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.”

From what I have heard the last place in the world you want to be sent is a french prison. No weight lifting equipment, basketball courts, etc. Not like the Holiday camps and thug training schools our prisons have become. But the bottom line, summing up the problem to one word....Balkanization.

They are as bad as the Japanese prisons, but not as bad as the Chinese and Russians (See gulag.) ones.

Ooops, I almost forgot the Mexican and Turkish prisons.
OOOooo, how could I forget the ones in Vietnam or ALL/ANY of sub-Sahara Africa? Or the Afghan ones, the Iraqi, Iranian ones? I bet the ones in Central/South America are nice too. Hey, the CUBAN ones? I ALmost forgot the ones in North Africa -- Lybia, Algeria, Morroco.....shame on me.

Lol. Where have all the prisons gone? Sing along.
The French might even bring back Devil's Island. That would be nice for the Muslim north Africans, wouldn't it?
Shudder.

"The biggest news to me, however, is that CNN EUROPE will NOT report on this!! I am sitting in Germany now and neither will ANY OF THE GERMAN STATIONS!!

Perhaps they don't want the Muslims in their villa's to start rioting as well.

"An American leftist who spoke great French (like Jane Fonda does) was just explaining the parallels between this and the Rodney King riots."

That must have been funny to watch. It just goes to show how clueless the left all over the world really is. They will deny socialism is the root cause of all these troubles, along with Islamic Appeasement (a dangerous combination!) until Europe collapses again, and hundreds of thousands are dead.

I suspect things will start up in Spain sometime soon as well. It may well spread all through Europe, Jihad has begun. Dhimmitude will become official. Eurabia is born.

I DID forget the Cambodian, other southeast Asian, Haitian, other Caribbean, Indian/Bangladeshi/Pakistani prisons too. How forgetful.

Sounds like OURS are the best.

Notable exception below:

MARICOPA ARIZONA COUNTY SHERIFF AND HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND OVER
THE MARICOPA ARIZONA COUNTY SHERIFF AND HE KEEPS GETTING ELECTED OVER AND OVER.

THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS WHY:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio (in Arizona) who created the "tent city jail": He has jail meals down to 40 cents a serving and charges the inmates for them.

He stopped smoking and porno magazines in the jails. Took away their weights. Cut off all but "G" movies. He started chain gangs so the inmates could do free work on county and city projects.

Then he started chain gangs for women so he wouldn't get sued for discrimination.

He took away cable TV until he found out there was a federal court order that required cable TV for jails. So he hooked up the cable TV again only let in the Disney channel and the weather channel.

When asked why the weather channel he replied, so they will know how hot it's gonna be while they are working on my chain gangs.

He cut off coffee since it has zero nutritional value.

When the inmates complained, he told them, "This isn't the Ritz/Carlton. If you don't like it, don't come back."

He bought Newt Gingrich' lecture series on videotape that he pipes into the jails.

When asked by a reporter if he had any lecture series by a Democrat, he replied that a democratic lecture series might explain why a lot of the inmates were in his jails in the first place.

More on the Arizona Sheriff:

With temperatures being even hotter than usual in Phoenix (116 degrees just set a new record), the Associated Press reports: About 2,000 inmates living in a barbed-wire-surrounded tent encampment at the Maricopa County Jail have been given permission to strip down to their government-issued pink boxer shorts.

On Wednesday, hundreds of men wearing boxers were either curled up on their bunk beds or chatted in the tents, which reached 138 degrees inside the week before.

Many were also swathed in wet, pink towels as sweat collected on their chests and dripped down to their pink socks.

"It feels like we are in a furnace," said James Zanzot, an inmate who has lived in the tents for 1+ years. "It's inhumane."

Joe Arpaio, the tough-guy sheriff who created the tent city and long ago started making his prisoners wear pink, and eat bologna sandwiches, is not one bit sympathetic. He said Wednesday that he told all of the inmates: "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and our soldiers are living in tents too, and they have to wear full battle gear, but they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your damned mouths!"

