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Intifada in France
The New York Sun ^ | November 4, 2005 | New York Sun Staff Editorial

Posted on 11/04/2005 5:36:05 AM PST by JohnLongIsland

If President Chirac thought he was going to gain peace with the Muslim community in France by taking an appeasement line in the Iraq war, it certainly looks like he miscalculated. Today the streets of the French capital are looking more like Ramallah and less like the advanced, sophisticated, gay Paree image Monsieur Chirac likes to portray to the world, and the story, which is just starting to grip the world's attention, is full of ironies. One is tempted to suggest that Prime Minister Sharon send a note cautioning Monsieur Chirac about cycles of violence.

Back in the 1990s, the French sneered at America for the Los Angeles riots. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 1992: "the consensus of French pundits is that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs." President Mitterrand, the Washington Post reported in 1992, blamed the riots on the "conservative society" that Presidents Reagan and Bush had created and said France is different because it "is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world."

(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: 1firstkeyword; cheeseeating; france; francechiracmuslims; francistan; insurgency; islam; parisriots; surrendermonkeys; uprising
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To: moose2004
"What BS film were they watching?"

I'm not exactly sure what film they were watching, but I'll have my son find out for me. He said it was this whole thing on France and all these people were protesting the US and holding signs saying "Bush is a murderer", the US sucks", etc. He had enough, because day in and day out he listens to this teacher, along with other teachers bash Bush. He's not confrontational by nature, but I tell him to always stick up for his beliefs and be armed with a good argument. He said he did say "If it wasn't for the US, France would be speaking German" and he said the teacher laughed at him. It's a tough battle for him, but I'm proud that he sticks to his beliefs and isn't afraid to voice them. He wouldn't normally walk out and say "bull *hit" but he said he couldn't sit there and watch an Anti-American film. I'll try to get the film name for you and post it to your sn.
41 posted on 11/04/2005 6:22:08 AM PST by ladiesview61
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To: metmom
It's too damn easy, especially for people who want to turn that great country into a backwater of civilization.

The Aussies need to return to their pre-80s immigration policies, just like the UK-and we-should, if we have any hope of surviving.

42 posted on 11/04/2005 6:22:10 AM PST by Do not dub me shapka broham
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To: JohnLongIsland
I think Sharon should go to the UN and demand France raise a dialog and have a road map to peace.

He should also demand that France keep all roads in and out of the slums open so that the rioters can pass back and forth without being harassed.

Then he should demand that France give up the left bank to the Muslims so they can have a country of their own.

France should immediately turn over the church of Notre Dame to the Muzzies to use as a mosque, etc., etc., etc..

Sharon is probably laughing his ass off right now "Intifada this Chirac!"
43 posted on 11/04/2005 6:22:47 AM PST by Americanexpat (A strong democracy through citizen oversight.)
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To: ladiesview61
Good for him!

:)

44 posted on 11/04/2005 6:22:54 AM PST by Do not dub me shapka broham
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To: goldstategop

There are no long waits for medical care in France.


45 posted on 11/04/2005 6:25:15 AM PST by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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To: metmom
I believe the French riot police are really geared toward playing their part in the political theater type of riot that french college students create on the weekends. I think they may be a little shocked that people are actually fighting.
46 posted on 11/04/2005 6:25:43 AM PST by The Toll
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To: L98Fiero

"WTF does a thread about France have to do with Bush's border policy (or lack thereof)?"
..................................................
just an intelligence test. LOL


47 posted on 11/04/2005 6:27:19 AM PST by ConsentofGoverned (if a sucker is born every minute, what are the voters?)
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To: JohnLongIsland
I demand a timetable for withdrawal of French troops! They should never have attempted to quell the violnce! The rioters are merely freedom fighters. It's time for the French to leave! If the French troops hadn't responded as they did, none of this would be happening! Doesn't everyone know that Muslim is a religion of peace?
48 posted on 11/04/2005 6:29:06 AM PST by Real Cynic No More (Al-Jazeera is to the Iraqi War as CBS was to the Vietnam War.)
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To: JohnLongIsland

Friday, November 04, 2005

LE POT III [Jonah Goldberg]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081835

From the September 21, 2005 LA Times:

Some French commentators have been dismayed by the tone of the media coverage concerning the destruction across the Atlantic. Some prominent people in the French press and politics, they believe, have eagerly turned the catastrophe into an all-purpose symbol of American ills, real or imagined.

"If the United States didn't exist, it would have to be invented so that elsewhere we can reassure ourselves, as if to better hide our own defects and incoherencies," warned a recent editorial in Le Figaro newspaper. "It's easy to ramble on about the decline of the American empire. Some even see the difficulties encountered by the U.S. as the work of a vengeful hand from the beyond.... Derision and demonizing are out of place."

