The Madrid and London terror bombings, the failed plot against America-bound British airliners, the murder of Theo van Gough, a series of violent anti-Semitic incidents in France, the Paris riots, and the Muhammad cartoon affair have all served to wake up at least some Europeans to the problem of unassimilated Muslim immigrants and their children. Unfortunately, many Europeans remain asleep. To see how the sleep-walkers dream, have a look at “France and Its Muslims,” a piece by Stephanie Giry in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (subscription required).

Giry hopes to disabuse Americans of the view that the French riots indicate failed Muslim integration in France. And Giry goes further, arguing that the Van Gough murder and the Muhammad cartoon affair have nothing much to do with the threat of Islamist terror.

Giry’s piece is an exercise in denial, and obfuscation. Instead of analyzing the cartoon affair, the van Gough murder (which she quickly dismisses as the work of a “deranged fanatic”), anti-Semitic violence in France, etc., Giry ignores these issues and focuses instead on what she claims is the real story: the successful integration of the majority of Muslims into French society. The few statistics Giry cites to prove successful integration are unconvincing.

Yes, concedes Giry, there is a process of “re-Islamization” among some young men, but this affects “at most only ten percent of the Muslim population.” Well, ten percent of France’s five million plus Muslims, magnified in potential impact by being concentrated among young men, is a matter of real significance–especially since the numbers are moving up, not down. Only about a third of America’s baby boomers were actively involved in the counter-culture of the 1960′s, yet that movement transformed our society. A strongly committed group with a distinctive cultural message can easily have an impact far out of proportion to its numbers–especially when we’re talking about young men willing to take risks.

And the numbers themselves tell only part of the story. If they are not actively integrated into French society, young ethnic Muslims who are not particularly religious nonetheless form a potential pool of recruits into radical Islam. You can’t tell from the numbers of “secular” versus religious Muslims alone whether young people are truly culturally integrated, or simply anomic individuals, cut off from meaningful community, and therefore ripe for recruitment into Islamist groups. The growing numbers of Islamist young men are likely coming from such a pool of unintegrated secularists.

According to Giry, French Muslims have a higher rate of intermarriage with non-Muslims than Muslims in other parts of Europe. If true, that is indeed an important indicator of relative integration, although given the extraordinarily low rates of Muslim intermarriage in much of Europe, that may not be saying much. In any case, what we really need is a careful look at Muslim marriage patterns and practices in France, and how they affect integration. Giry gives us nothing like that. Like the French left in general, for example, Giry simply dismisses the connection between polygamy and the Paris riots. She has nothing to say about the sub-Saharan Muslim immigrants who practice polygamy in the Paris suburbs, although this group is notably poorly integrated into French culture. (For more, see my “Polygamy versus Democracy.”)

For Giry, concerns over Muslim assimilation simply distract from the “real” issues: racism and unempolyment. Anyone who takes Muslim immigration seriously as a problem in its own right is tarred as drawing on the “playbook” of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. In short, if you want to know what Europeans who refuse to take this issue seriously are thinking, read Giry.

Meanwhile, here’s a report from Germany’s Spiegel, “Integration in Theory, Alienation in Practice.”

I’ll let you decide whether Spiegel’s account or Giry’s is more convincing.