Posted on 11/04/2005 9:11:31 AM PST by DallasMike
"I hope you'll join the rest of us in calling for freedom for the Paristinians. And the surrender of the Left Bank for a new Paristinian homeland."
I am not much enamoured of the Palestinian cause, I am afraid. Too much terrorism and killing of people has vitiated their legitimate moral point about territory.
So I must demur on your offer that I should join you in supporting the Palestinian cause.
..................
Sarkozy's remarks echo those of other experts and law enforcement officials who believe criminal gangs and possibly Islamist movements might be fueling near nightly clashes between youths and police outside Paris in recent days.
Can't be, We in America know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam, the French must too.
"The French are still in denial that they tooo are in this war on terror. Islam is hellbent on it!"
Actually, no.
There are French troops with you in Afghanistan. France and America are cooperating very closely on Lebanon and in pressing Syria. I heard the American Ambassador John Bolton on the radio last evening speaking of the close work the USA and France are doing on Syria.
The French counterintelligence agency in Paris is the hub of counterintelligence activities against Islamist terrorism across the world, and is the only international spy agency that will actually take direct tasking from foreign nations.
France is very deeply engaged in the war on terror. Everyone knows what is at stake. Nobody is blind. Everyone knows that there are operatives at work in France attempting to replicated what Al Qaeda did in Spain and Islamists did in England.
But the riots in Seine-St. Denis do not have anything to do with this, any more than the black riots in America in the 1960s during the Cold War were a Communist plot to overthrow the United States. Different dynamics are at work.
The young Beurs going wild in the banlieu are angry, and need to be dealt with carefully. They COULD radicalize and become the foundation of an Islamist movement. But right now, what they are complaining about - with some justice, although their means of expression are totally unacceptable - is police brutality, the lack of jobs, ghetto conditions and social exclusion. That is all French domestic issues, and if France deals with these issues carefully, Clichc s/s Bois will not become the next front in the War on Terror, because it will not be an Islamist matter.
BWAHAHAHA...Now pull the other one.
I can only hope they misquoted her and she meant to say 'there is no link between Islam and this violence'.
If that's the case she would only be stupid and not brain dead.
Are they trying to tell us it's just the crypts and the bloods causing a little mischief?
"But did she say "Je ne crois pas qu'il y a un lien entre l'Islam et la violence"? "
I can totally see that coming from the mouth of a Eurocrat. That's just the kind of PC garbage ALL our leaders are spouting. It's the attitude behind the whole, "Islam is a religion of peace" junk.
Until the West lays down it's multicuralism it can not fight this war and win.
Wow...here....
Apparently all of Europe is wearing these...one size fts all Socialists!
"Yup, just a "Religion of Peace"...no problems here...
Yeesh...way to reverse-Darwin yourselves, Euro-Weenies!
What is your basis for saying that what is happening in France now has nothing to do with Islam?
Well, perhaps. But I can't see it coming out of the mouth of a French woman. The French are not pie-in-the-sky dreamers. That is the Scandinavians. Nor are the French so rigidly doctrinaire that they will intentional inflict destruction upon themselves and persist in it: that is the Germans.
There have been bombs discovered on the TGV lines, and there was Islamist bombing in Paris in the 1980s. France has forces in Muslim Africa and in Afghanistan, and French counterintelligence operations track Islamist terrorists and get them all across France.
French officials can make bad calls, but they are rarely naive.
I think she was referring to the current violence in the banlieu, which is the center of all attention in France now. I think she meant that the Beurs rioting in Clichy are not doing so because of Islam.
Islam is an organized gang.
Nam Vet
A Baghdad Bob award?
Knowledge of those particular suburbs and cousins who live there, including some who are black and some who are beur.
Listening carefully, even in the Anglo-Saxon media reports, to what the people are saying. They are not talking about Allah, or jihad, or the Qu'ran. They are not even referring to the fouillard - the headscarf.
