But as Celia points out, the point is genetically valid, so saying "it's useful to have new blood in the gene pool" is perfectly defensible. If I thought the documentary was really telling everybody to marry a Turk or Arab and how marriages between ethnic Germans (or whatever) are bad, I might think differently about it, but I'd have to see some pretty convincing evidence before I'll buy that something that ludicrous was actually broadcasted.

The restaurant chain is called Quick, as stated in the original article. Admittedly, it's a total rip-off of McDonalds, but it's an entirely different company all the same, a French one which according to the article is even largely owned by a state investment company (which I had no idea about). And in France and Belgium, Quick is a competitor on equal footing to McDonalds. I don't know who of the Americans started talking about McDonalds instead, but I found it funny.

Could've fooled me, what with the raging nationalism and "let's put a French flag in every classroom!".

I really can't agree that that would be "compounding the issue". On the contrary, it's extremely relevant to the discussion at hand - France was not some monolithic culture before they had large numbers of Muslims. The European countries are very different from America because until fairly recently they had far less cultural mixture and intermingling *within one and the same location*, but in many European countries there's still been multiculturality, multilinguism etc. for centuries, by having culturally different regions within the same country.

Something interesting in this regard is what some Swiss newspapers dragged up from their country's history after the infamous minaret ban: that in the 1890s, Swiss voters passed a remarkably similar proposal, banning the construction of synagogues. I don't say that to draw misguided parallels between anti-Semitism and the immigration-sceptic movement (to use a less loaded term than "Islamophobic", but to point out that this kind of struggle and the feeling that the local identity is under threat isn't really that new.

I don't either, but then most of them do assimilate. In fact, one might say that a large part of the problem is that they assimilate far too well - in the wrong regards. You can say many bad things about the Islamic world, but until very recently, and as far as I know even lasting to this day, they have one remarkable characteristic: very low levels of crime, compared to similarly poor countries elsewhere. Then significant numbers of them moved to Europe, and now the largest part of the problems European countries have with these Muslim immigrants lie in the crime levels among their youth, and the way they make people feel unsafe in some neighbourhoods. Where does all that crime suddenly come from? Certainly not from Islam, and not from their home countries or home culture. The large majority of the actually devout Muslims in Western-Europe - not really as large a group as you might think - are law-obedient people, model citizens in many regards. The bad apples, the criminals, those aren't exactly big believers for the most part. Yeah, sure, you get some of the worst extremists turning to violence, but what kind of percentages are we talking about then?

Yes, but really, as I just said elsewhere, not every country is the same and not every situation is the same. France has a long and far from glorious history in the countries that most of their immigrants originate from, which has both positive (most immigrants know some French even before coming to France, as it's the language of the elite in Morocco and Algeria) and negative side-effects. For all that Sarkozy whines about burqas, the main issues that exist with the Muslim minorities in France are really quite unrelated to Islam or to a failure of integration (excepting one important factor which is the way the conservative gender relations in Islam, combined with "new" Western permissivity, openness and less respect for authority figures results in horribly spoiled and authority-challenging Muslim boys).

Uh, well, I think there are still some people around who speak the language... I'm not sure if there's much of a separatist movement (I only know the one in Savoye gets like 0.5% of the vote there, but then Savoye doesn't have its own language and all).