Posted on 11/07/2005 6:10:57 AM PST by Mr. Mojo
Rioting by French youths spread to 300 towns overnight and a man hurt in the violence died of his wounds, the first fatality in 11 days of unrest that has shocked the country, police said Monday.
As urban unrest spread to neighboring Belgium and possibly Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm.
On Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for overnight arson and violence since rioting started Oct. 27, Michel Gaudin told a news conference.
Australia, Austria, Britain, Germany and Hungary advised their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the United States and Russia in warning tourists to stay away from violence-hit areas.
Alain Rahmouni, a national police spokesman, said the man who was beaten died at a hospital from injuries sustained in the attack, but he had no immediate details of the victim's age or his attacker.
The man was caught by surprise by an attacker after rushing out of his apartment building to put out a trash can fire, Rahmouni said.
Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels' main train station, police in the Belgian capital said.
The mayhem started as an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing projects and has fanned out nationwide among disaffected youths, mostly of Muslim or African origin, to become France's worst civil unrest in over a decade.
Attacks overnight Sunday to Monday were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests, Gaudin said.
"This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected," Gaudin said, noting that the violence appeared to be sliding away from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and worsening elsewhere.
It was the first time police had been injured by weapons' fire and there were signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with police, officials said.
Among the injured police, 10 were hurt by youths firing fine-grain birdshot in a late-night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized, but their lives were not considered in danger. One was wounded in the neck, the other in the legs.
The unrest began Oct. 27 in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, after the deaths of two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation. They apparently thought they were being chased.
All told, 4,700 cars have been burned in France since the rioting began and 1,200 suspects were detained at least temporarily, Gaudin said.
The growing violence is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair — fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as well as for Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a way out.
France, with some 5 million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe.
President Jacques Chirac, whose government is under intense pressure to halt the violence, promised stern punishment for those behind the attacks, making his first public comments Sunday since the riots started.
"The law must have the last word," Chirac said Sunday after a security meeting with top ministers. France is determined "to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear, and they will be arrested, judged and punished."
France's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree. It forbade all those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others."
Arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city of Saint-Etienne and its suburbs, and two people were injured in the bus attack. Churches were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, he said.
In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, Hamon said, while a daycare center was burned in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb.
Much of the youths' anger has focused on law-and-order Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose reference to the troublemakers as "scum" appeared to inflame passions.
---Rioting by French youths ---
It's those darn French youths again!
The Mohammedans are not using guns yet because that wuld convert this all into a military confrontation which would allow the government cover to send in the army and shoot some folks. It would send most of the rioters home. The guns and RPGs must come out eventually just because AQ or whoever can't completely control the crazies and when the shooting does seriously get underway AQ will use that for all they can, too. That's when we will see the stock Islamoarmory deployed.
There were three or four Molotov cocktails in SF at the latest anti-American protest, but that was last Sunday I believe.
His Hungarian heritage just might have something to do with that.
Let's just say, he isn't exactly a fan of Jerry Lewis.
And is that last word "surrender?"
What's the Sharia law punishment for torching a car?
Don't enjoy it too much. However much the French deserve what they are getting, a Mohammedan Europe is not a bright future for our own country. Even it the fall of Europe silences our own Left and steels American will to remove the cancer here, there is still the prospect of another large chunk of Western Civilization and, yes Christendom, falling under the blanket of Islam.
Rahmoui appears to be an Algerian name.
A way out?
I wonder how our own "authorities" would react. Alas we don't have the ghetto pools that Europe has. Our Mohammedans tend more to be pretty affluent. I don't think the medical community in my town would burn cars. These Saracens all drive Lexus and Cadillac.
I have been convinced for some years now that Europe is a civilization in disintegration. The violence in France is just a vivid manifestation of that cultural decay.
Constantinople fell to the Muslim Turks 550 years ago because Western Europeans refused to defend Eastern Europeans. Today Western Europeans will not even come to the rescue of themselves.
I do believe that much more violent events lie ahead for France, Germany, and England. European Civilization is coming to an end. It may take another 100 years for the final collapse, but I don't think any Europeans have the will to change course.
Maybe Chirac figures that when all the cars in Europe are gone, the rioting will stop...These muzlims must really hate cars...
I doubt that the riots have much to do with religion or Islam per se. As usual, racial or ethnic issues are at the bottom of it just like in Northern Ireland.
This isn't working because they have it backwards. There should be continued police deployment and massive calls for calm.
Something like 10% of French population are actual believing Christians. Sure, most folks are baptized but they never practise their religion. The same goes for the descendants of Muslim immigrants. These riots are about race and ethnicity, not religion.
How dare these rioters continue to riot when there have been "calls for calm"?
If that is the case then time is approaching for an American Crusade into Europe.
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