Posted on 11/01/2005 7:12:43 AM PST by Eurotwit
NICOLAS SARKOZY, the French Interior Minister, pledged zero tolerance in the fight against urban violence yesterday as he visited a Paris suburb hit by four nights of rioting.
In a sharp break from traditonal French government policies, M Sarkozy said that he would take a tough approach to the “hooligans . . . who make life impossible on our council estates”.
He was addressing police officers who have been struggling to contain disturbances in Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris, after two teenagers died last week.
But M Sarkozy’s visit was ran into controversy when the families of the youths, Ziad Benna, 17, and Bouna Traoré, 15, pulled out of a meeting with him after a police teargas grenade exploded inside a local mosque. Siyakah Traoré, Bouna’s brother, said: “There is no way we’re going to see Sarkozy, who is incompetent. What happened in the mosque is really disrespectful.”
The teenagers were electrocuted after climbing into an electricity substation in Clichy-sous-Bois on Thursday. A friend who survived said that they had been hiding from the police. The authorities said that officers were looking for other youths in connection with a break-in at a building site.
Although Ziad and Bouna had nothing to do with the break-in, they panicked when they saw the youths running to escape arrest, officials said. Their deaths sparked an outbreak of the violence that periodically engulfs the suburbs of French cities, against a backdrop of high employment, a large immigrant population and an underground economy run by drug traffickers.
At least 30 police officers have been injured in clashes with gangs of youths, who have also attacked post office vans, town council offices, fire engines and a police station. One police van was shot at on Saturday. About 70 cars were burnt and 40 alleged rioters have been arrested.
M Sarkozy, who built his popularity by cutting crime figures during his first spell as Interior Minister, from 2002 to 2004, said that seventeen companies of riot police and seven mobile police brigades would be permanently stationed in difficult neighbourhoods, while plainclothes officers would be sent in to identify “gang leaders, drug traffickers and big shots”.
M Sarkozy’s comments stunned left-wing politicians, who called for an orthodox government response, with public money for education, housing and job creation schemes.
Even M Sarkozy’s Cabinet colleague, Azouz Begag, the Minister for Promotion of Equal Opportunities, criticised him for describing violent youths as “scum”.
M Begag said: “You should not tell these youths you’re going to get stuck into them and send in the police. You should try to appease them.”
" M Sarkozy’s comments stunned left-wing politicians, who called for an orthodox government response, with public money for education, housing and job creation schemes."
Gotta love the International Left's version of law and order.
Ah, peaceful Islam, at it again.
Worked real well on Uncle Adolf, didn't it? ;)
"M Begag said: 'You should not tell these youths you’re going to get stuck into them and send in the police. You should try to appease them.'"
This looks like a Babblefish breakdown.
I wonder what the actual quote was.
"Stuck into them" makes no sense.
And "appease" sounds like a bad (and intentional) mistranslation of "calm".
That's just a guess, but I suspect an accurate one.
No wonder the French won't join us in Iraq. They don't want to admit the Fallujahs in their own back yard.
> Ah, peaceful Islam, at it again.
Yes, but you won't learn that by reading any Legacy Media
reports about these riots.
"You should try to appease them.”
The French show us [for the nth time] how to lose a war.
"The French show us [for the nth time] how to lose a war."
M. Sarkozy is not appeasing anybody. He is using police force to crack down, and will continue to do so. Nobody wants a London or Madrid in Paris.
Suburban hooligans, is that anything like rioting Muslim scum?
Ayn Rand may ave been wrong or incomplete on a lot of ideas, but I think she was right on this one: we need to leave the Left in the world they think will be so wonderful and carefree to experience reality. When they cry for help and for us to "do something", they must be ignored. Leftists disgust me. They obviously don't live anywhere near these troubled urban centers and expect someone else to solve the problem in a quiet sensitive manner. Such sensitive people need to grow up or be ignored like bad children throwing a tantrum.
..... stuck into them...
This is a UK expression for getting in front of , or stopping somebody. It is often used in soccer commentary to describe hard physical defending.
Interesting.
In any case, Sarkozy's not going to back down. Quite like Giuliani in New York City, he will push the police forces into the crime-infested areas and battle it out by force with the street hoodlums who presume to control such areas now. The opposition can whine all they like, but they are not in power and do not set policy.
For shame! Look at this propaganda! A whole article and the words "muslim" nor "islam" ever appear in it, when specifically the rioting is being done by them. Its equivalent of Krystalnacht happening and the words "German" or "Nazi" never once appearing in an article in 1938.
Yes, I have contrary thoughts.
