What the Uprising Generation Wants

France's underclass is tired of being shut out. And time is on their side

The gendarmes have weapons. The kids they face in the street have mostly stones and Molotov cocktails. It is a mismatch. But it's the cops who are the heavy underdogs--the cops and the France that the cops alone represent in those burning godforsaken ghettos where most Frenchmen dare not go.

On the one side are the protester-arsonists, many if not most of them Muslim, whom the Interior Minister called racaille (rabble)--young, restless, violent, vibrant, angry, jobless, envious and fecund. And on the other side is an aged and exhausted civilization, the hollowed-out core of European Christendom, static, aging, contented, coddled, passive...

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