Insight into French Unrest

I haven’t been following the riots in France with any particular interest, but a blog post by a journalist in France caught my attention.   A little snippet, if I may:

The rebellion is spreading spontaneously — driven especially by
racist police conduct that is the daily lot of these youths. It’s
incredible the level of police racism — these young are arrested or
controlled by the police, shaken down, pushed around, and have their
papers checked simply because they have dark sins, and the police are
verbally brutal, calling them ‘bougnoules’ [a racist insult, something
like the American “towel-heads”, only worse], ‘dirty Arabs’ and more.
The police bark, ‘Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes!’ as if they had no
right even to look a policeman in the face. It’s utterly dehumanizing.
No wonder these kids feel so divorced from authority.

Wow.  Certainly, there are better ways to voice your
dissatisfaction with goverment policy, but I can’t blame the youth if
the picture is really as dark as the blog paints it to be.

For me, I think the most distrubing thing is that I don’t see how an
resolution can be reached easily as the core issues are not ones that
can be changed overnight or through words alone.  I simply cannot
answer what the proper course of action is on behalf of the goverment
as there is no central figure with whom to negotiate terms of
peace.  Further martial action will surely only be met by more
resistence and increased unrest amoung the youth.

Could we be seeing the early stages of a modern day revolution?

Perhaps what’s most frightening is that, for the most part, none of
the current activity has been organized on any large scale.  I
think everyone would fear the invovlment of an organized Islamic
uprising which may draw upon the vast network of European Islamic
extremists.  Aye, this is a Jihadist’s dream in the making.