Rioting by Muslims youths appears to be back on the rise again in France. This particularly portion of the AP article caught my attention (my bolding):

The overnight attacks and recent ambushes on police have raised concern about the changing character of suburban violence, which is seemingly more premeditated than last year’s spontaneous outcry and no longer restricted to the housing projects. The use of handguns was unusual — last year’s rioters were armed primarily with crowbars, stones, sticks or gasoline bombs.

Regional authorities said the Nanterre bus line, which passes near Paris’ financial district, had not been considered at a high risk of attack. Francois Saglier, director of bus service at the RATP, said the attacks happened “without prior warning and not necessarily in neighborhoods considered difficult.”

The RATP was to meet later Thursday with unions to determine which routes would be changed or limited in response to the unrest. Unions demanded that the RATP allow drivers to exercise their right to stop work in case of imminent danger.

Don’t think other European governments like Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Germany aren’t paying close attention to this, for I’m thinking it’s becoming pretty clear to them that for far too long they have allowed unchecked immigration to overwhelm their own native populations, which are emigrating the heck outta there to other countries. Unfortunately, the toothpaste is out of the tube, so to speak, and there’s virtually nothing these governments can do to prevent the same thing from spreading and expanding without some form of confrontation. Unless the French were to really get tough – and I’m not sure they have either the desire or the courage to do so, a bad situation is only bound to get worse. When abhorrent behavior – in any form – is not countered or checked early on, those doing it are only emboldened.

And Powerline has more, including this link and the following:

The most spectacular incident took place at 1AM between Bagnolet and Montreuil. A gang of 10 pistol wielding hooded youths boarded the bus. One of the assailants placed his gun on the side of the bus driver’s head and ordered him to get out of his seat. The gang commandeered the bus, drove it a short distance and torched it in a neighboring suburb. Appropriately enough, the bus was torched at Montreuil’s Lenin Square.

How big a problem is Europe facing? Only the end of its western form of culture and civilization as they have known it. One of my faves, The Anchoress, is cross-blogging over at Captains Quarters, and she highlights an interview given by the always fab, always incisive Mark Steyn to Human Events magazine, in which Steyn rings the death knell for Europe and European culture and discounts the idea that the march of civilization always goes forward, never backward:

“Basically the European nations are dying and the populations in them are turning into relatively hostile Muslim populations, not all of them terrorists, but all of them, almost all of those people not sympathetic to America and American interests. And I feel that the great assumption that we all have, that the present tense is somehow permanent, or that it’s like technological progress. You know, it’s like, cars don’t go backwards. You don’t suddenly have a Cadillac Escalade and you go out into the yard one morning and it’s turned into a Ford Model T and it’s got a rumble seat and all kinds of other stuff in it. You take the view that—we think that social progress is like technological progress, that it can never be reversed, but I think it can be reversed and I think a lot of the world is going to be re-primitivized in the decades ahead and America has to change.”

The Anchoress gets it right, I think: “For as long as I have been reading Steyn, he has used demographics to powerfully make his point. He does so in this book as well, and the numbers are sobering. “America Alone” is a book you will want to read, and I urge you to. The world is going to look very, very different in another generation, and your children will be dealing with it. You need to anticipate it.”

Finally, Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is someone who definitely gets it, and this column he posted at National Review Online ought to be required reading and a wake-up call for everyone out there who thinks the Global War on Terror is just George W. Bush’s paranoia and presidential obsession. Even if Santorum’s run for re-election this year falls short, he needs to be considered a major player in the 2008 Republican presidential sweepstakes.