France is revolting

…again. We went through this last year at this same time. Which is basically why it broke out again.

Marauding youths torched hundreds of vehicles overnight and on Saturday in renewed violence coinciding with the first anniversary of riots that exposed a deep schism between poor North African immigrants and mainstream France.

A group of teenagers set one bus on fire Saturday in the southern French port city of Marseille, seriously wounding a passenger. Three others suffered from smoke inhalation, police said. Two other public buses and 277 vehicles around the country were burned overnight, police said.

This isn’t vandalism, folks, it’s premeditated violence.

Police had braced for a bigger replay of violence in the poor suburbs predominantly made up of Muslims from former French colonies in Africa. Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the deaths of two teens that ignited three weeks of riots in 2005.

Remember that? France was ablaze because of political and cultural divisiveness and gross mishandling of it all. But it never got resolved.

France’s trouble integrating minorities and the suburban unrest are becoming hot political issues in the campaign for next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections. The government passed an equal opportunities law this spring and has poured funds into “sensitive” areas, but disenchantment is still pervasive.

The latest unrest centered on the troubled suburbs that ring Paris. Half the cars burned nationwide overnight were torched in the region around the capital. Of the 47 arrests, 33 people were taken into custody in the Paris suburbs, mostly for throwing projectiles, burning cars or generally vandalizing property, police said.

This is foreboding, and how it is handled will determine how much ground these radicals capture. Pope Benedict has been directly confronting these very threats in his addresses in Europe. Especially that one in Regensburg.