THERE IS WAR in France today. Yes, I mean war — a civil war. Official France calls it “rioting.” I call it war because the French government and parliament have declared a state of emergency — the first time this far-reaching measure has been employed since Algeria’s war of independence started in 1955.

Back then, France also denied that it was war.

The violence began in late October in the public housing neighborhood of Clichy-sous-Bois, just north of Paris, when two Arab youths were accidentally electrocuted while hiding from police in an electric power substation. The residents, most of them poor and of Arab heritage, overreacted and, filled with their own prejudices, automatically assumed that the officers’ actions were racially motivated so began to revolt.

The riots spread to hundreds of similar low-income immigrant neighborhoods and soon became even more chaotic. By mid-November, France had been in a state of emergency for 12 days.

After more than 8,500 cars were torched in 116 cities, after almost 2,000 arrests, and after schools, gyms, churches and synagogues had been set on fire, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin extended the state of emergency for three months.

This is unique in all of Europe, and this is why the word ‘riots’ seems an understatement so disassociated from reality.

But what kind of war is it? Some say it is the frustrated poor against the rich. Others see a clash mostly of jealous, poor Muslim immigrants against the wealthy Christian West. Or is it, as conservatives howl, the beginning of a jihad: a ‘holy war’ by the Islamic fifth column in Europe, as Osama bin Laden is dreaming about in his hideout somewhere in the Hindu Kush?

One thing is for sure: Unlike in earlier rebellions, today there is an element of Islamist fundamentalism that the French and their European fellows find disturbing.

The French government tried to downplay this aspect in the first two weeks. For 12 days, politicians called the rioters “immigrants of North and West African descent,” emphasizing the word “African.” Not until the government recognized that the riots would not simply go away as before did they admit that the vast majority of the teenagers rioting are Muslims.

In previous years, similar riots took place in France, but nobody paid much attention. It was the unprecedented scope of this year’s unrest that grabbed the world’s attention, adding to the fast-growing uneasiness of Europeans who worry about violent Muslims in their midst.

An American professor of political science at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts recently conducted a study on Muslim immigrants in six European nations. In her book, The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe, Jytte Klausen found non-religious reasons for the clash of Muslim immigrants with their host nations. She writes that discrimination by governments, by employers and by the media are the main reasons for the frustration of these immigrants to Europe.

If her research is accurate, the burden of the failed integration should be put entirely on the shoulders of the hosts — the French state. Klausen writes that governments very often deny Muslim immigrants the rights of citizenship and employers freeze them out of jobs, while the media stereotypes them and denigrates their faith.

Regardless of their background, Klausen finds these immigrants to be “overwhelmingly secular in outlook and supportive of core liberal values. They very much want to integrate.” This trashes the European notion that Muslims remain aloof by religious choice.

Almost all attribute the socio-economic plight of Muslims to racism. A key finding of Klausen’s study is job discrimination, especially in France, but also in Sweden, despite its liberal views on citizenship.

Germany and France — remember how much they opposed ousting the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 — are “the worst in accepting Muslims as citizens,” according to Klausen. This is further proof that France and Germany opposed the US-led war in Iraq for reasons of rivalry, not, as some thought, out of sympathy with the Arab world.

The ‘riots’ in France also show that Europeans need to spend less time being upset about others, and more time examining and facing their own problems. Meeting the demands of multiculturalism has not been the strong point of France, or of any other European nation.

Minorities in France face a 40 percent unemployment rate — four times the national average. Since the terrorist attacks on the US on 9/11, Arab youths are often arbitrarily ordered by police to produce identity cards. It is true that many Muslim immigrants feel alienated from mainstream society. But until 9/11, both sides accepted the ghettoization: the host countries and the immigrants.

Today, there is an element of Islamist fundamentalism that the French and their European fellows find disturbing.

To be fair, one must also point out that enduring segregation is also in the interest of a growing number of ‘French Muslims’ who don’t want to consider themselves French, but who want to live in France. The ‘Grand Nation’ is confronted with an increasingly two-track educational system: More and more Muslim students refuse to sing, dance, participate in sports, sketch a face, or play an instrument. They even won’t draw a right angle, because they say it looks like part of the Christian cross. They won’t read Voltaire and Rousseau, because they are too anti-religion, Madame Bovary is considered too pro-women, and so on.

There are schools that obeyed a Muslim leader’s call for separate locker rooms because “the circumcised should not have to undress alongside the impure,” as he put it. But with all due respect, if millions of immigrants want to change their new homes so drastically, it is legitimate for Europeans to ask why they want to come to these countries in the first place.

It is a fact, too, that many Muslim immigrants want to enjoy Western prosperity while opposing Western values and customs. If this Islamist fundamentalist mindset doesn’t change, Muslims all over Europe will face a tough time, and perhaps Turkey will in the end not be allowed to become a full member of the European Union.

Is it really wise to fight with the Europeans on their own ground over Voltaire and separate locker rooms?

The societal split between natives and new immigrant communities is a powder-keg problem in nearly all Western European nations. Last November, controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was brutally murdered by the son of Moroccan immigrants. Dozens of Islamic schools and mosques were burned down in retaliation in the Netherlands, a small country that is generally known for the tolerance and openness of its society.

More problematic is Germany, where hate crimes against Muslim immigrants date farther back. In the 1990s, young adults torched several buildings that were inhabited by Turkish immigrants, burning them to death, and chased an Algerian until he died. The latest government report on xenophobia, which is examined in Germany every year, shows that it is continually on the rise. As strange as it may sound, a growing number of Germans dislike Muslims and Jews alike.

The big difference between immigration to the United State and to Europe is that Americans define themselves by residence; if you’re born in the US, live in the US or have citizenship, then you’re considered American. Europeans, on the other hand, define themselves by ancestry; one could be born in Europe, live in Europe or have citizenship in a European country and still not be considered European if your parents aren’t, by blood, European.

For example, Americans may consider an immigrant couple foreign, but not the couple’s American-born children. The same cannot be said of Europeans, who consider European-born children of immigrants foreign. And a US school would not allow special treatment of Muslims on matters of curriculum as French schools do. However a Muslim woman is allowed to wear her hijab at school, which she cannot do in France.

Whether Europeans like it or not, how a country treats immigrants is a fundamental feature of its society.  et