FRANCE HIT BY A BURNING RAGE

A FEW days ago Georges Bigot, a French firefighter, was standing with colleagues on a street in a suburb of Paris waiting for reinforcements to help put out a fire started by rioters. Suddenly a television fell out of the sky in front of him.

It had been heaved over a balcony eight floors up and shattered on the ground. “Have you ever seen a television exploding on the pavement?” asked Bigot wearily as he stood under a light drizzle. “Well, it gave me quite a shock.”

As he spoke, thick clouds of smoke billowed from a textile warehouse set ablaze the previous night by another gang of youths, mainly of north African and black African origin, in this shabby suburb north of the capital. Firefighters who had tried to put it out during the night were pelted with stones.

“We’re used to stones,” grinned Bigot as blaring sirens echoed off the walls of giant concrete tower blocks built in the 1960s and 1970s to house the first immigrants. “Household appliances are a bit more dangerous. A falling television or a toaster, it could kill you.”

Bigot, 30, was on the front line in an increasingly desperate battle yesterday as the worst street violence seen in France for more than a decade spread from the Paris suburbs to other cities, with 250 people arrested and 900 vehicles torched on Friday night. This was the highest nightly total in a spate of rioting that followed the death 10 days ago of two youths apparently fleeing from the police.

Trouble was reported in Strasbourg, in eastern France, Rennes, Rouen and Lille in the northwest and Nice, Toulouse and Avignon in the south. In the Paris region, two nurseries, one in Yvelines and another in Bretigny-sur-Orge, were set on fire on Friday night along with a school in Seine-et-Marne.

In Meaux, a town east of the capital, youths threw Molotov cocktails at paramedics, whose patient was taken to hospital under police escort.

Last night the rioters returned, setting more than 600 cars on fire across France, and burning down a nursery school in Grigny, south of Paris. Rampaging youths also torched cars in central Paris for the first time since the disturbances began.

In the Normandy town of Evreux, arsonists laid waste to at least 50 vehicles, a shopping centre, a post office and two schools.

The Foreign Office urged British holidaymakers to be “extremely vigilant” in riot-hit areas. America warned its tourists to keep away from troublespots.

After an emergency cabinet meeting yesterday, Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-talking interior minister, warned rioters that their actions could “cost dear in terms of sentences”. But he also promised to tackle the causes of violence, conceding that there were “a certain number of injustices in some neighbourhoods”.

France’s media and its politicians have portrayed the rioting as a form of protest against poverty, racial discrimination and the desperation felt by immigrant families who live in the cités — the grim housing estates erected a generation ago, often near big factories, to accommodate a booming immigrant population.

Attacks against firefighters or ambulance crews trying to save immigrant families from the flames suggested something more perverse than despair, however, and the divided government seemed at a loss over how to deal with the problem.

“Without question what is taking place bears all the hallmarks of being co-ordinated,” Yves Bot, the Paris public prosecutor, said yesterday. “The way things are organised is in response to a strategy, with mobile tactics employed by youths who turn up on scooters, throw a lighted bottle at a vehicle and then leave.”

France has often tried to ignore the malaise in what police call “sensitive districts” or, collectively, “the zone”, a world far removed from the picturesque French tourist trail of restaurants, wine and historic monuments.

In these underprivileged pockets the burning of cars on a Saturday night is for many young men a popular sport and rite of passage that seldom makes news. According to one recent estimate, about 30 cars are set on fire every Saturday night in suburbs across France.

The sheer scale of last week’s clashes, however, made them difficult to ignore, particularly with the government acknowledging that it might deploy troops to prevent gangs from marauding through the affluent heart of Paris, a chilling prospect for a city that has come to regard its burgeoning immigrant community on the other side of the ring road as the barbarians at the gate.

Aulnay-sous-Bois is only a few miles from the Eiffel tower but last week parts of it resembled Baghdad. The Renault car dealership looked as if it had taken a direct hit from a car bomb. Black, twisted bits of metal were scarcely recognisable as the remains of vehicles waiting to be sold.

“Well, that’s just great isn’t it,” said Manuel Pires, 55, a Portuguese immigrant surveying the wreckage. “What do they think they’re playing at? They’ve just put all of these garage employees out of work. Talk about shooting yourself in the head.”