The extensive coverage has tended to paint the picture of a superpower brought down by economic inequality, racial conflict and neglectful government. A recent Nouvel Observateur cover summed up this stark view: "America Stripped Naked: The cyclone reveals the wounds of the every-man-for-himself society."

Marianne, a left-leaning newsmagazine, declared: "The American giant folds beneath the weight of its failures and struggles to enforce an order that it wanted to impose on the world."

Marianne's take typified the profound disdain for President Bush in evidence here. A special issue titled "The Fall of the Pyromaniac Fireman" blamed Bush for a planetary flash fire of crises -- from Iraq to global warming -- that, in the magazine's view, discredit an entire free-market-driven, militaristic "Anglo-Saxon model" of governance.

In the newspaper Liberation, Gerard Dupuy accused the Bush administration of "contempt for victims who without a doubt were doubly at fault for being both poor and black." He concluded that the neoconservative "crusade," which was "already mired in the Mesopotamian marshes" of Iraq, had "foundered in the Louisiana bayou."



LE POT CONT'D [Jonah Goldberg]

From the September 1 roundup:

France's LIBERATION also feels this is a huge crisis for the US, and its society.

"This is a major crisis. The proof is that Bush - whom no tragedy nor international crisis seemed to be able to bother during his Texan holidays - went to Washington on the gallop," the left-leaning daily says.

"But the most striking thing, and the most revealing, is the brutal collapse of a rich and highly developed society," it comments. "The greatest power in the world knocked out by a punch from the gods," it says.

"The authorities," both state and federal, "are floundering, helpless", it goes on.

"And violence, which is never very far in a region where it is often forgotten that misery and social exclusion are endemic, is taking over in the form of pillaging.

"After the rules of the gods comes the law of the jungle," it concludes.

http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081833


LE POT MEET MSSR. KETTLE [Jonah Goldberg]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081832

From a September 8 BBC Newspaper summary of the French press:

"Katrina's devastation points the finger at Bush's system," announces LE MONDE's top headline.
Below the headline sits an large cartoon of George Bush watching wide-screen footage of black people floating dead in the water or screaming for help as an army patrol sails by on a boat, heavily armed. Bush is being briefed by his generals. Distraught and determined, he says: "But, what country is this? Is it far away? We absolutely have to do something!"

"The ravages of hurricane Katrina, which has swallowed up New Orleans...have provoked in the United States a debate on George Bush's model of government," says the French daily, noting that "for some...the page is turning on September 11, and this is perhaps the end of triumphant conservatism".

"Issues forgotten for years are back to the fore: poverty, the state's absence, latent racism," it goes on.

"After the 2001 attacks, the blacks had felt better integrated. Problems concerning society and poverty disappeared behind anti-terrorist concerns," it concludes.


49 posted on 11/04/2005 6:35:06 AM PST by finnman69 (cum puella incedit minore medio corpore sub quo manifestu s globus, inflammare animos)
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To: goldstategop

Good post.

(so, were you a big pink flamingo on halloween?)


50 posted on 11/04/2005 6:37:21 AM PST by Uncledave
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To: ladiesview61

Have your son give this Time article to the weasel teacher.

http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,1125401,00.html

Why Paris is Burning
Failure to integrate immigrants has brewed a potent cocktail of rage
By JAMES GRAFF/PARIS
Officially, the French state doesn't recognize minorities, only citizens of France, all of them equal under the law. But that republican ideal has seemed especially hollow over the past week as the children of impoverished, largely Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa fought running battles with police throughout the banlieues, or suburbs, to the east and north of the French capital. On Sunday night, tear gas from a police canister filled the air in a Muslim prayer hall, sending worshipers out into the street gasping for air—and enraged at an act of desecration for which the police denied responsibility. By Wednesday, after five nights of violence, more than three dozen arrests had been made as the rioting spread from community to community—one official even warned that it threatened to become an "insurrection." And France's political class was embroiled in a fierce debate over how best to put a lid on their boiling banlieues.

Anger and resentment have been long brewing in the belt of immigrant misery that surrounds Paris, where jobs are rare and poverty rampant. It exploded last Thursday night when two teenagers in the northeastern banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois were electrocuted after they climbed into a electric relay station and touched a high-voltage transformer. The youths—one Malian, the other Tunisian—had apparently thought they were being chased by police after fleeing a police identity check. Though a preliminary investigation has found that they weren't being pursued, their senseless deaths were quickly blamed on the police. After two nights of violence, hundreds marched through Clichy-sous-Bois on Saturday morning, many of them wearing white t-shirts with the slogan "Mort Pour Rien"—dead for no reason.

More Violence Feared

The rapid spread of the violence showed that it was about more than the death of the two teenagers. Unemployment in many of these communities runs at 30 to 40 percent, even higher among young people. The banlieues are monuments to France's failure to integrate large parts of its Muslim population, despite many of them being from families that have lived in France for two or three generations.

