Michelle Malkin has an excellent round up of the French riot coverage including good articles in the NY Post and NY Sun. A lot of this commentary, including Mark Steyn's interview with Hugh Hewitt and coverage by the blogosphere in general, seems fixated on the idea that this is the start of a French or European intifada and this ties in with notes that there have been riots in other countries as well recently.
This article at Frontpagemag.com seems typical in its blaming of the riots on a failure to assimilate muslim immigrants, while noting, as I did in the previous post, that press articles seem to blame the riots on unemployment, poverty etc. I agree with it and with George at EU Rota who both point out the root cause is not poverty, discrimination and unemployment so much as the dirigiste government that has mismanaged the economy so that there is a shortage of jobs and mismanaged the housing system so that the immigrants are congregated in a few areas where they can fester with inadequate access to education, low quality housing etc. French government policy has generally been to make grandiose speeches and then take no effective action and the banlieux are the result of decades of precisely this policy.
However I tend to disagree partly with the analyses that blame these riots on radical islam. I have absolutely no doubt that the radical islamists are doing their best to take advantage of the riots and to spread them but I do not believe that the proximate cause of the riots is islam. In many ways the French riots are no different from the Rodney King riots in LA and the rhetorical question of "how come poor catholics aren't rioting?" applies equally to LA where one could have asked how come poor Hispanics weren't rioting. Just as with the LA riots in years past and for that matter with the riots by Aboriginals in Redfern (Sydney, Australia), the riot is caused by unemployed criminal young men getting upset at attempts to curtail their criminality. There are of course other reasons such as endemic poverty and racial discrimination that help fan the flames but the spark is generally speaking policemen attempting to enforce the rule of law in areas that have become crime-ridden no-go zones.
The root cause of today's riots, IMO, is quite simply the socialist and PC dogma that has wrecked the European economy and removed concepts like "personal responsibility" from society. If you want two, more precise, policy errors they would be:
The banlieux are an urban-planning disaster area and should have been knocked down and replaced with something more humanizing.
The restrictive labour laws that make it risky to take on new workers (the idiotic 35 hour week is just the tip of the iceberg here)
You put people in a miserable environment and remove their options for working legally and is it any wonder they commit crimes while getting frustrated at the difference in living conditions between their housing and those of others. The fact thet many of tem have turned to religion and away from identifying themselves as French is merely a symptom of the uderlying problem. Unfortunately now that we've got to this situation fixing it is a lot harder than opening up the economy and knocking down suburbs that make Moscow look friendly.