Pires, a driver who is married with two grown-up children, has some sympathy for Sarkozy, who raised eyebrows last week by referring to the troublemakers as “scum” that needed to be hosed out of the estates.

The interior minister may have been “a bit direct”, Pires said, “but let’s face it, we do need a bit of order around here. None of the other politicians seems prepared to confront reality. The gangs have taken over. It is a question of restoring law and order”. Several thousand Aulnay residents, singing the national anthem, took to the streets yesterday demanding just that.

Not everybody agreed with Pires. Arguments from politicians across the spectrum about the root causes of violence have multiplied with the hurling of each firebomb.

France’s Muslim population has swollen in recent years to an estimated 6m — 10% of the total population. That percentage could easily double in the next 20 years and compares with about 1.5m — or less than 3% — in Britain.

The ugly, often poorly maintained, blocks of public housing in which many live are a testament to 40 years of government policy that concentrated immigrants and their families in well-defined districts, often in the vicinity of big factories that attracted the first generation of grateful immigrant workers.

Today these districts on the outskirts of Paris and other cities have become hotbeds of joblessness and crime — a parallel society with its own laws in spite of the lip service that government officials continually pay to the notion of integration. Women are often forced to wear veils. In one district a municipal swimming pool was persuaded to offer a period of “women only” bathing each day to satisfy a fundamentalist imam.

Police, meanwhile, were told to “tread softly”. They seldom set foot in the quartiers chauds, or “hot districts”, until Sarkozy arrived on the scene. He introduced the “zero tolerance” policing that was famed for taming the badlands of America: police began stopping and searching youths on the streets and conducting raids in the housing estates.

“They are sometimes frisked up to 10 times a day,” said Dounia Bouzar, an expert on French-born Muslims. “Given the way these kids live, I wonder why it (the rioting) doesn’t happen more often.”

Michel Lereste, a social worker, said that resentment felt by many young immigrants had been crystallised by the deaths 10 days ago of two youths electrocuted in a power station where they had hidden after wrongly thinking they were being chased by police.

The ringleaders are well known to police from previous clashes and many have served jail sentences. Others appeared to join in “for fun”, snapping photographs of burning cars with mobile phones in between throwing stones.

In Le Blanc Mesnil, a Paris district, last week Hassan, a 15-year-old schoolboy, claimed his cité was involved in an “intifada” against French authorities — a reference to the Palestinian uprising against Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. “The violence won’t stop until Sarkozy resigns,” he said.

That seemed unlikely and in the end Sarkozy may suffer less from the riots than Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister and his chief rival in the race to succeed Jacques Chirac as president in 2007.

Sarkozy’s tough language against the rioters will at least win him support on the right, while de Villepin did not help his cause by losing his temper with MPs who were critical of his handling of the affair.

As pressure mounted on the government, de Villepin, who was forced to cancel a trip to Canada, met a group of 15 young people from the Paris suburbs on Friday night to discuss ways of restoring calm.

There were concerns, according to some analysts, that the biggest beneficiaries of the latest explosion could be extreme right-wing politicians such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the National Front party, who wants to put an end to the “Islamisation” of France.

Despite his blunt rhetoric, Sarkozy does not come anywhere near that. He has adopted a subtle two-pronged approach — a kind of Gallic “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” — that has wrong-footed his critics. Besides advocating a crackdown he is also proposing affirmative action to help young people.

They probably need it. Jean-François Amadieu, a university professor who has studied discrimination, sought to demonstrate it by sending out fake applications for jobs. He found applicants with addresses in “difficult” areas received half as many invitations to an interview as those from more salubrious districts.

Some, nevertheless, have made it. Jamel Debbouze, a comic actor famous for his cracks about life on the estates, has become one of France’s best-paid entertainers; Faiza Guène, a 19-year-old from an Algerian family, has embarked upon a lucrative literary career with a debut novel whose heroine was described as “a Bridget Jones teenager of the suburbs”.

