They’re rioting again in France.

The media is trying not to say it to be politically correct, but it’s chiefly Arabs and other Muslim minorities.

It first happened in 2005 and it’s happening again, mostly in the poor suburbs around Paris. It was ugly last time, but uglier this week, with youths throwing Molotov cocktails and firing shotguns.

It started when two teens on a motor-scooter died after running into a police car. The 2005 riots were triggered when two youths were electrocuted while hiding from police in a power sub-station. But those were just matches on tinder.

The deeper reason is that the mostly Muslim underclass feels it has no place in French society. The unemployment rate in these suburbs is 20 percent.

In one sense, it’s a faraway story but it got me thinking about matters closer to home.

America still has an underclass that lives in grim conditions. More to the point, we, far more than France, are seen resentfully by Muslims. Why aren’t there riots here?

I saw one answer summed up in a 2006 article by Vivienne Walt, a Time magazine correspondent who a year ago revisited some of the French riot zones, such as the Paris suburb of Clichy, and sensed that anger was building again.

“Back in the early 1990s,” she wrote, “when I covered stories in the South Bronx and Harlem as a reporter for Newsday, I saw housing conditions far worse than these. In Clichy, firearms and hard drugs are still relatively rare, and France’s social-welfare and excellent public health-care systems sustain most people. But compared with those in America’s urban ghettos, people here face a more entrenched problem: political exclusion.”

I looked it up and saw that today, Muslims make up 10 percent of the French population, but no Muslim sits in Parliament there. By contrast, the Muslim population in the United States is less than 2 percent and yet last year, a Muslim named Keith Ellison was elected to congress from Minnesota — at a time when many would accuse America of having stigmatized Muslims.

More broadly, we may well be up in arms about our borders being flooded, yet there’s a whole caucus of Latinos in Congress, and a Latino governor named Bill Richardson is running for president. So is a black man with the name of Barack Hussein Obama.

America is not a beloved country around the world right now. It hasn’t been for a long time. Few people love a superpower, and we’ve made our share of blunders that have angered folks around the globe. I found that out in some of the more charged places I’ve traveled, like Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and certain corners of Africa.

But interestingly, many of those same folks will acknowledge an area where the U.S. has a unique genius.

We are, they say, a model of how a nation can achieve coexistence.

Humans are by nature tribal. It is what tears countries apart. It’s the root problem in Iraq. It doesn’t matter that they’re almost all Muslims there — the various Sunni and Shiite tribes despise each other. More important, they put tribe ahead of country.

Here, people don’t.

Almost nowhere on earth is there as broad a mix of groups as in America. In many other nations, that would lead to the kind of tribal conflict now unfolding in Iraq. At the least, you might expect riots here among the most disenfranchised.

Admittedly, there have been in the past — such as the L.A. riot of 1992. But that remained in L.A., unlike the 2005 French riots which spread to almost every city in that country.

The difference is that people here feel — and see — that their group, whatever its frustrations, can gain a stake in our system.

Around the world, people are often stunned that we’ve achieved that. In Northern Ireland, both Catholics and Protestants told me they don’t understand how the two faiths coexist here, and in Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims have warred for decades, both sides often asked me how America balances our own mix without violence.

You’d need a few volumes to answer that fully, but I’ve long thought that, ironically, France’s own Alexis de Tocqueville gave the best answer in his famous writings on America in the mid-1800s. What made America work so well, he wrote, wasn’t just democracy, or liberty, or freedom, or human rights. It was its keen sense of equality — of giving everyone a chance.

Admittedly, “everyone” didn’t include black folks back then, but it was this American love of equality that has always forced us, over time, to address such exclusion.

France, and Europe, may well embrace democracy, and liberty, and human rights.

But they don’t “get” equality, and inclusion, as much as Americans do.

That’s why the Paris riots may say a lot about France, but I think they say even more about America.

mpatinkin@projo.com