If a riot has a hundred causes then it’s caused by everything and anything and any all-purpose, universal explanation for it is bound to be implausible. When a 31 year old teacher is among the first people charged in the aftermath of the worst of the violence you can put away your handy explanations about youthful alienation and all the rest of it.
Of course that’s doubtless a factor but it doesn’t explain why the majority of those who might be thought most likely to take to the streets did not in fact do so. Indeed, as I suggest in passing in a piece for the Daily Beast, if these disturbances remind one of anything much it’s the riots that convulsed France back in 2005.
Back then, of course, hysterical commentators declared that this was the beginning of a “French intifada” and a harbinger of the creeping Islamicisation of western europe.
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