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.

Even the headline of this article is biased just by posing the question "Generation Jihad?" When I read the article it is clear to me that it is written by people who are looking at the situation from the outside who are not sympathetic to the issues affecting the various Muslim communities in Europe. It is wrong to treat all Muslim communities in Europe as if they are immigrant communities. They are not. Muslims have a history of life in Europe that goes back to times before many European countries existed. These people are Europeans and Muslims. In France, the rioters are generally French. I do not understand how the Spiegel writers can say that these young people, who have usually never lived anywhere else but Europe, consider themselves Turk or Morrocan first. How do the writers know that? Germans always say that about everybody as a kind of slander. I do not believe the Spiegel writers know about Muslim youth in Europe at all but rather they are rehashing old European slanders we've heard repeated about every minortiy group in Europe: "there is a difference between us and them." Us and them. "We are friendly, law-abiding peaceful people whereas they are dangerous, riotous rabble and darkly foreign." It is always the same story in Europe. It is wrong to write about minority communities as if they are monolithic entities. There is great diversity in Muslim communities throughout Europe. Some are very successful, others are not so successful. There is something very shameful in the way this story is being reported.