Rioting Spreads to 20 Towns Around Paris

“Rioting Spreads to 20 Towns Around Paris

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1277921&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

The French, who are such geopolitical experts on terrorism and treating Muslims correctly (according to the anti-Bush Lefties anyway), are having problems at home.”

“Maybe they can negotiate with/and/or run from, the protestors.”

“Lemme guess. The liberals on TT are at fault somehow!”

“They support the French and their actions.

Hey tree, do you blame the right for Bush's issues? I mean, we're not him, we just support him.”

“The riots started last Thursday after the electrocution deaths of two teenagers who ran from a soccer game and hid in a power station in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after they saw police enter the area. Youths in the neighborhood said police chased the boys to their death.

Terrorism?”

“TD - Believe it or not, there is more to what happened than that one snip of yours.”

“Those innocent young boys were terrified, TD.”

“Sarge: Oh I don't doubt it. The world seems to be falling apart at times.

I looked up the comment that SS made though. Time seems to agree --> http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,176139,00.html -- but no reason to argue here.. I don't know any of the facts either way.

Sounds like you have a point though, SS:

"It's the way they stop and search people, kneeing them between the legs as they put them up against the wall. They get students mixed up with the worst offenders, yet these young people have done nothing wrong."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4397056.stm
last edited: 11/03/05 3:37:54 PM”

“I don't believe it. The French are too lazy to riot for any length of time.”

“It does show once again the propensity of the French to run for uniforms though.”

“Nigal, Nigal, Nigal......
You just have the wrong feelings toward the French.
We Americans are supposed to just bow down and kiss their pure little feet any time they hold their noses up at us and tell us how the correct way of doing something is.

Just ask any Libbie around here. ;-)”

“http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=10149100&src=rss/topNews

"A trade union representing policemen described the unrest as a "civil war" and called on Sarkozy to impose a curfew in the affected areas to ensure violence did not spiral out of control."

Hey Stovie. I'm glad you posted this as fuego.. lol.. you are quite the inflamer today.. I'm still having trouble understanding your first comment though. This appears to have nothing to do with terroism.

Speaking of anti-bush Lefties though.. "New Republic Writer Calls For Anti-Bush Left-Wingers To Be Killed"

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2005/030205tobekilled.htm

"violence, torture, and even death for leading leftists who dare oppose Bush's war on terror and the slaughter in Iraq"

Do you take it THAT serious? Or just enjoy poking at the other side?”

“What's so civil about war, anyways?”

“rioters created terror around paris”

“Where is Buddha when you need him? He could rip into a Frenchman like a Hun.

Before this is over the French may be speaking Arabic, because the USA is not going to bail them out this time.”

“Maybe we'll send the terrorists ammunition like the French sent Saddam ammunition.

That would be cool! LMAO!!!”

“Failure to integrate immigrants has brewed a potent cocktail of rage
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1125401,00.html

Time has written a good summary article.”

“One of my alltime favorite jokes is:

How many French does it take to defend Paris?

We don't know, it's never happened yet.”

“http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/11/04/bush.summit/index.html

The Americans, who are such geopolitical experts on terrorism and treating neighbors correctly (according to the Pro-Bush neocons anyway), are having problems at home.””

“those frenchies deserve all they get for daring to suggest there were no wmds and saddam posed no significant threat huh. bring back the freedom fries.”

“Q: Why were French avenues lined with trees

A: So the Germans could march in the shade”

“Rioting Spreads to 300 Towns in France
Nov 07 10:16 AM US/Eastern

By ANGELA DOLAND
Associated Press Writer


PARIS


Rioting by French youths spread to 300 towns overnight, and a 61-year- old man hurt in the violence died of his wounds, the first fatality in 11 days of unrest that has shocked the country, police said Monday.

As urban unrest spread to neighboring Belgium and possibly Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm.



Meanwhile, governments worldwide urged their citizens to be careful in France.

On Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for overnight arson and violence since rioting started last month, national police chief Michel Gaudin told a news conference.

Australia, Britain, Germany and Japan advised their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the United States, Russia and at least a half dozen other countries in warning tourists to stay away from violence-hit areas.

