Dear France,
You adopted this rifle. Fill it up with bullets, aim at rioters and pull the damned trigger.
Anything less is going to cause you to lose your country (again).
Posted on 11/07/2005 7:28:49 AM PST by NYer
PARIS A man who was beaten by an attacker while trying to extinguish a trash can fire during riots north of Paris has died of his injuries, becoming the first fatality since the urban unrest started 11 days ago, a police official said Monday. Youths overnight injured three dozen officers and burned more than 1,400 vehicles.
Apparent copycat attacks spread to other European cities for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels' main train station, police in the Belgian capital said.
Australia, Austria and Britain became the latest countries to advise 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 about 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 the fire, Rahmouni said.
Clashes around France left 36 police injured, and vandals burned 1,408 vehicles overnight Sunday-Monday, setting a new high for overnight arson and violence since the rioting started Oct. 27, national police chief Michel Gaudin 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 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 were injured by weapons fire amid signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with police, officials said.
Among the injured police, 10 were injured 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 in danger. One was wounded in the neck, the other in the legs.
The unrest began 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.
There have been 4,700 cars burned in France since the rioting began, and 1,200 suspects have been 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.
Meanwhile, the government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm.
President Jacques Chirac promised stern punishment for those behind the attacks, making his first public address Sunday since the riots started.
"The law must have the last word," Chirac said 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. The extent of damage was not immediately clear.
In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted rocks at a bus, 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, who inflamed passions by referring to troublemakers as "scum."
In Strasbourg, youths stole a car and rammed it into a housing project, setting the vehicle and the building on fire.
"We'll stop when Sarkozy steps down," said the defiant 17-year-old driver of the car, who gave his name only as Murat. Under arrest, he and several others awaited a ride to the police station as smoke poured from the windows of the housing project behind them.
It is turning into Civil War.
Wonder how they are going to stop this?
See it's not their fault. Their passions were inflamed.
They were simple troublemakers. Being called "scum" turned them into savages.
Lucky for France he only called them scum, a**holes would have gotten them really mad.
They'll be all over the story when a gay bar burns. That's probably the only thing that might make the french do something about this. Pathetic country.
> a public housing estate in the tough suburb of Stains.
It'd *have* to be tough with a name like that...
Come on French government. Grow a pair. The more they coddle these thugs the more the danger to the French nation.
Only one dead because the French are so intimidated that they are hiding under the bed. I recall the way the French would defer to the Muslim thugs when I was last there, the French acted as if they could seem invisible, then the Muslim gangs might go away and leave them be.
Dear France,
You adopted this rifle. Fill it up with bullets, aim at rioters and pull the damned trigger.
Anything less is going to cause you to lose your country (again).
She survived, 20% burns.
Thanks. You know, 1 more death and France's surrender will be assured.
Also, the French are having trouble here because so many of the leftists who were in the streets during the 68 riots are now in gov't and the media. They are nostalgic for the race to the barricades. We have the same idiots in this country. Want to see what the radical left would look like in a crisis? Here you go.
Flipping his BIC?
The Boston Police Dept. dealt more harshly with Red Sox and Pats fans.
Qur’an 8:57 “If you gain mastery over them in battle, inflict such a defeat as would terrorize them, so that they would learn a lesson and be warned.”
An Egyptian brandishes a Koran during a march on the Saint Girgis church in Alexandria. The usually peaceful Egyptian city of Alexandria was reeling from riots that left three dead and pitted police and Muslims protesting a play they charge is offensive to Islam.(AFP/Adel Al-Masri)
LOL! Bullseye!
Go here and you can get an expandable pdf - but I can't tell what it is - almost like a tiny handgun, but very unclear to me.
http://www.newseum.org/media/dfp/pdf7/POR_PUBL.pdf
Those pesky "youths"! Why are they so grumpy lately?
The thing in your link is clearly an expended shotgun shell, in the cop's hand. But the thing in the rioter's hand is something else.
Putin: "Chiracky buddy, whassup?? Your pre-war rhetoric looks like bad borscht soup! Word???? ha ha.------------------------------------------------------------------------ Chirac: "Hey mon frere Putin, don't be laughing, next week your 'burbs will be burning by the Checkies." ha ha.------------------------------------------------------------- Schroeder: "Jou guys have Maaajer Problems!!! ha ha.
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