WaPo is beyond parody

Have you noticed that the French "youths" engaged in the rioting in the "suburbs" around Paris are just called "youths" in the TV and print media, as if they were a bunch of drunken soccer-loving yobs and hooligans? Almost no one seem willing to mention that these are almost exclusively unassimilated Muslims.

Today, the Washington Times actually mentioned this in the first sentence of its article.

The United States government warned Americans yesterday to stay clear of violence-wracked Parisian suburbs, as rioting gangs of Arab and African youths, mostly Muslims, torched cars, schools and buses for an eighth straight night.

But the Washington Post? Take a look at its front-page headline:

As Youth Riots Spread Across France, Muslim Groups Attempt to Intervene

According to the headline, it's generic "youths" who are rioting and Muslims who are trying to stop the rioting. Only in the sixth paragraph does the Post mention the unpleasant news of who these rioters are.

UPDATE (11/6): And I thought I was pessimistic. I've often said that France will be a Muslim country in 15 or 20 years. Mark Steyn (via Solomonia) starts a column this way:

Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. "By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night," I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. As Thursday's edition of the Guardian reported in London: "French youths fired at police and burned over 300 cars last night as towns around Paris experienced their worst night of violence in a week of urban unrest."

And he remarks on the "youths" terminology.

''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East.