These riots exploded because two kids got killed, after what everyone believes was a police chase. Nobody in those areas believes the police when they say they were not chasing the youths, because everyone knows that the police are extremely aggressive, that they beat up beurs and blacks, that they harrass young men all the time. At least that is the way it is perceived. And there is some truth to it. French police are very harsh. They are militaristic, and they like to hit people. French authorities also use torture - the famous affair of the phone book. If you do not know it, an annual telephone directory hurled at you flat end on produces great pain, like beating with a truncheon. It does not, however, leave a mark. If you are young and beur and come into the possession of the police, which can happen for looking at them wrong, or for no discernible reason, you are going to suffer blows and, at very least, degradation.
And remember, please, you are as French as the cop is.
This is the thing that is so frustrating in reading American accounts of this. These are French people rioting, not Algerians or Afghani Taliban.
The other things they talk about are jobs. They have no jobs. Go to the internet cafe on any day of the week in Bondy. They are full of Beurs, teenagers and also in their twenties, playing violent video games and chain smoking. Why? Because there are no jobs.
If you ever apply for a job in France, you will discover that you are expected to attach a photo to your curriculum vitae. What is the purpose of that photo? Two-fold: to make sure that no pretty girl is unhired, and to make sure that no Beur with a French name slips through the cracks.
Two students, both with law degrees from the U. of Paris, Sorbonne, both with the same mention. The one is white from the provinces: he will obtain a juridical job. The other is black, or beur: he will, at best, serve as an usher in a movie theater, because nobody will hire a black or a beur for any professional post, nor give them any authority in government. Blacks have it a little better, even, than beurs. They can do well in teaching and in medicine. But not if they are African. There are many children of African blacks in these riots. They are often Christian (to about the same extent that the Beur are Muslim, which is to say that both are secular and don't much practice any religion).
Housing conditions are deplorable. Over the past several months, dozens of people, mostly black immigrants, have been burnt up in terrible nocturnal fires in apartment buildings in terrible condition. Now, one can criticize the existence of a social state if one wishes (America has one too, which is practically as extensive as France's), but if the government is going to provide or subsidize housing, it cannot allow such housing to simply lapse into uninhabitable or dangerous conditions.
Where is Islam in any of this?
The police chase some kids, and they die, and the community of youth (many of whom have also been chased and beaten up by police) rise up and start smashing things. They aren't shouting from the rooftops about Islamic revolution and Sharia. They are calling for jobs and for reining in the police.
This does not make them justified in their violent property crimes, nor in the violence directed against a few people (that woman burnt was a terrible thing). But it does show the cadre in which these things are going on. Elsewhere, I have compared this to the US race riots in the 1960s. Going on elsewhere in the world was decolonization and the Cold War struggle between Communism and the West. But were the massive riots and struggles in the USA REALLY about the Communist Global Conspiracy and decolonization? No. They were about particular American social and legal problems that had festered for a long, long time and finally people got fed up and exploded.
That is what is going on in France.
Islamist want to turn it into a Muslim revolution, but it's not that, not yet anyway. Could it BECOME that? Sure. If France doesn't figure out a way to break down the walls of exclusion - something on the order of the Affirmative Action program the Republican Nixon Administration came up with in America in order to defuse America's racial tension, things could radicalize.
Some of the complaints of the beurs are legitimate, and they aren't going to go away. Either this warning shot will be answered, or, if it's not, or if it's answered with brutality by the French state (which does not seem likely) things will escalate. And then we WILL be talking about Islamism taking root in the general populace. But that has not happened yet.
Just as in this country, political correctness is in no way limited by reality.
I think you don't think very well....missing the obvious facts before your face, aren't you lady?
Thanks. I've thought from the beginning that this is more like the LA riots than anything else.
Thanks for taking the time to offer such a well stated opinion.
your opinion of the situation is simular that of the french govt.
sadly however, i dont see an easy way out.
un-employment is already over 10 percent, taxes are high, and social spending at record levels already.
how additional money can be found is iffy i think.
good luck to them on that.
cheers,
knews hound
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