Or take last week's attacks in Jordan by a quartet of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's finest suicide bombers. The day after the carnage, Jordanians took to the streets in their thousands to shout "Death to Zarqawi!" and "Burn in hell, Zarqawi!" King Abdullah denounced terrorism as "sick" and called for a "global fight" against it. "These people are insane," he said of the husband-and-wife couple dispatched to blow up a wedding reception.

For purposes of comparison, consider the Madrid bombing from March last year. The day after that, Spaniards also took to the streets, for their feebly tasteful vigil. Instead of righteous anger, they were "united in sorrow" - i.e. enervated in passivity. Instead of wishing death on the perpetrators, the preferred slogan was "Basta!" - "Enough!" - which was directed less at the killers than at Aznar and Bush. Instead of a leader who calls for a "global fight", they elected a government pledged to withdraw from any meaningful role in the global fight.

So Europe's present biculturalism makes disaster a certainty. One way to avoid it would be to go genuinely multicultural, to broaden the Continent's sources of immigration beyond the Muslim world. But a talented ambitious Chinese or Indian or Chilean has zero reason to emigrate to France, unless he is consumed by a perverse fantasy of living in a segregated society that artificially constrains his economic opportunities yet imposes confiscatory taxation on him in order to support an ancien regime of indolent geriatrics.

France faces tough choices and, unlike Baghdad, in Paris you can't even talk about them honestly. As Jean-Claude Dassier, director-general of the French news station LCI, told a broadcasters' conference in Amsterdam, he has been playing down the riots on the following grounds: "Politics in France is heading to the Right and I don't want Right-wing politicians back in second or even first place because we showed burning cars on television."

Oh, well. You can understand why the Quai d'Orsay is relaxed about Iran becoming the second Muslim nuclear power. As things stand, France is on course to be the third. You heard it here first. You probably won't hear it on Mr Dassier's station at all.

A teacher who has been dealing with the veil issue in school since 1988, Alami isn?t gentle with those who, through their hesitations and compromises, ?make it possible for little girls to be discriminated against and stigmatized already beginning in school.? Her eyes grow fiery as she tells of ?women who have stayed behind in the North African countryside, who are enraged when they see their sisters who have left for Western countries come back veiled and submissive.? Alami says that it?s in the name of all these women that she defends ?the right to anonymity.?

In hundreds of French housing projects and ghettos populated by mostly Muslim Arab and African immigrants and their French children and grandchildren, "normal" has been for years a sort of chronic intifada, even if it was invisible to most of France and the rest of the world. According to research conducted by the government's domestic-intelligence network, the Renseignements Generaux, French police would not venture without major reinforcements into some 150 "no-go zones" around the country?and that was before the recent wave of riots began on Oct. 27. In France's "immigrant" neighborhoods, to borrow a phrase from the American military, it's "situation normal, all f?-ed up."

for Spain alone to keep its economy growing at the robust rate it has seen for the last decade, it has to have 1 million new immigrant workers per year. And despite some right-wing backlash by locals who feel threatened?or overwhelmed?first-generation immigrants cause relatively few problems. They tend to compare their life in Europe with the much harsher one they came from, and typically they take jobs few Europeans want.

Strong economic growth that creates jobs plus an open business environment that makes room for small-time entrepreneurs can ease tensions. (France is notably weak on both fronts.) But addressing the problem of racism is more complex.