France's tough-talking Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, blamed the trouble on "riffraff" and years of neglect of the problem by Socialist governments. For many, though, he was throwing salt into an open wound. The families of the electrocuted youths refused Sarkozy's offer to meet with them, and his hard-nosed approach drew criticism even from within his government. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, a probable rival to Sarkozy in the race to represent France's conservatives in the 2007 presidential election, arranged a meeting with the families, and calls for calm were resonating from all sides of the political spectrum. On Wednesday night the fires were burning again in the banlieues, consuming three dozen cars, two buses, two primary schools and an auto showroom. Government ministers were meeting in crisis session on Thursday, increasingly wary of the prospect that the violence, which until now has spread by what one official called "mimickry," could take on a more organized form. Says a French interior ministry official: "If these things continue and spread to places like Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg, we'll have a state of insurrection." If that happens, the real debate about how to integrate France's poor people will be postponed again. And the fire next time could be even worse.


51 posted on 11/04/2005 6:37:39 AM PST by finnman69 (cum puella incedit minore medio corpore sub quo manifestu s globus, inflammare animos)
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To: NYer
re: Chirac led the opposition to the Iraq war out of fear of how his Muslim population would react

And, of course, France was up to its neck in illegal Oil for Food transactions and supplying Iraq with weapons in violation of the sanctions.

Once again I am reminded of the joke about the scorpion that convinced a frog to give him a ride across a river by assuring the frog that if he stung him they would both die. The frog bought the logic, but half way across the scorpion stung the frog. With his last, gasping, drowning breath the frog asked "Why? Now we're both going to die!" The scorpion responds "It's my nature!"

Well, what we are seeing in France is the nature of the beast. The sooner the world acknowledges this, the sooner we'll be on our way to ridding ourselves of the scourge they are.
52 posted on 11/04/2005 6:50:54 AM PST by jwpjr
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To: finnman69

American GDP = 3.9%
french GDP = 0%

American unemployment = 5%
French unemployment = 10% and an amazing 23% among people 25 years or younger.

The US is on the decline? In the french presses dreams.


53 posted on 11/04/2005 6:54:11 AM PST by Proud_USA_Republican (We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good. - Hillary Clinton)
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To: finnman69
"Have your son give this Time article to the weasel teacher."

Thank you so much, I definitely will, and I'll also e-mail to my daughter in college. She goes to The College of the Holy Cross" (Chris Matthews/Clarance Thomas, go figure) and her prof. are "sickening liberal" as she says.
54 posted on 11/04/2005 6:57:42 AM PST by ladiesview61
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To: JohnLongIsland

" How the times have changed. Muslims in Paris's suburbs are out shooting at police and firefighters, burning cars and buildings, and throwing rocks at commuter trains. "

I have been lectured at least one hundred times by Europeans about America's racist society and why we have riots here in the US of A.

The fact is this is not a social problem but a moral problem that won't get fixed with more welfare benefits.


55 posted on 11/04/2005 7:28:44 AM PST by BeAllYouCanBe (Animal Rights Activist Advisory: No French Person Was Injured In The Writing Of This Post)
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To: Reaganesque

Thanks for the link to the Theodore Dalrymple article. This is an excellent piece that everyone who wants to understand the situation in France should read. The attitudes of the police, civil servants, etc. remind me vividly of pre-Giuliani New York City, though apparently it is even worse in Paris. As Giuliani proved, change is possible, but it takes both strong leadership and civic will power.


56 posted on 11/04/2005 7:59:17 AM PST by joylyn
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To: Vicomte13
There are no long waits for medical care in France.

I bet there are now!

57 posted on 11/04/2005 8:03:14 AM PST by jiggyboy (Ten percent of poll respondents are either lying or insane)
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To: JohnLongIsland

Damn! I hope they throw every last one of these punks back to Tunisia. This sickens me. I love France--unlike many people, I find the French very warm, except in the big cities, which are like any big city.

You know, there never was that big French immigration wave to the US--the French looked at the British and Germans and Irish leaving their teeming shores and said, "no thanks, we're good; think we'll hang out here..." LOL.

Shame to see it ruined because they lost their healthy nationalism to being politically correct. Ship 'em out, I say


58 posted on 11/04/2005 8:17:01 AM PST by ktvaughn
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To: Do not dub me shapka broham
Rioting spreads from Paris to Dijon
59 posted on 11/04/2005 8:21:03 AM PST by George W. Bush
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To: jiggyboy

No. There has not been much violence against persons. Nobody's been killed at all, and injuries are light.

The rioters have aimed at property, not persons, and the police have not used deadly force.


60 posted on 11/04/2005 8:21:05 AM PST by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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