The gathering storm: Islamic violence in France, fostered by French anti-Christian political and cultural elites, gives a glimpse of what our own elites are bringing upon us via uncontrolled immigration.

If Americans want a gander at the future, they need only look east, to the City of Light. Sixty years ago, it was all the French could do to boot out the Nazi armies that had raped Europe and captured Paris. Today, the French apologize for not welcoming the deluge of Muslim immigrants who set the country ablaze last November.

What a difference six decades makes.

Whatever the difference is, Americans can see what awaits them if they do not overturn the anti-Christian political and cultural elites who would bring to Baltimore, Omaha, and San Francisco what anti-Christian French elites have brought to Rennes, Nice, and Paris: a seething, unassimilable religious and racial minority, numbering some six million, no more interested in becoming French than it was in becoming Christian when its religious fore-bears sacked the Holy Land and provoked the first Crusade.

The Muslim community in America already numbers three million. But America, unlike France, also faces an additional demographic threat: the growing number of illegal Mexican immigrants. Hat in hand, they fill our schools, jails, and welfare rolls, yet still demand cultural homage from real Americans in the cities and towns they infiltrate, and in some cases, like Los Angeles, conquer. Lest anyone think the danger is hypothetical, the public statements of Muslims living in America, as well as the anti-American violence on the part of Mexicans attending a World Cup soccer match in Los Angeles, provide fair warning of what may be coming.

Very simply, overwhelming numbers of Muslims and Mexicans (and other foreigners)--encouraged by our political and cultural elites--expect us to submit to their demands: to reorder school curricula, holidays, government and business practices, even the language in which we vote. As France and the Scandinavian countries have learned, capitulation does not portend a peaceful future.

What's Happening in Europe

The wave of Islamic violence that swept over France was predictable. So was the excuse for it: discrimination against Muslims, no jobs for Muslims, not enough welfare for Muslims. (In a word: "racism.") And so was the answer of the ruling elites: they groveled.

France boasts some of the most generous welfare benefits in Europe, but Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was on his knees. The Muslim colonists can't get jobs because they have "foreign-sounding names," he lamented, and "the effectiveness of our integration model is in question," he told French legislators. The riots, he said, are "a warning" and "an appeal."

"We must be lucid: The Republic is at a moment of truth," Villepin rightly said in the understatement of the century. "France is wounded. It does not recognize itself in these devastated streets and neighborhoods, in this outburst of hatred and of violence that vandalizes and kills."

Actually, what France doesn't recognize is its own religion and culture and the beginning of its demise as a nation and republic. Its gaspingly weak president, Jacques Chirac, aping Villepin, deplored the "ghettoization of youths of African or North African origin," his spokesman announced. And of course, he recognized "the incapacity of French society to fully accept them," that France "has not done everything possible for these youths, supported them so they feel understood, heard and respected."

High jobless rates …