I don't get this. Why are the authorities allowing this to happen? Until the current situation is resolved, nothing is going to get better. The first thing that has to happen is that the authorities have got to get control of their own society. You have, what, 3,000 cars burned, one person killed, thugs starting to literally open fire on police, and dozens, hundreds of buildings torched? And this isn't just in one area -- it's spreading throughout France.

Make a public announcement that the government is going to regain control by whatever means necessary. Impose a dusk-to-dawn curfew in the affected areas, starting tonight. Impose martial law. Bring in the military. And if, following this notice, anyone is stupid enough to be out at night, shoot them dead, on the spot, and leave them there until morning.

All the discussion and theorizing are fine, but the entire nation is teetering on the brink of anarchy. France as we know it is about to go under. Get control, first.

I am an American who has spent some time in France and I can attest to the fact that France in particular and Europe in general does have a problem with racism. In France especially, North Africans are discriminated against at every level of society.

Paris is a weird city. When you go there you see that it's almost entirely a museum piece built to glorify classical French civilization, which is good for attracting tourists but not good if you were on the receiving end of clasical French civilization like the North Africans were. In no way whatsoever has French culture come to terms with the truth about French history. For example, the film "The Battle of Algiers" is still banned in France, even though it is almost entirely accurate in its portrayal of the French war against Algerian independence.

Even though Europe is supposedly multicultural and modern, people still think of a typical European as being a white person even though many millions of Africans and Asians are fully and completely European. Europe does very little to include people who are not white and the French government openly forces North Africans specifically to assimilate to a certain version of WHITE French culture. For example, Muslim girls cannot wear head scarves in school. There is nothing in the United States that comes close to the overt cultural bullying that white French culture gets away with in France.

I think that if it wasn't for anti-muslim bias in the Western media, we would see these riots for what they are: a compelling political statement about European civilization on par with the 1968 riots. The difference between now and 1968 is that today we are not seeing primarily white college students rioting.

The suburbs of Paris are a human wasteland that France has hidden from the world for decades because tourists don't go there.

What is strange about this article is how familiar it seems. I remember just a few years ago, in the early 1990s, when my -- white, once-liberal -- parents informed me solemnly that New York City would soon become "majority black." This, for them, spelt the doom of a once great city: that the city of Woody Allen and the Metropolitan Opera, beatniks and (ironically) jazz, would be taken over by roving bands of criminal blacks, fueled by, on the one hand, drugs and poverty, and on the other hand, a deep antipathy towards "Anglo" culture.

Fifteen years later, New York is in the midst of a renaissance. The city is safe. Black people and white people can look each other in the eye. Whites -- like me -- do not instinctively cross the street late at night to avoid a black man. Neighborhoods that were once no-go war zones are shared. It is not a utopia. But the hell of permanent race-war that even reasonable people like my parents felt was just around the corner never came to pass.

We had our troubles. We had the LA Riots. We had Crown Heights. We had Kitty Genovese. Let Europe -- white Europe and "black" Europe -- confront its problems. Let them face their fears. Let them start telling each other some hard truths: that ruling races can be racist; that the oppressed can addict themselves not only to drugs, but to the rhetoric of hate. Let them, even, say things like my parents said, and believe what my parents believed.

And maybe, just maybe, let them hire a few Gulianis. Throw the camera-pandering socialists out the door. So their kids can vote, as I did these past primaries, for someone like Howard Dean.

The chickens are coming home to roost in France.

Muslims don't want to assimilate to any non-Muslim culture . . . because they want to take everything over. These hotheaded, irrational, angry "youths" have declared war on France and throwing money at them won't do anything productive.

However, they can't do anything so sensible as declare martial law and shoot rioters on sight, because it would make them look racist and un-PC.

They're getting what's coming to them and I will be delighted when Europe completely collapses in a few centuries from low native birthrates and Muslim invasion from within.

As bitter as it is, France is getting what it deserves.

Not to long ago, France romanticized the intifada in Israel/Palestine with bestselling books about suicide bombers. Now the intifada has opened up on its doorstep and France acts with suprise. France was quick to voice critical commentary over the behavior of the US in Iraq (which I do not defend), forgetting its own colonial blunders. France seems quick to point the finger, but slow to look in the mirror.

As a person who lived in Paris, this chaos is no suprise. Kids of Arab and North African decent were causing trouble back in 2000, but the uber-PC French failed to address the problem. France is a Muslim country ... all hail the death of the Rebulique.

F. London

We have still not learned our lessons about racism or equity from the history and misery that plagues people of color. The very coverage of this is racist and xenophobic. The people participating in the non-ideological violence are consistently called immigrants even though they are mostly French born children of African descent and the fact that some have arab faces does not make their situations easier. The feul for this violence is not solely the "modern welfare state," but it is not a factor because poor people have leeched it and abused it. Instead, the fact of the matter is that these policies (although not better in their previous incarnations) are being swept into history in worldwide neo-liberal waves.

Sadly, it has been hard for people to realize that the reason that unemployment rates are increasing around the world, as well as poverty rates, only begs us to take a look at how many jobs offered to the poor and uneducated of the world are service industry positions. In the United States, this trend was seen alongside the continual decrease in blue collar, unionized jobs. Without unions, healthcare and retirement benefits are oftentimes non-existant.

Nonetheless, with such bleak futures, how can we not expect people who are unemployed, poor, victims of racist policies to react violently to the maddness they live in. When the violent French protestors are confronted with police, military, and harsher hardline laws, they cannot be expected to stop. These marginalized groups exist around the world and they are not planning or fulfilling a call to Jihad but they are empowering themselves in the same violent way that racist, neo-liberal, and inadequate measures have attacked a disproportionate amount of poor, non-white men, women, and children of color.