I have been discussing this with my French colleagues and I kept asking them why they just don't shoot about twenty of those bastards. Their answer is enough to give you gray hair.
They said,
"If we start shooting them, outside groups will start smuggling them weapons and then we're all screwed."
Makes total sense if you think about it.
I suspect that these riots are merely cover for a massive weapons smuggling operation.
Well, if the "Frenchmen on the street" do not rise up and engage in one massive ethnic cleansing verging on genocide, the France and it's culture as we know it today will cease to exist. The government will not save the nation.
"I have been discussing this with my French colleagues and I kept asking them why they just don't shoot about twenty of those bastards. Their answer is enough to give you gray hair.
They said,
"If we start shooting them, outside groups will start smuggling them weapons and then we're all screwed."
What they have to do is start shooting across the country at the same time. If they just do it in one place, it will only inflame those who weren't subjected to it, who won't expect it to be repeated. On the other hand, if they do it in about two dozen places at once, rather than it being something most of the rioters only hear about, it will be something they witnessed. I expect the "intifida" would quickly soil its collective pants.
I think a lot of freepers underestimate what the level of brute force the French government is capable of when its survival is at stake. If things do not calm down soon, I foresee the French resorting to measures that will make Abu Graib or Gitmo look like Club Med.
The French are perfectly capable of jetissoning European human rights law, International human rights law, and any and all other laws that might tie their hands against a general uprising. Of course the French, being the French, will later invent a "rationale" for why what they did was sanctioned by, and fully consistent with, all of these high minded rules, and once the heat is off, will go back to condemning the US as the evil empire for such imagined offenses as failing to embrace the Kyoto treaty, or eating GM food.
English translation: "We're wimps who've lost our manhoods. Don't send American troops again. Just send lots and lots of K-Y Jelly."
France has divisions of tanks, they are the 90% majority of the nation, the Islamics stand out from the rest of the people, there is no friendly border for the islamics to cross and regroup....this is only an insurgency because the French lack a spine.
Kind of like how the French smuggle weapons to Muslims in other countries?
Can't wait until they start using real weapons in France.