Way to go, Sheriff! Maybe if all prisons were like this one there would be a lot less crime and/or repeat offenders. Criminals should be punished for their crimes - not live in luxury until it's time for their parole, only to go out and commit another crime so they can get back in to live on taxpayers money and enjoy things taxpayers can't afford to have for themselves.

Sheriff Joe was just reelected Sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona.

You must mean CNN international...they are notorious for not reporting big stories that might make the USA look good or them look bad. They honestly work harder at not reporting that they would if they actually reported all the news.

When I was in Sweden a couple years back, caught a bit of Sky TV. Sweden only has like 4 channels and mostly shows old American shows like "Knight Rider" dubbed in Svenska. Sky had the only news-weather channel and you had to be lucky enough to be watching at the time or miss the odd weather report which seemed to be only every eight hours or so.

It was September, kind of cool out, cloudy. He gave the report for England..."It is dark and dank". That was all he said! Nothing. Again, even with the weather, notorious under-reporting. Why couldn't he just say, 15C and rainy for the next 6 days?

LOL

The biggest news to me, however, is that CNN EUROPE will NOT report on this!! I am sitting in Germany now and neither will ANY OF THE GERMAN STATIONS!!
Yep. CNN EUROPE is as anti-American as any UBL-er, communist or Sleazywoodian.

Even TELE5, the French station, is not concentrating on this as too big a story. They had a panel discussion just now. I can understand French from having gone to university in Canada:
An American leftist who spoke great French (like Jane Fonda does) was just explaining the parallels between this and the Rodney King riots. He was trying to sympathize with the rioters. His mistake? The French leftists on the panel were furious that he implied that this was an *ethnic* riot! "This has nothing to do with race or religion" they cried with so much fury that I was sure they would attack him physically on TV. Their spin is that this riot indicates the need for the overthrow of Sarkazy and the last vestiges of right wing reactionism against the inevitable progression of the proletariat and downtrodden third world.
Harhar. JaJa.
Fun to watch the communists fight.
So much fodder for the nationalists.

That the American leftist noted the South Central LA Riots calmed down when 8000 soldiers were sent to the scene: that brought the most bile! His fellow panelists were like: "Typical American...he thinks that you can solve every problem with the military."
NO ONE, not even the "typical" American, is THAT stupid. :o)
The program was designed to do just what it did -- validate one side and inflame the other side.
I doubt the average frog cares for either extreme.

American leftists have to understand that they cannot win. They are considered right wingers by their international counterparts and would be executed along with the rest of us if there was ever a victory of international socialism over Amerika.
American leftists, like their more extreme counterparts in other parts of the world, are doomed to lose because they:

1. base their ~~logic~~ thinking on self-hate;

2. speak only to the weakest part of all human nature -- the wah-boohoo-poor-me-I'm-the-victim part;

3. are too engulfed in and obssessed with blaming everyone else but themselves for their unhappiness;

4. are too young (This speaks to the young lefties.) to know how wrong they are about life, human history and human nature;

5. are too morally weak (This speaks to the older lefties.) to do anything else with their politics besides blame others and fight for a socialist utopia.
Utopia, übrigens, means "no-where" in Greek.

Leftists might learn something basic about MANY, many Americans:

AMERICAN !

Das stimmt!

This illustrates a point I've often made. The term "right-wing" means extremely different things in Europe and the US. In Europe, all political points of view are "left-wing" by American standards. The European left-wing is international socialists, while their right-wing are nationalist socialists. The American "right-wing" philosophy of limited government individualism doesn't appear at all in Europe. Both sides of the Atlantic use a "left-wing/right-wing" axis to measure their political differences, but it isn't the same axis in both places. In fact, I believe the US axis is actually orthogonal to the European one (The entire European polity, regardless of their position on the European axis, are left-wing on the American axis).

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