France and Race and Islam

I have posted previously that the riots in france are caused by economic failure of the French state. Many in the liberal media, however, are arguing that it all has to do with race. Consider this quote from David Ignatius:

I lived for several years in France, returning to America a year ago, and I was always astonished by the French inability to reckon with racial divisions. You just didn't see black or brown faces in prominent positions -- not in the National Assembly, not on French television, not among business leaders, not in the media. French analysts have been warning for decades about the dangers of warehousing African and Arab immigrants in the suburbs, but the French have refused to adopt aggressive affirmative-action programs that might change the situation.

I am not so sure that race is spurring on the riots. African Americans were slaves in America who were brought over against their will and have lived here for 500 years. In America you don't often experience the feeling of whites hoping that black Americans will "go home." In contrast, North Africans have been living in France, a country that is 500+ years old, for less than 50 years - most of them coming over voluntarily to work. To expect that North Africans should suddenly be in high places of power is a stretch. Nevertheless, I also admit that I do not have direct knowledge of what life is like in France.

Ignatious goes on:

Americans of my generation remember the riots in Watts and Newark, and the explosion of rage in Washington after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. It was a trial by fire, and it changed America. Racist politicians such as George Wallace tried to sow more hatred, but a consensus emerged that America needed to provide real opportunities for the enraged young blacks who were throwing the molotov cocktails.

This line of thinking is where the manistream punditry fails to acknowledge the differences of riots in America to the riots in France. The difference is ISLAM.

In America, black Americans rioted for the usual things, they hated the police, wanted better jobs, less poverty, all the usual social ills. Their leaders demanded change. However, I do not recall any riot where the rioters demanded that they be given their own autonomous region in America where they could be separated from American society. Yet, this is what the Islamists are demanding in France, they want Francistan and Land of Mohammed inside the French state.... which is why instituing affirmative action programs, as Ignatious suggests, will solve nothing.

There is no solution to this demand. No state should voluntarily give up its land to squatters without a long and bloody war. Perhaps this is the beginning of that war.