The victim was identified as Jean-Jacques Le Chenadec, a retired auto industry worker who died after being beaten by an attacker. He was trying to extinguish a trash can fire Friday at his housing project in the northeastern suburb of Stains when an attacker caught him by surprise and beat him into a coma, police said.

Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels' main train station, police in the Belgian capital said.

The mayhem started as an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing projects and has fanned out nationwide among disaffected youths, mostly of Muslim or African origin, to become France's worst civil unrest in more than a decade.

Attacks overnight Sunday to Monday were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests, Gaudin said.

"This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected," Gaudin said, noting that the violence appeared to be sliding away from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and worsening elsewhere.

It was the first time police had been injured by weapons' fire and there were signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with police, officials said.

Among the injured police, 10 were hurt by youths firing fine-grain birdshot in a late-night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized, but the injuries were not considered life-threatening. One was wounded in the neck, the other in the legs.

The unrest began Oct. 27 in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy- sous-Bois after the deaths of two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation. They apparently thought they were being chased.

About 4,700 cars have been burned in France since the rioting began and 1,200 suspects were detained at least temporarily, Gaudin said.

The growing violence is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair _ fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as well as for Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a way out.

France, with 5 million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe.

President Jacques Chirac, whose government is under intense pressure to halt the violence, promised stern punishment for those behind the attacks, making his first public comments Sunday since the riots started.

"The law must have the last word," Chirac said after a security meeting with top ministers. France is determined "to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear, and they will be arrested, judged and punished."

France's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that forbade all those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others."

Arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city of Saint- Etienne and its suburbs, and two people were injured in the bus attack. Churches were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, he said.

In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, Hamon said, while a daycare center was burned in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb.

Much of the youths' anger has focused on law-and-order Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose reference to the troublemakers as "scum" appeared to inflame passions.

___

Associated Press writers Emmanuel Georges-Picot in Paris, Thierry Boinet in Grenoble and Jan Sliva in Strasbourg contributed to this report.


http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/11/07/D8DNMVOO3.html






Getting worse.”

“it must be difficult to have accepted into your country all the immigrants from your colonial past, and then to have them turn on you and demand even more inthe form of social services, riot and start burning your country down.


I don't understand how some countries with an entitlement based society can survive.

Who's paying for it??”

“I find it very interesting just how little this is being reported by the Major News Media.
It's as if France isn't important anymore.
Maybe France needs to blame Bush to get some respect from the reporters again?”

“

I hear France is going to impose a curfew.
Braindead.”

“Wasn't France supposed to be the model of social development where all its citizen were taken care of? What broke here?

I heard the riots are also happening in Denmark and Belgium... The facts seem similar: underprivileged, marginalized youths, unemployment etc..

How can this have happened in some of the most socially progressive societies in the world?

Anyone?”

“Discrimination and unemployment. Du-uh.”

“It is no surprise that you don't blame the criminals.”

“This is what France gets for being to PC and accepting such a large number of immigrants that come from a culture of violence. They are reaping what they have sown.

Religion of peace my hairy ass...”

“and unemployment

Yeah, those damn teenage school-kid rioters are really hurting for jobs! What a joke.”

“Ut Oh! The curfew didn't work!

Who wudda thunk that????? ;-)”

“The thundering silence from the lefties is keeping me awake.

The Left is firmly of the side of the rioters. France has such fickle friends.
Pop over to Democratic Underground and the few that will even say anything are cheering the riots.

France needs their friends now. Maybe they should blame BUSH and all the libbies will love them again.”

“Simple...Warn the population to stay indoors...National curfew for 36 hours....

then SHOOT to kill anyone who is seen to be commiting acts of violence. no further warning.

Actively employ the Army to do the shooting.

Did I mention that you should leave the bodies in the street until order is restored?”

“Michael Savage is So Right!”

“The right seems positively giddy about this.

Sad.”

“Afternoon everyone. Left, right, middle -- who cares. All I can tell you right now is that my job sems to take precidence over everything and I can't spend much time arguing this and that. This of course reduces me to the role of distant voyeur or puppet mimic. I'll take the latter, and pass along this blog from LeShawn Barber.

http://lashawnbarber.com/archives/2005/11/03/parisriots/

Paris is reaping what it’s sown, and if we don’t heed the warnings (as if the murder of thousands and destruction of two buildings in New York City weren’t enough), we can expect the same.

