Riots in France

There was an important exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Mark Steyn on last night's Hugh Hewitt Show. HT: Radio Blogger for the segment of the transcript below. Click here for the entire transcript.

HH: Mark Steyn, how do you account for the indifference or ignorance of the mainstream media in America?

MS: Well, I think this is now basically becoming a willful effort at misleading. It's not just the United States. Other countries, too, are reporting this as their youths, or their French youth. And it isn't until you get thirteen paragraphs into the story, and they're quoting one of these youths, and you realize he's called Mohammed, that it occurs to you that there might be an ethno-cultural religious component to this situation. And this is absolutely grotesque, because the one...I'm sometimes accused of being terribly pessimistic when I speak in North America. And I always tell Americans and Canadians, that the one great advantage people have, you know, everything may...there may be a lot of bad news in the world, but the one advantage North Americans have, is that Europe is ahead of you in the line. And you have to learn what's happening. You have to confront honestly what's happening with these disaffected Muslim populations in Europe. I mean, most of the September 11th bombers, the Millennium bomber, a lot of these people all passed through various parts of the European welfare state. It's relevant to U.S. security, too.