This (and I believe it worth the free registration to read the article):

With cries of “God is great,” bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.

The French authorities could not allow a band of youths to expel the police from French territory. So they hit back — sending in Special Forces, known as the CRS, with armored cars and tough rules of engagement.

Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the “occupied territories.” By midweek, the riots had spread to three of the provinces neighboring Paris, with a population of 5.5 million.

But who lives in the affected areas? In Clichy itself, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants are Muslim immigrants or their children, mostly from Arab and black Africa. In other affected towns, the Muslim immigrant community accounts for 30 percent to 60 percent of the population. But these are not the only figures that matter. Average unemployment in the affected areas is estimated at around 30 percent and, when it comes to young would-be workers, reaches 60 percent.

Is an extension of that:

...[T]he crux of the West’s problems with militant, fundamentalist Islamists: that a sub-culture could be so twisted as to believe that vicious, mean crimes could be honorable proves that their system of ethics is so completely out of line with ours that their is no way for them to coexist within the same regions and under the same law. For that matter, it proves the lie of cultural relativism.

The expectations of fundamentalist Muslims who emigrate to the West--sometimes from impoverished North African nations, sometimes from wealthy Middle Eastern families--is that the cultures, laws, and expectations of their new hosts will bend to the will of the immigrants. Western expectation is that the newcomers will peacefully bring the best of their own culture, but not in a way that damages the legal and political body of the host.

Instead of peaceful integration, though, what we have is honor rapes in France, the religiously motivated murder of Theo Van Gogh, and the request that Muslim communities have the opportunity to enforce their own religious laws in Canada. In the UK we see Islamic extremists will to live on the dole--that is, on the welfare provided by a generous host--while supporting the London bombings.

Oddly, the US has been spared much of the problem with it’s immigrant base (while being a huge target for attack from outsiders). Is that just luck? Is it just a matter of time before poorer Islamic communities in the US riot in the same way?

Again, that touchy-feely PC belief that if they just got to know us better, if we just communicated more, we wouldn’t have these cultural clashes is proven to be naive. They know us very well, they respect us very little, and they believe that we heretics are fair game for attack and exploitation. Not every Muslim is a potential enemy of their host state, but those that embrace their religious law and culture above the more secular laws of Western developed nations simply cannot rub elbows with the rest of us without undue strain.

We can’t tolerate some of their religious practices (honor rapes again spring to mind) and they can’t tolerate us in a much broader sense.

We have our own problems with riots, of course (think of the riots following the Rodney King verdict), and the problems in France aren’t entirely religious in nature (having a significant economic component). It would be unwise, though, to ignore the cultural and religious element, especially while we engage in a war against Islamic terror throughout the world.