zlacker

The problem is that the 'foreign' policy is irrelevant. The 'foreign' policy is made to appear the state is 'doing something' while MOST of the problem has been in the country for many, many years. Most of the problem is that the youngsters of immigrant stock have not been integrated, and have nothing else to do than turn to crime and/or religion, so are just RIPE for radicalism...

And there's little the state can do about THAT. they can't send war planes to the banlieus -- it's a lot easier to play tough and send warplanes somewhere else, ignoring the local problem of the ghethos.

And I don't have a proposal to make it all better either. It was an unsolvable problem already in france when I grew up there, and there's very little that can be done that hasn't been tried already.

>>buserr+(OP)
Of course craziness can explode in many ways, but denying that foreign policy is a huge trigger is just disingenuous. How many suicide bombers have you seen in Canada or Sweden? And they have a huge migrant population, larger than France in percentage terms, with various degrees of (non-)integration. But they don't set other countries on fire nor they usually bomb anyone, so they don't get hit by paramilitary networks.

>>toyg+f1
Fair enough; I think I should have said that it's not 'only' foreign policy that matters, it's part fo the factors of course. You can play with thought policies when you are not already crowded with a population of people who feel they are being dealt (rightly, or wrongly, or perceived, or real) the wrong hand.

The real sad thing is that it puts a lot of other people in the wrong sort of focus, all the people who ARE integrated, who made the efforts, who overcame the hurdles of segregation and racism; these are the 'visible' people who'll get in trouble in the next few weeks/months in the daily lives, and perhaps make them wonder if it was such a good idea to identify and 'join' a population that is just angry and looking for a soft target.