The best thing about the rioting in France is that it proves once and for all that pandering to Islamists is always a bad idea. Even when you provide them with all the perks available to sluggards in a socialist society, it's no guarantee they won't turn right around and bite the hand that feeds them. So, just in case anybody ever asks you to name the biggest difference between a French Muslim and a French poodle, you now know the answer.

France made the mistake of throwing open its doors 40 years ago to cheap Arab and African workers, and came to discover, to its dismay, that the children and grandchildren of those original immigrants, don't care for the French any more than the rest of us do.

There are those who believe that the rioting is the result of the French failing to assimilate Muslims into their society. Far be it from me to defend France, something you may have noticed over the past century the French, themselves, are extremely reluctant to do. However, you might as well condemn Old MacDonald for not assimilating with his farm animals. It's not French snobbery that isolates the Muslims or creates their embarrassingly high rate of unemployment. The fact of the matter is that their young men are too spoiled and too lazy to do manual labor, and too ignorant and ill-educated to do anything else. Combine a welfare state that provides them with food and lodging with a vulgar religion that condemns all non-believers as infidels, and you have gasoline just waiting for a lighted match.

Most liberal pundits, I've found, justify riots, blaming society at large for its marauders. I, on the other hand, am not so easily hoodwinked. Check out the photos of every riot you've ever seen and you will discover that it's the very same riff-raff in every mob, no matter where the vandalism takes place. Remove the 16-25 year old male punks from the pictures, and you'd be left with a lot of lamp posts and telephone poles minding their own business.

Whether it's the Rodney King mob burning down stores in L.A., the PLO bums throwing stones in Jenin, or the lay-a-bouts in Paris, they're exactly the same as the punks in America who run amok every time their home team either wins or loses a Super Bowl or an NBA title. There is a reason why you rarely see anybody over the age of 30 out in the streets. Could it be that only youngsters are ever oppressed or downtrodden? Hardly. It's because even their own parents know that the young hoodlums would be just as likely to stone them as to stone the cops; far likelier, in fact, because their folks are less likely to be armed and dangerous.

It's no secret that testosterone-driven young males enjoy busting windows, spray- painting graffiti, and starting fires. Unfortunately, just as with certain parents who are in denial when it comes to the antics of their bratty children, social workers, members of the liberal media and other assorted pacifists, habitually blame riots on capitalism, western imperialism, gas companies and, for all I know, premature potty training.

Frankly, what I most fear is that in a world in which multiculturalists, including even President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, feel obliged to bow and scrape to Muslims, in a world so overflowing with infantile feel-good rhetoric about the joys of Islam, that it will eventually and inevitably give rise to fascism.

Each time I hear people defending Islam, pretending that it's merely another humanistic faith like Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism, I wonder if they would have insisted that National Socialism was just another political party, and that being a Nazi was no different from being a Republican or a Democrat.

I worry that in a world filled with folks lying about the emperor, it will finally take a Hitler to point out he's as naked as a jaybird.

Frankly, I'm sick and tired of hearing people parroting the lie that Islam is a religion of peace. I suppose so long as you're willing to set aside your bible and pick up the Koran and start kneeling to Mecca, they'll let you live in peace; unless, of course, you belong to a different sect. In which case, in the name of the great and merciful Allah, they'd have no choice but to cut your head off.

Of course American Muslims aren't like the butchers and suicide-bombers who murder in the name of their religion, or so we're told. But just how would we know that to be true? What we do know is that even after 9/11, until the F.B.I. put a stop to it, many of them were funneling funds to Al Qaeda.

Before I'm convinced there's a real difference between our Muslims and those other ones, the faithful in the U.S. will have to first stop whining about racial profiling; their young people will have to start enlisting in the armed services; and they'll have to begin condemning their co-religionists loudly and often. For openers, it would be a nice gesture if they passed the hat around the old mosque and then announced they'd come up with a multi-million dollar reward for Osama bin Laden, dead or alive.

As for the rest of us, it's high time we stopped trying to come up with highfalutin' excuses for murderous mobs.

The answer, nearly always, to why young people riot is simple. It's fun.

You can learn more about Burt and his latest book, Conservatives Are from Mars (Liberals Are from San Francisco) at his home page. Write Mr. Prelutsky at: