“Open Source War”

Posted on November 8, 2005

Car burning in Strasbourg, France on November 5.
Photo by François Schnell.

France — and with her, perhaps all of Western Europe — is in crisis tonight.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, what started out as simple rioting in the Paris banlieues (suburbs) has now spread to more than 300 cities across the country, fueled by the rage of France’s large and mostly un-assimilated Muslim minority population. The unrest has gotten so severe that the government has declared a state of emergency and there is talk that the army will be called in to confront rioters. Sympathetic riots have broken out in Belgium and Germany as well, raising the question of whether the unrest will remain confined to French borders. Some are going so far as to declare that the riots have evolved into a full scale intifada such as we have seen in Palestine.

If you want to understand the dynamics of this situation, I recommend you check out Global Guerrillas, where John Robb is posting some of the most cogent and thought-provoking commentary I’ve seen yet on this growing crisis.