Lax immigration policies, prostration to the god of multiculturalism, and the refusal to fight fire with fire are three reasons why Muslim “youths” in Paris are rioting in the streets.

As I see it, the religion of Islam is inherently incompatible with the concept of individual liberty, a crucial component of western countries. It’s no accident that a culture like the West and a nation like the United States were envisioned and created by people who were either Christians and/or biblically literate and/or respected the Christian tradition. In countries under Islamic law, there’s no such idea as “individual liberty.” You’re either a Muslim or in danger of having your throat sliced open.

A growing problem in the West is not only our insane, suicidal embrace of “multiculturalism,” but an inability to recognize that Islam is an enemy intent on destroying freedom wherever it exists. Those Muslim rioters in Paris, angry about being unemployed or whatever their excuse, need to be crushed.

Instead, authorities are apologizing for throwing tear gas into a mosque. They’re smoking crack, right? If rioting thugs are hiding in mosques, why wouldn’t you try to tear-gas them out? This is similar to the Guantanamo Bay Koran-flushing and don’t-touch-the-temple memes that floated around.

Let me be clear, especially if you’re reading this blog for the first time. While I don’t believe every single Muslim on the planet is violent, I believe that the nature of Islam itself is violent. One of the most stunning things I ever heard was George Bush’s contention that Islam is a “religion of peace.” Yes, you have your Christian kooks blowing up child killers “in the name of God,” but generally, such incidents are isolated.

On the contrary, Islamofascism is the order of the day. Every day there’s more news of death at the hands of Muslims. Instead of taking an extremely hard line and putting pressure on Muslim so-called leaders to denounce these thugs and round them up, we’re the ones injuring our spines from all the bowing and scraping, trying to prove we’re not religious bigots. Forget that. I care more about my physical well-being and preservation of my way of life than what weak-willed, emasculated liberals say about me.

If Muslim extremists are willing to blow up themselves and children, we must be willing to do what it takes to stop them. We’re certainly able.

In response to the riots, President Jacques Chirac said the law must be enforced firmly but “in a spirit of dialogue and respect.” Whatever that means. Heart of a lion, he has.

This headline makes me sick: French youths riot for seventh night running. French youths? They make it sound so generic and ordinary, as if a bunch of rowdy, drunk teenagers decided to throw rocks at cars. These are radical Muslims, foreign invaders, destroying property and injuring people who graciously allowed them into their country in the first place!

The whole thing is comical, especially Chirac’s pleas.

You notice how Muslims adopt the tendency to riot, protest and cry “Discrimination!” once they’re in western countries, when such actions would render them headless in the countries they fled from? No gratitude at all.

I’m done. Carry on”

“I heard they burned 1,200 cars last night.

The unemployed must be trying do generate demand for more Renaults so the can get jobs building replacement cars that they burn up.

I love Karma.”

“Like I said before, those Frenchies deserve everything they get for daring to suggest there were no WMDs.

In terms of Karma you could probably hear the cheers and laughter coming from Paris as the the situation in NO worstened....... oh no, you didn't hear that huh?”

“Y'all notice how the libbies are throwing hissy fits right and left nowadays?

Their buddy France is in flames, Delay and Rowe are still laughing at them, and Bush is running circles around then with the Supreme Court.
Almost enough to make you feel sorry for them.”

“The right seems positively giddy about this.

Damn skippy. Let em burn.”

“Their buddy France is in flames, Delay and Rowe are still laughing at them, and Bush is running circles around then with the Supreme Court.
Almost enough to make you feel sorry for them. That's possibly the funniest thing you've ever posted stovey.”

“Thank You
Thank You
I'm here on Tuesdays.”

“This is like teaching dinner etiquette to a dog!

lmao!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9969698/”

“Warn the population to stay indoors?
Thats the problem the French Population is indoors waiting for their french government to do something. Burning a country that is not yours is realatively easy to join in on.”

