France got her very own George Floyd riots this week—mostly last weekend, actually—following the police shooting on June 28th of a 17-year-old Muslim after a traffic stop.

From the New York Times:

Protesters burned cars, set fire to buildings and vandalized police stations, lighting fireworks outside them. Thousands of people were arrested and hundreds of police officers were wounded. Tens of thousands of officers have been deployed across the country.

[What’s behind the unrest in France?, Emma Bubola and Aurelien Breeden, July 3, 2023]

What’s behind the unrest in France? Violent riots convulsed French cities after the police shooting of a 17-year-old. The interior minister said that 40,000 officers would be deployed across France on Thursday evening. https://t.co/aFsmOoCU9x

— Stuart Falk (@stufalk) June 29, 2023

I'd like to say something original and penetrating about this, but nothing comes to mind. It has of course been sensationally dumb of the French to permit mass settlement of Arab and African Muslims and to imagine that, with common schooling and some anti-discrimination laws, the immigrants would become indistinguishable from legacy French people in a generation or two.

Nope: While there surely has been some assimilation there has plainly also been a whole lot of ab-similation—not moving towards similarity but away from it.

I coined that word "absimilation" in my 2009 book We Are Doomed, hoping it might catch on. It didn't; and five years later I had a Diary segment lamenting the fact that it hadn't. That segment ended with the following, quote:

We live in an age of bad, stupid ideas. Mass immigration of Muslims into non-Muslim nations may be the baddest and stupidest.