror of Algeria came home with a vengeance. In what was perhaps his finest hour, De Gaulle saved the Republic and got France out of yet another disaster brought entirely on itself by the willful decisions of its own elites.

And what has the home of Robespierre and the Paris Commune learned about rational, well-guided approaches to secularism that avoid lurching into extremes and carrying on old grievances and hatreds?

Not a goddamned thing:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-other-france

^It's the dirty little secret of these terrorist attacks that the perpetrators, on both sides of the Atlantic, are far more often naturalized citizens or second and third generation residets. So the real question is not that this happens, it's why does this happen? What leads people who've lived in countries for generations to suddenly start indulging in the dark side of modernity?

Well, as it turns out that has a pretty direct answer:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/french-algerians-still-second-class

^Treat people like second or third rate citizens and you stoke up the fires of resentment enough for demagogues and adherents of a death cult like Daesh to capitalize upon them and have a ready-made category of recruits. Ultimately as long as the West adopts a color line for its benefits and decides it doesn't intend to share what it has with people who require it to give more than lip service to the values of tolerance and multiculturalism it professes, these movements will continue to find recruits.

Of course no matter what there will always be fanatics willing to martyr themselves in the name of whatever God they serve. It's another dark side of human psychology as is seen by the willful use of suicide methods from at least WWII onward. The solution to this is that there really isn't one unless humanity evolves into a wholly new species with an alternate psychology. However with the exception of the fanatics and martyrs and God-botherers, the greater masses *can* be conciliated if people adopt the wisdom not to make enemies of people who would end up with very little to lose.

As Donald Trump has gotten where he has purely on the basis of 'Fuck you we got ours' in my country we stand at our own precipice, and with far greater consequences than the shifts in France. I can only hope that Hillary doesn't fuck up a virtually impossible to lose situation as that can potentially happen. But that is not a reason, however, to obfuscate a bit of context that remains all too relevant when the French idea of equality leads to sexual assault in the name of decency:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/24/french-police-make-woman-remove-burkini-on-nice-beach

I actually expect Europeans to behave better than the boorish and ignorant people on this side of the Atlantic. When they prove to be human just like we are, it's disappointing as all Hell. It's bad enough to see ignorance and idiocy and self-inflicted wounds recurring again and again and again and again here. I just hope that France, unlike us, remembers better the better angels of its nature and rises above the easy temptations of hatred and contempt. And if it did, it would be a wonderful instance both for France for all humanity.