Posted on 11/06/2005 8:43:24 AM PST by Pikamax
Paris slum residents fume as riots ruin their town
By Tom Heneghan Reuters
Sunday, November 06, 2005
AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS, France (Reuters) - Down past the burned-out delivery vans, between scruffy trees and high-rises with rusting balconies, stands a firebombed municipal social club. They used to teach tango and jazz dance here.
Further along, charred patches on the street mark the places where other cars were torched and then towed away. Shoppers hesitate before a supermarket with shattered glass doors. On the edge of town, acrid smoke rises from a smoldering carpet depot.
After more than a week of nightly violence, the rundown northeastern Paris suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois is a jumble of frayed nerves and flaring tempers. Residents are fed up with rioters upsetting their homes, their lives and their dreams.
"My kids can't sleep at night," says a mother who only gives her name as Samia. "They hear explosions, they see fires and they think they're in a war. When the slightest thing happens, they get anxious and say 'Mama, what's going on?"'
But if the politicians are at a loss for a coherent response to the unrest -- now spreading from Paris's suburbs to other cities -- many of the inhabitants and even the rioters themselves seem similarly trapped between anger and despair.
Henri Huynh, who came here from Vietnam in 1969, sighs in resignation at the sight of the firebombed social club. "That's where we used to have our dancing lessons," he mutters.
Only minutes later, he's screaming as young men turn up a boom box to blast rap music at the town's "silent march against violence" as it passes. "Stop that now! Stop that provocation!" he yells. The grinning youngsters ignore him.
WRONG NAME, WRONG ADDRESS
Just off the highway linking Paris and its Charles de Gaulle airport, Aulnay-sous-Bois is one of many dreary suburbs around the capital where young French of Arab and African origin grow up feeling they have "No Future" tattooed on their foreheads.
As in many suburbs, unemployment is significantly higher than the national average of about 10 percent. In the rougher estates, it probably reaches 30-40 percent or more, feeding a widespread sense there's not much residents can do to get ahead.
"Even if you have a university degree, in the end all they give you is a broom," hisses an Algerian cafe owner.
Fouzi Guendouz worries he won't get a summer job next year because he comes from this riot-hit suburb of 80,000 residents.
"It's already hard enough to get a job when you have an Arab name like mine," says the 20-year-old business student of Algerian origin. "Now my address is against me too."
Guendouz has no time for politicians who urge residents of foreign origin to make more efforts to integrate: "I was born here, I went to school here, I'm a French citizen -- how much more integrated can I get? That's an insult, it's stupid."
Claude Chevallier, manager of the smoldering carpet depot, sees breakdown all around -- "on the family level, in schools and in civic life. Many youths have never seen their parents work and couldn't hold down a job if they got one."
...Continued
Holding her little daughter, a young mother named Ghislaine says the protesting youths have no right to trash things, but sympathizes with their frustration.
"The police are really rough with them," she says. "If they're Arab or black, they constantly get stopped to have their ID card checked. It's no wonder they're fed up with it."
TEMPTED BY TELEVISION
Although nobody uses the word, many residents marching among the housing blocks seem to agree with embattled Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy that the rioters are "scum."
"You should see these hooligans in the morning," says Genevieve Bourgognat, a middle-aged woman who watched from her eighth-floor flat as the local social club burned down below.
"They come back to survey what they did and they're proud of it. They show their friends. They boast they got on television!"
Huynh, a mild-mannered small business consultant, searches for the best way to describe them. "They're like dogs -- they bite anything in their way," he finally says.
Sarkozy and other officials accuse drug traffickers and Islamist militants of stoking the flames, an argument that elicits a shrug and a dubious shake of the head here.
"Drug traffickers working behind the scenes? You can go down to the train station and see them peddling drugs in broad daylight," said Ali Sabri, 39. "The police know who they are but they don't do anything about it."
After the "silent march" is over, a few adolescent boys ham it up for a television crew earnestly trying to ask them serious questions about discontent in the suburbs.
