Nicolas Sarkozy: Scourge of the Banlieues?

World Politics Review ^ | 11 May 2007 | John Rosenthal

[Kitten Festival]

PARIS -- "If I could get my hands on Sarkozy, I'd kill him." Thus begins author David Rieff's article in the New York Times Magazine last month on Nicolas Sarkozy's relation to the French "banlieues." Needless to say, it is not David Rieff himself, a fellow of the World Policy Institute in New York, who is proffering the threat. Rather he is quoting one "Mamadou", a young resident of the Les Bousquets housing project outside Paris. Evidently having succeeded in making an impression on the American visitor, Mamadou continued, "Then I'd go to prison. And when I got out, I'd be a hero." In fact, Mamadou might even be able to go to prison and be a hero right now, since under the French Penal Code, the making of death threats is itself a crime. Rieff goes on to ask a second young man, named "Ahmad", if he too "felt the same way." "I wouldn't kill him, no," Ahmad is supposed to have responded, "But I hate him. We all hate him."

All? Anyone reading Rieff's account or indeed virtually any of the English-language reports on the tensions in the poor, dilapidated suburbs on the outskirts of France's major urban centers would indeed be led to believe that "all" the residents of the French banlieues hate Nicolas Sarkozy. But the results of last Sunday's election tell a quite different story. Rieff points to Montfermeil, where Les Bousquets is located, as one of the typical "hard-up towns" with large immigrant populations where hostility to France in general and Sarkozy in particular is supposed to be the norm. He could hardly have chosen a worse example. As so happens, Montfermeil is a stronghold of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party and Sarkozy carried Montfermeil on Sunday with a comfortable 52.2

[Kitten Festival]

Turns out even the slum dwellers and Muslims voted for Sarko in droves. They don't like crime and thugs either.

[skeeter]

Nobody does ‘Hate’ better than leftists.

[stm]

So not the libtards are advocating killing a foreign head of state? How freakin’ lovely.

[George W. Bush]

I think the writer made up the death threat against Sarkozy. It is his hatred of the collapse of France's socialist paradise that the article describes.

[GoldenPup]

France should re-activate Devil’s Island...and use it. Now, that would generate headlines...and smiles.

[RedMonqey]

“If I could get my hands on Sarkozy, I’d kill him.”

More acts of love and charity from immigrants for being allowed entry in a county that isn’t a third world hellhole

No good act goes unpunished

[Hiddigeigei]

Did you read the same article I did?

[George W. Bush]

Yes. This would not be the first time that Times employees fabricate hate speech incidents like this. If it's the Times family of publications, they have to prove that someone actually said it. I won't take their word for it.

[FreedomPoster]

<*DING!*>

We have a winner.