Too often, however, the fame of women from the estates is built on tales of horrific abuse. Samira Bellil, another young woman of Algerian origin, has written a book about being subjected to repeated gang rapes, a sickeningly common crime. On one occasion she was dragged off a crowded train by a gang of youths who wanted to rape her. Nobody lifted a finger to help.

“Terrible things are happening here,” said Mohammed Bouheiri, an elderly vegetable seller chatting with friends on a street corner. “The government must not neglect us.”

...Nicolas Sarkozy, the tough-talking interior minister, warned rioters that their actions could “cost dear in terms of sentences”. But he also promised to tackle the causes of violence, conceding that there were “a certain number of injustices in some neighbourhoods”.

He's tough as bananas.

With the evidence we're starting to see, this is most likely not entirely a "burning rage," but an organized militant Islamic planned op. They've found bomb factories--probably not set up on the spur of the moment, because one report stated they were fairly sophisticated.

And what about the two guys "hiding" in the electricial station? The police insist they were not chasing them, and they had no need to hide. Could they have been there for other reasons, such as sabotaging the electrical station, perhaps in preparation for beginning the "riots?"

Hmmmm, wouldn't it be ironic if someone staged an Anti-France protest? I wonder how the Frogs would react when a so-called 'Ally' stabs them in the back?

In all seriousness; I'm shocked that France hasn't formally offered terms of surrender yet. 10 Days fighting teenagers with gasoline bombs, putting up with live fire against the police, over 1000 cars torched, businesses burnt to the ground, ect.

Here's a hint. Fire a Tracer bullet from a sniper's rifle into one of the arsonist's gasoline bottles. Watching Abdulahha burst into flames sends a message to the other leaches.

...an organized militant Islamic planned op.

Absolutely.

Don't you wonder what they are storing in the undercrofts of those mosques that have sprung up to pollute American landscape in the past three decades?

I'm probably wrong, but I don't think you'll find bingo cards and boxes of the un-holy Koran.

“Without question what is taking place bears all the hallmarks of being co-ordinated ....”

There is a sinister historic parallel reference here, as some have suggested the French revolution (1789) was artificially provoked by a small, deliberate group of radicals working behind the scenes.

>> France’s media and its politicians have portrayed the rioting as a form of protest against poverty, racial discrimination and the desperation felt by immigrant families who live in the cités

Hopefully these enlightened purveyors of social conscience will have their cars and investments burned in tonight's 'protest'.

“France’s media and its politicians have portrayed the rioting as a form of protest against poverty”

So follow this through, people immigrant to France because their culture’s values created poverty at home, values that include amonst other things no respect fro personal property, or the rights of others to work and obtain it, they then bring these values to France, and the French media believe that this is a protest and not an invasion and an organized effort to pillage those countries with ethical values?

Same thing is happening here in the US, if our media will not stand up to the lack of values and standards of the third world and call it for what it is, evil instead of trying to integrate it into society under the false pretense of diversity, and higher cooperate sponsorship $, since we don’t want to offend any immigrant viewers, we are doomed.

And what about the two guys "hiding" in the electricial station? The police insist they were not chasing them, and they had no need to hide. Could they have been there for other reasons, such as sabotaging the electrical station, perhaps in preparation for beginning the "riots?"

This 'electrical station' was next to a Mosque; which coincidentally is the same mosque that had a teargas gernade tossed in to it days after the deaths.

Now, from the articles youths scaled a fence and jumped in, however two of 3 jumped on top of a transformer and shorted the transformer out; getting killed in the process. The third escaped without serious physical injury. The fact that all of this is focusing on a single Mosque should even give the famed Detective Clouseau a clue as to where to start.

This idiot wants the police to "tread softly"? What in hell does that mean? How many years will they wait before bringing their troops in to wipe out these hordes of scumbags? The french politicos are in major denial.

The folks I feel sorry for are innocent non-mooselims who have to end up paying for this with their lives, limbs and taxes.

The "kids" who hid in the electrical transformer box (a stupid place to hide) were caught stealing parts from parked cars. They were caught red-handed as criminals and ran.

They were only caught because a Muslim housewife called the police who normally would fear to go to the area. That woman is probably dead now. Al Qaeda in France would make sure of that.

Bush's fault.

France is a quagmire. Time for the french to withdraw.

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