“

The Problem with Frenchness

Juan Cole

Readers have asked me for comment about the riots in France that have now provoked emergency laws and a curfew. What I would rather comment on, however, is the myths that have governed many rightwing American comments on the tragic events. Actually, I can only think that the disturbances must produce a huge ice cream headache for the dittoheads. French of European heritage pitted against French of African and North African heritage? How could they ever pick a side?

I should begin by saying how much these events sadden me and fill me with anguish. I grew up in part in France (7 years of my childhood in two different periods) and have long been in love with the place, and the people. We visited this past June for a magical week. And, of course, I've been to Morocco and Tunisia and Senegal, and so have a sense of the other side in all this; I rather like all those places, too. How sad, to see all this violence and rancor. I hope Paris and France more generally can get through these tough times and begin working on the underlying problems soon. At this time of a crisis in globalization in the wake of the Cold War, we need Paris to be a dynamic exemplar of problem-solving on this front.

The French have determinedly avoided multiculturalism or affirmative action. They have insisted that everyone is French together and on a "color-blind" set of policies. "Color-blind" policies based on "merit" always seem to benefit some groups more than others, despite a rhetoric of equality and achievement. In order to resolve the problems they face, the French will have to come to terms with the multi-cultural character of contemporary society. And they will have to find ways of actively sharing jobs with minority populations, who often suffer from an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent (i.e. Iraq).

Mark Steyn of the Chicago Sun-Times commits most of the gross errors, factual and ethical, that characterize the discourse of the Right in the US on such matters.

For instance, Steyn complains that the rioters have been referred to as "French youths."


''French youths,'' huh? You mean Pierre and Jacques and Marcel and Alphonse? Granted that most of the "youths" are technically citizens of the French Republic, it doesn't take much time in les banlieus of Paris to discover that the rioters do not think of their primary identity as ''French'': They're young men from North Africa growing ever more estranged from the broader community with each passing year and wedded ever more intensely to an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything you're likely to find in the Middle East. After four somnolent years, it turns out finally that there really is an explosive ''Arab street,'' but it's in Clichy-sous-Bois.


This paragraph is the biggest load of manure to hit the print media since Michael Brown (later of FEMA) and his Arabian Horse Society were profiled in Arabian Horse Times.

The French youth who are burning automobiles are as French as Jennifer Lopez and Christopher Walken are American. Perhaps the Steyns came before the Revolutionary War, but a very large number of us have not. [Actually Steyn is Canadian and if he lives in the US he is either an alien or . . . an immigrant!] The US brings 10 million immigrants every decade and one in 10 Americans is now foreign-born. Their children, born and bred here, have never known another home. All US citizens are Americans, including the present governor of California. "The immigrant" is always a political category. Proud Californio families (think "Zorro") who can trace themselves back to the 18th century Spanish empire in California are often coded as "Mexican immigrants" by "white" Californians whose parents were Okies.

A lot of the persons living in the urban outer cities (a better translation of cite than "suburb") are from subsaharan Africa. And there are lots of Eastern European immigrants. The riots were sparked by the deaths of African youths, not Muslims. Singling out the persons of Muslim heritage is just a form of bigotry. Moreover, French youth of European heritage rioted quite extensively in 1968. As they had in 1789. Rioting in the streets is not a foreign custom. It has a French genealogy and context.

The young people from North African societies such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are mostly only nominal Muslims. They frequently do not speak much Arabic, and don't have "proper" French, either. They frequently do not know much about Islam and most of them certainly don't practice it-- much less being more virulent about it than Middle Easterners.

Aware of their in-between-ness, young persons of North African heritage in France developed a distinctive identity. They took the word Arabe and scrambled it to produce Beur (which sounds in French like the word for "butter"). Beur culture can be compared a bit to hip-hop as a form of urban expression of marginality and self-assertion in a racist society. It is mostly secular.