"It's like Baghdad here! It's the Apocalypse!" they hoot into the camera before a social worker breaks in and chides the television crew for giving excited kids a platform to perform.
"I know why they called a silent march," a young black woman mutters as she turns away shaking her head at the mutual misunderstanding. "Maybe we don't really have anything to say."
..don't worry darling, it's just Akbar and his friends shaking down the French government for entitlements and benefits. It's called the American way. Wait and you'll see the liberals cave as soon as we start in Paris.
Doogle
You're saying the sheep only need turn on the wolves.
Exactly. No one dragged these delinquents to France against their will.
The thing that I enjoy most about FR is how we, in this case you, understand just how predictable the the Left really is. Watching Jimmy the Peanut on Larry King live this week, that is what he said, in a nutshell. Good post.
That is what separates France from America. Socialism from Capitalism.
In America, you need not take the broom. You can start your own business. You need not depend upon government for your livelihood. You don't even need a university degree to make it in America.
> ... a CBS affiliate, they did a short report this
> morning almost completely taken up with a description
> of the complaint of the DEMONSTRATERS - that they felt
> excluded from French society.
Parent-killers crying "orphan".
These people have deliberately resisted all attempts
and official policies intended to integrate them into
French society.
They created their own ghettos, and they are about to
become France's Gaza Strip.
But sure, the Legacy Media has their PC-approved
metaphor, and they're sticking with it, and the heck
with the actual reality.
There are ways to deal with what is going on.
Until that happens ... this sort of thing will continue.
Dingy Harry is working overtime trying to figerout how it is Bush's fault, what he new about it and why didn't he notify our frenchfried allies. Oh and where was Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and were civil lefts of deprived rioters violinated.
The main thing is that froggies got paid by Saddam to bark at US and it saved them from the muSlime problems (not).
"WE, the west, because of our hate, ignorance, prejudice, racism, and intolerance have driven these noble and suffering people to seek "justice"."
Funny stuff aside, what is Jacques "Mr. Liberal lover of the poor and downtrodden" Chirac up to?
Maybe he cant make up his mind whether he wants to stop the riots or risk looking like an "imperialist"?
The most obvious first step, a curfew, isn't even being considered from what I can garner.
The other half of this equation is that the French don't want them to integrate, no matter how much they claim to. The Muslims don't want to integrate and the French wouldn't let them if they did want to.
As a matter of fact it has..the police have agreed to be off the streets by 10 p.m.
Couldn't happen to a better country.
Frankly, the French are a very racist and obnoxious people. Their daily speech is peppered with absurd prejudices. Im not surprised theyre getting a riot up the wazoo under the circumstances.
If people were as offensive in their speech as the French are in the United States, I strongly suspect that they would end up with a rearranged nose.
These riots are just more proof that the french are an obnoxious racist people, that like to lecture others to cover up their own shortcomings.
everything is against them. they don't want the police around, but somehow the police brutalize them. they claim to be assimilated and part of france, but they burn down businesses in their neighborhoods and then complain they can't get jobs. they bitterly claim the french culture does not care about them, but they pour lighter fluid on a disabled woman and engulf her in flames.
i dunno. why wouldn't you want to hire these people?
truly amazing is the coverage of these fires, particularly the article in newsweek drudge is linked to. i am SO sick of liberal excuses.
France must deport a few hundred thousand of these Muslim pests. Deport by force back to their ancestral hell holes. The rest will then mind their manners. Also deport any Muslim woman who has more than three children. Deport her and her child en or France will be Muslim in 15 years.
Deport all Muslim psychos and loudmouth Imams & Mullahs
France must deport a few hundred thousand of these Muslim pests. Deport by force back to their ancestral hell holes. The rest will then mind their manners. Also deport any Muslim woman who has more than three children. Deport her and her child en or France will be Muslim in 15 years.
Deport all Muslim psychos and loudmouth Imams & Mullahs
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