I think that the French intelligence services have deeply penetrated the mosque and the cells, and that things are broken up, arrests and deportations made, etc., before any attacks come off.
I acknowledge that an attack could indeed happen, but I think that it is less likely in France.
Just think very carefully about what happened to those teenagers. They had committed no crime, and yet they chose to flee into live electricity and die rather than wait around for the police. Why?
One can never prove it, but I suspect that the answer is that Abu Graib was run by pantywaist milquetoasts. If you want to get information, you don't attach collars to the necks of Islamist males. You attack electrodes to their balls and you hit them with the juice until they talk or they cook. National security demands that these things NOT be revealed to the public, and so they will not be. If you know what I mean.
Also, the difference between Arabs and Islamists must be sorted out. 7-8% of the population of the Republic are of Arab extraction. That does not make them Muslims. Many are secular, or only about as Muslim as the francais de souche are Catholic. We do not speak here, then, of 5 million potential insurgents. No, the real numbers are in the hundreds of thousands.
You surveil. You infiltrate. You impede. You extract. And where necessary, you kill. And that stands a reasonably good chance, I believe, of preventing Madrid and London style attacks in France.
"M Sarkozy’s comments stunned left-wing politicians, who called for an orthodox government response, with public money for education, housing and job creation schemes."
So typical of panty-wetting, socialist, hand-wringers all over the world.
"When it comes to French domestic intelligence services, they're pretty hard-core about preventing this type of thing. I think they do a lot of stuff that the US media would love to report on if they ever learned about it. But, the intelligence services also have quite a large number of people to keep tabs on."
They are the best in the world.
And for all of the famed French "independence", the French counterintelligence agency in Paris is the ONLY major counterintelligence agency of any major power, including the UK, USA, Israel, that will take direct tasking from foreign governments and execute operations based on foreign requests. When it comes to suppressing terrorists, French intelligence is the most "Western" - in the global sense - of any of the Western powers. The US CIA will not take tasking directly from French or British intelligence, for example. The French will almost invariably ACT when requested - they will pick someone up, put in the bug, etc. - and then pull it later if it proves to be ill founded. In an age of shadowy terrorists and speed-of-light local communication, there is no time to stand on ceremony.
Obviously when the lives of a city at stake, there can be no question of human rights of captured terrorists. They will given information. Drugs break down their mind and resistance and make them unable to discern realities. And physical pressure, as necessary, accomplishes the rest. Errors are made, and the innocent sometimes die. That happens in war, and it cannot be avoided. The alternative: subjecting intelligence operations to any sort of judicial or constitutional control whatsoever, will mean bombs going off in the underground, or Paris skyscrapers falling with thousands of deaths, or bombs and aeroplanes flying into French government buildings.
When one compares what is at stake, one understands that the intelligence services must have the authority to bug anybody, and to conduct whatever espionage is necessary, and to do whatever else is necessary to get information.
Of course in a country of laws, this must all be sub-rosa.
And yet it must go on.
And finally, national secrets must be such that the government has the absolute authority to censor anything that is to be published or broadcast before it happens. There cannot be a question of unravelling the whole intelligence network because a reporter discovers something. If that thing discovered is a national secret, that reporter has no right to publish or speak it in France, or anywhere else. Obviously if that reporter chooses to leave the country and to attempt to do so abroad, measures must be taken to ensure that war secrets of France are not publicized.
The American CIA will execute reporters who are about to publish CIA operative names in foreign papers.
The war on terrorists is a war. It is not a game. In war, there are different rules, and there must be different rules, or else a country will be destroyed.
There is a crazy assumption made, that every Arab is an Islamist, and that every Muslim will be solidaire with his "Islamist brethren". Of course men are weak and fickle, can be bought or threatened. Nobody hates the Israelis more than the Palestinians, and yet the Mossad gets good information from Palestinians, and not primarily by torture, but by other means. Individuals are always pressure points.
All of this said, bombs could still go off in Paris. It is far less likely than in New York, or London, Madrid or Moscow, but it could happen.
And if it does, you can expect an even more firm crackdown to be taken.
Do recall that Argentina and Chile both won their "dirty wars" against the Communists, and Communists were well over 30% of those populations.
To act, people MUST be led. If you identify the natural leaders, and neutralize them one way or the other, you make a people - however angry - incapable of acting in concert against you.
All that Islamists in France can succeed in doing, by attacks, is reinforcing the belief that, deep down, Le Pen is right. France will not overtly support Le Pen. But France will expel as many males as are needed to be expelled in order to stabilize the nation. There is really no question about this.
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