Another thing that is wrong with Steyn's execrable paragraph is that it assumes an echt "Frenchness" that is startling in a post-Holocaust thinker. There are no pure "nations" folks. I mean, first of all, what is now France had a lot of different populations in it even in the 18th century-- Bretons (speakers of a Celtic language related to Welsh and Gaelic), Basques, Alsatians (German speakers), Provencale people in the south, Jews, etc., etc. "Multi-culturalism" is not something new in Europe. What was new was the Romantic nationalist conviction that there are "pure" "nations" based on "blood." It was among the more monstrous mistakes in history. Of course if, according to this essentially racist way of thinking, there are "pure" nations that have Gypsies, Jews and others living among them, then the others might have to be "cleansed" to restore the "purity."

Yet another problem: France has for some time been a capitalist country with a relatively strong economy. Such economies attract workers. There have been massive labor immigration flows into France all along. In the early 20th century Poles came to work in the coal mines, and then more came in the inter-war period. By the beginning of the Great Depression, there were half a million Polish immigrants in France. Their numbers declined slightly in the next few years. There were even more Italians. There isn't anything peculiar about having large numbers of immigrants who came for work. And, few in France in the early 20th century thought that Poles were susceptible of integration into French society. Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, who has made himself unpopular by exacerbating tensions with intemperate language, is the son of immigrants (I guess he does not count as "French" according to Steyn's criteria.)

Steyn wants to create a 1300-year struggle between Catholic France and the Muslims going back to Tours. This way of thinking is downright silly. France in the 19th century was a notorious ally of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, and fought alongside Muslims against the Christian Russians in the Crimean War. Among contemporary French, 40 percent do not even believe in God, and less than 20 percent go to mass at all regularly. Many of the French of non-European heritage are also not religious.

The French repaid the compliment of Tours by conquering much of the Middle East. Bonaparte aggressively and viciously invaded Egypt in 1798, but couldn't hold on there. But in 1830 the French invaded Algeria and incorporated it into France. Algeria was "French soil." They reduced the Algerian population (which they brutalized and exploited) to marginal people under the colonial thumb. The French government of Algeria allowed hundreds of thousands to perish of famine in the 1870s. After World War II, given low French birth rates and a dynamic capitalist economy, the French began importing Algerian menial labor. The resulting Beurs are no more incapable of "integrating" into France than the Poles or Jews were.

So it wasn't the Algerians who came and got France. France had come and gotten the Algerians, beginning with Charles X and then the July Monarchy. They settled a million rather rowdy French, Italians and Maltese in Algeria. These persons rioted a lot in the early 1960s as it became apparent that Algeria would get its independence (1962). In fact, European settler colonists or "immigrants" have caused far more trouble in the Middle East than vice versa.

The kind of riots we are seeing in France also have occurred in US cities (they sent Detroit into a tailspin from 1967). They are always produced by racial segregation, racist discrimination, spectacular unemployment, and lack of access to the mainstream economy. The problems were broached by award-winning French author Tahar Ben Jalloun in his French Hospitality decades ago.

(Americans who code themselves as "white" are often surprised to discover that "white people" created the inner cities here by zoning them for settlement by racial "minorities," excluding the minorities from the nicer parts of the cities and from suburbs. As late as the 1960s, many European-Americans were willing to sign a "covenant" not to sell their houses to an African-American, Chinese-American or a Jewish American. In fact, in the US, the suburbs were built, most often with de facto government subsidies in the form of highways and other perquisites, as an explicit means of racial segregation. Spatial segregation protected "white" businesses from competition from minority entrepreneurs, who couldn't open shops outside their ghettos. In France, government inputs were used to create "outer cities," but many of the same forces were at work.) The French do not have Jim Crow laws, but de facto residential segregation is a widespread and intractable problem.

The problem is economic and having to do with economic and residential exclusionism, not with an "unassimilable" "immigrant" minority. (The French authorites deported a lot of Poles in the 1930s for making trouble by trying to unionize and strike, on the grounds that they were an unassimilable Slavic minority.)

On the other hand, would it be possible for the French Muslim youth to be pushed toward religious extremism if the French government does not address the underlying problems. Sure. That was what I was alluding to in my posting last week.

The solution? Recognizing that "Frenchness" is not monochrome, that France is a tapestry of cultures and always has been, and that sometimes some threads of the tapestry need some extra attention if it is not to fray and come apart.”