Posted on 10/28/2006 6:41:35 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France - Marauding youths torched hundreds of vehicles overnight and on Saturday in renewed violence coinciding with the first anniversary of riots that exposed a deep schism between poor North African immigrants and mainstream France.
A group of teenagers set one bus on fire Saturday in the southern French port city of Marseille, seriously wounding a passenger. Three others suffered from smoke inhalation, police said. Two other public buses and 277 vehicles around the country were burned overnight, police said.
Six police were injured and 47 people were arrested, ministry officials said. Still the Interior Ministry described the night as "relative calm," noting that up to 100 cars are torched by youths in troubled neighborhoods on an average night.
Police had braced for a bigger replay of violence in the poor suburbs predominantly made up of Muslims from former French colonies in Africa. Friday marked the one-year anniversary of the deaths of two teens that ignited three weeks of riots in 2005.
The rioting was fueled by anger at France's failure to offer equal opportunities to many minorities — especially Arabs and blacks — and France's 5 million-strong Muslim population.
France's trouble integrating minorities and the suburban unrest are becoming hot political issues in the campaign for next year's presidential and parliamentary elections. The government passed an equal opportunities law this spring and has poured funds into "sensitive" areas, but disenchantment is still pervasive.
The latest unrest centered on the troubled suburbs that ring Paris. Half the cars burned nationwide overnight were torched in the region around the capital. Of the 47 arrests, 33 people were taken into custody in the Paris suburbs, mostly for throwing projectiles, burning cars or generally vandalizing property, police said.
The national police said about 4,000 extra police and riot officers were deployed across the country to cope with a possible resurgence of violence. Some 7,000 police are at the ready on an average night in France, officials have said.
The bus attacks late Friday were not far from the site where the two teens were electrocuted in a power substation in Paris suburb Clichy-sous-Bois on Oct. 27, 2005. The two were hiding after what they thought was a police chase.
One bus was engulfed in flames at the foot of a high-rise housing project.
"Four guys attacked Bus 346," said witness Thierry Ange, 19. "They made everyone get off, then they hit a woman and dragged out the bus driver by his tie," then torched the bus with a gasoline bomb in a bottle, he said.
The blackened remains of another bus burned earlier stood across town. Two armed men had forced passengers off the bus, police said.
Youths also tried to burn a bus in Reims in eastern France, and attackers hurled metal balls at an empty bus in Trappes, west of Paris, the Interior Ministry said.
Scores of police, wielding shields and backed by a helicopter shining its searchlight, swept into a tough housing project in Montfermeil, a town near Clichy-sous-Bois, and several youths responded by throwing stones.
Paris' transport authority responded to the violence by curtailing bus services in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of the capital, which is home to thousands of immigrants and their French-born children.
___
Associated Press writers Jean-Marie Godard and Jean-Pierre Verges contributed to this report from Paris.
And if they ask we had damn well be willing to help. The fall of Europe into chaos would cause grave damage to us. We didn't defeat communism and protect western Europe for almost 50 years so that it could fall because of immigration riots. I would rather send 10,000 troops now (if they ask) and have the French be grateful than send 4 million in 20 years and have them love us.
Then send them the hell back to any Islamic country that will accept them.
Oh goody!
Where's that brainless Freeper who said that so long as not too many were killed, torching vehicles was inconsequential?
Maiming and paralyzing is Ok too, I think.
Moron...
I'll take the the 'youths' that scribbled some soap on my car one 'mischief night'.......I walked out, wiped it off, the end.
This 'mischief' by disaffected youths ultimately will entail beheading your sister or mother in some soccer stadium for the heinous crime of showing her face in public.
REmember the news footage of the koreans shooting at the looters in the LA riots following the rodney king trial?
As the saying goes, "Coming to a city near you."
"Hey. You're not Chevalier!"
(Monday Night football theme begins)
'Hi, this is Al-Jahzeera Michaels coming to you from Lincoln field in Philadelphia......tonight's matchup should be a great one......the 'Taliban Terrorists' versus your unarmed, poor-a$$ self......we'll start with the opening kickoff; David Akeristan is teeing off on your Mom's head for the opening kickoff......'
I predict we will see it here. If frat stunts in a prison are considered torture, can you imagine the flak if a cop were to arrest a muslim for torching a car? The libs will just explain that he was disenfranchized and misunderstood and needs counceling.
[dry humor follows]
The obvious answer is to push up the French excise tax on gasoline.
The reason these Moslem hoodlums do this, is, they can get away with it. The French gov't needs to (and I predict) start enforcing a curfew (there is one, I believe), and shoot on sight any of these vermin who violate it.
yea, we got it. sheesh
While I appreciate your enthusiam, the fear of a rebellion is real because of the MSM and their constant and outspoken acts that they are against Bush and the WAR onTERROR. Just watch Sunday morning talk shows. NBC CBS ABC will be the hate media to stirr up trouble in our beautifull USA. Not one thing about the troops who are fighting hard and winning the battle.
Betcha we never fire a shot if this were to happen here. We've become so pathetically weak that we're concerned about how painful lethal injection is.
C'mon, get with the program. Right after the holy month of Ramadan, it is the "Burning of the Citroen's and Peugeot's" to purify and sanctify the souls of the infidel. Sheesh.
And sadly, John Q. would be the guy arrested.
...or perhaps a better way to put it is, "the kickoff is caught deep in the 'endzone'........'no return' on the play.......
El Wrongo. W just proclaimed it as a peacefull faith a couple of days ago celebrating the end of Ramadan.
?
You don't know the French culture. I've worked with these people on and off for 14 years.
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