Couldn’t be further from the truth. To most “Wahhabite radicals” the vast majority of Pakistanis, who actually belong to the Braelvi “religio-cultural” tradition, are “grave-worshipping heretics”.

I’m sure that this was argued at the time. Taylor Branch shows convincingly how the conservatives at the time tried to portray Martin Luther King as a communist agent.

But then you might as well say that both groups had watched a lot of footage of what happened *earlier* in Belfast and Londonderry.

Obviously there is viral learning and learning by doing even in rioting, and herd behaviour, and all sorts of things like that. I would say it is important to take note of the kinds of images on the TV the participants might have been exposed to from early childhood. Also the micro-psychological studies which seem to show that young people today have a shorter fuse when it comes to moving into aggressive behaviour, but this is by the by.

I don’t think we should mistake form with content: the Northern Irish intifada and the Palestinian one do not seem to have been especially linked ideologically – although militants from both the relevant groups may have openly sympathised with each other’s situation.

More to the point, I didn’t notice any evidence of the Palestinian headscarves in the TV footage I saw. In fact, as Guy suggests, the Beur preferred headgear seems to be the hood. Also not surprising since – again as we are noting – the majority of those who have been involved are either black Africans or non-Arab Berbers.

My guess, but it’s only a guess, is that you would probably find more evidence of Palestinian scarves on ‘home grown’ anti-globalisation demos.

That is not so simple. Their level of education is lower than in the general population and a high percentage live in poorer areas. Secondly, you also have true immigrants which face the language barrier.
Even if there were no racism in French society, they would still be poorer for longer than a decade or even two.

Of course, you cannot switch off racism by law. Especially as the members of a subculture of foreign origin are busy working to strengthen racist attitudes.

The first step should be to enforce law and order. The second step, in my oppinion, is to recognize that more money will not help. There must be a concentration on education, enforcing schooling. All aspects of that particular subculture that are hostile to or hindering to education must be actively combatted.

Who’s organizing the French guerrilla riots? Are they associated with any coherent political movement at all?

Gack. One might as well argue that the American urban riots of the 1960s were motivated by Communists.

The anti-Israeli intifada wasn’t primarily Islamist either.

The French guerilla riots showed two lessons learned from the intifada. First, a high level of violence that is just below the threshold of justifying a vicious crackdown. This allows for lots of recruitment, a sense that you are ‘effective’ even if you don’t get anything done, and very little personal risk for most participants (which reinforces the previous two ideas). Second, an avoidance of direct confrontation with law enforcement for the majority of the acts. Mobs quickly find themselves in direct physical contact with the authorities. These riots typically did not. Tactically, this looked like the beginning of the first intifada. I wouldn’t use one day of lessening calm (when it is raining) to dismiss the analogy out of hand.