I think I'm starting to understand the reactions of the more overheated right-wingers to the French riots.

Take Kender of the Stop the ACLU blog, for instance. When Kender writes a post titled French Riots, coming soon to Germany, Belgium and a slum near you, that's not a warning -- it's a prayer. Kender is saying this with fingers crossed. He (I'm guessing Kender is a he) wants this to happen.

To some extent, Kender is, like so many France-hating right-wingers, just feeling schadenfreude:

It is my opinion that the French are getting what they deserve here.

"Germany, Belgium and a slum near you" are next, according to Kender, presumably because, like France, all "have embraced a socialist system that is doomed to failure" (and yes, that also applies to the U.S. -- it's a common riff on the right that the half-assed U.S. government safety net is, for the poor, socialism in full flower).

But Kender's getting at something else here: Like a lot of right-wingers, he wants all hell to break loose. He wants the French riots to go global. He'd like a lot more property to be damaged and he might even be pleased if a lot more people died.

What I'm picking up from Kender, and from other right-wingers who see the riots as part of a multinational Muslim uprising, is something similar to what I sense every time an NRA purist talks about the threat of domestic insurrection or an increasingly tyrannical U.S. government: a hope that a purely evil enemy will rise up and provide the opportunity for pure, unbridled and socially sanctioned hatred -- and, ultimately, violent retribution. What bliss!

I don't completely blame the NRA guys. They don't want to just go to work all week and watch football all weekend. They want something more out of life. Who doesn't? But their reaction to the ordinariness of their lives is to imagine that a world-historical Evil will someday rise up from U.S. soil -- an evil only they can conquer. Usually it's a government gone jackbooted; sometimes it's rioters in the streets. And they and their guns will restore order where there was chaos and freedom where there was repression. On one level this is an understandable fantasy. On the other hand, the sensible reaction is: Grow up.

The new right-wing fantasy of metastasizing Muslim anger in Europe, and in America, is similar. These people want figures of pure evil to hate. Their president took the pursuit of the 9/11 murderers off the table, overthrowing Saddam was a huge letdown -- but now ... here come a bunch of Muslim kids with gasoline bombs! Killer ragheads! Life is worth living again! Just when the right thought the best it could do was hating and harassing undocumented dishwashers.

In the comments to Kender's post, someone named "Bic" (er, isn't that a French pen?) imagines how dire things might get:

...I saw a forecast today that France may well be partitioned, the way India was, within the decade, and that such may be the underlying goal of the Islamisists:

http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=85

Could this happen? Or worse, are there any alternatives left?

Kender responds:

The alternatives, Bic, are for the french to admit their failed policies, deport people by the boatloads, loosen restrictions on business and go with a more capitalistic, free market economy, but that will not happen...

Muslims, I am learning, are a danger, refusing to assimilate anywhere they immigrate, and eventually rising up in protest until they get their own lands.

Bic, thanks for the link in the above comment. It opened my eyes a little more to the dangers of Islam, muslims as a whole, and the futility of socialists policies such as france has been following for the last few decades....

There it is in a nutshell. A LARGE SWATH OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD IS DOOMED! And only we understand the problem! Only we have the solution! Declare Muslims unfit to live in civilized society! Begin ethnic cleansing! Let's do this!