Posted on 08/09/2010 2:02:57 AM PDT by abb
A utopian dream of a new urban community, built here in the 1970s, had slowly degraded into a poor neighborhood plagued by aimless youths before it finally burst into flames three weeks ago.
After Karim Boudouda, a 27-year-old of North African descent, and some of his friends had robbed a casino, he was killed in an exchange of automatic gunfire with the police. The next night, Villeneuve, a carefully planned neighborhood of Grenoble in eastern France, exploded. A mob set nearly 100 cars on fire, wrecked a tram car and burned an annex of city hall.
The police, reinforced by the national riot police, responded in “Robocop” gear, with helicopters flying overhead and television cameras in place, and made a number of arrests in a series of raids.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, battered in the opinion polls, quickly seized on the event as a symbol for a new campaign to get tough on immigration and crime. On July 30, about 10 days after the riots, he flew to Grenoble to make a fierce speech condemning violence, blaming “insufficiently regulated immigration” that has “led to a failure of integration.”
He vowed to deny automatic citizenship at 18 to French-born children of foreigners if they are juvenile delinquents. He said he would also strip foreign-born citizens of French citizenship if they had been convicted of threatening or harming a police officer, or of crimes like polygamy and female circumcision, which are widespread in North Africa.
“French nationality is earned, and one must prove oneself worthy of it,” he said. “When you open fire on an agent of the forces of order, you’re no longer worthy of being French.”
Villeneuve, or “new city,” emerged directly out of the social unrest of the May 1968 student uprising.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Back in the early part of the 20th century, there was a ‘Utopian’ settlement in the southwestern part of Louisiana - New Llano. It is near Ft. Polk, the big army base, and I’ve driven by it many times.
http://www.lpb.org/programs/utopia/article.html
Louisiana’s New Llano Colony
me too, New Llano always fascinated me. My parents grew up in the area and my Father was always sort of dismissive of them, he had nothing much to say about them. I think they thought they were peculiar. I have always wondered about them and there is a history written about them.
Louisiana Life did a piece on them a few years back. I think I still have the copy somewhere in my stacks of books/magazines.
Another blame France, the French, Sarko, blame anybody and everybody except themselves.
Muslims do not want to integrate.
They want to overthrow.
Scorchio ....
New Llano was “utopian”? When I lived there in ‘78-’80, I didn’t see anything utopian about it. It seemed like an extension of Leesville.
By then it was.
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