I don't know about that......
Sorry, had to be an A$$ on that one!!!
"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.
Can you be specific about France's "brute force"?