Mark Steyn has an awesome piece about the riots in France over at The Washington Times. It is this weeks “Tuesday Reading Assignment”. There will be a test given at the end of the week.

Europe has some big issues to deal with in the upcoming years.

Ever since September 11, 2001, I’ve gloomily predicted the European powder keg’s about to go up. “By 2010, we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,” I wrote in Canada’s Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule.

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The notion Texas neocon arrogance frosted up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans?

For a half-decade, French Arabs have carried on a low-level intifada against synagogues, kosher butchers, Jewish schools, etc. The concern of the political class has been to prevent these attacks from spreading to targets of more, ah, general interest. They seem to have failed. Unlike America’s Europhiles, France’s Arab street correctly identified Jacques Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.

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In Paris, while “youths” fired on the gendarmerie, burned down a gym and disrupted commuter trains, the French Cabinet split in two, as the “minister for social cohesion” (a Cabinet position I hope America never requires) and other colleagues distance themselves from the interior minister, the tough-talking Nicolas Sarkozy who dismissed the rioters as “scum.”

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In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: “The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.” That sounds a lot like a new Dark Ages.

Man, things are going to get worse before they get better.