France on Fire PING
Posted on 11/06/2005 10:19:10 AM PST by FairOpinion
PARIS - French President Jacques Chirac called a security meeting of his top ministers Sunday after urban rioting spread — with arsonists striking from the Mediterranean to the German border and into central Paris for the first time.
The meeting, planned for Sunday evening, came as Chirac faced mounting criticism from opposition politicians for not publicly speaking about the violence that has fanned out from Paris' tough northeastern suburbs.
The intensity and scope of the unrest overnight Saturday-Sunday was unprecedented since riots first erupted northeast of Paris on Oct.27. Arsonists burned 1,295 vehicles nationwide, including 35 within Paris itself — a sharp increase from the 897 incinerated the night before, said national police spokesman Patrick Hamon. Police made 349 arrests nationwide, he said.
"What we notice is that the bands of youths are, little by little, getting more organized," arranging attacks through mobile phone text messages and learning how to make gasoline bombs, Hamon said.
Police found a gasoline bomb-making factory in a derelict building in Evry south of Paris, with more than 100 bottles ready to turned into bombs, another 50 already prepared, as well as stocks of fuel and hoods for hiding rioters' faces, senior Justice Ministry official Jean-Marie Huet told The Associated Press. Police arrested six youths, all under 18, he added.
The discovery Saturday night, he said, shows that gasoline bombs being used by rioters "are not being improvised by kids in their bathrooms."
Post offices, municipal buildings, provincial police stations and even nursery schools were targeted to the north, south, east and west of Paris. Police say copycat attacks are fanning the unrest, but there was no evidence that separate gangs were coordinating. Officials say older youths, many already known to police for previous crimes, appear to be teaching younger teens to make gasoline bombs and carry out attacks.
The unrest is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many immigrants and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair — fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as well as for Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a way out.
France, with some 5 million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe.
Overnight attacks were reported in unlikely southern cities including the cultural bastion of Avignon and the resort cities of Nice and Cannes.
There were also attacks in or around the cities of Lyon, Lille, Marseille, Strasbourg and in the Normandy area.
The unrest took another alarming turn with car burnings inside the well-guarded French capital. Most of the vehicles torched were on the northern and southern edges of the city. But police said three cars were damaged by fire from gasoline bombs near the Place de la Republique neighborhood, or 3rd district, northeast of City Hall and near the historic Marais district.
"We were very afraid," said Annie Partouche, 55, who watched cars burning from her apartment in the 3rd district and said she lined her window ledges with wet towels to keep out dense smoke. "We were afraid to leave the building."
Before the latest incidents, some 2,300 police poured into the Paris region to bolster security on what had been expected to be a restive Saturday night.
The violence began Oct. 27 in Clichy-sous-Bois, a low-income suburb northeast of Paris, after the deaths of two teenagers, of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation. They apparently thought they were being chased.
Since then, the situation has calmed in Clichy-sous-Bois, where clashes between youths and police have stopped. But, anger and violence has heightened in new areas. In all, 3,300 buses, cars and other vehicles have been torched since the violence began, said Hamon, the police spokesman.
He said the town of Evreux, 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of Paris, appeared hardest hit by marauding youths overnight Saturday-Sunday, with arsonists destroying at least 50 vehicles, shops and businesses, a post office and two schools.
Five Evreux police officers and three firefighters were injured in clashes with youths, Hamon said.
"Rioters attacked us with baseball bats," said Philippe Jofres, a deputy fire chief, told France-2 television. "We were attacked with pickaxes. It was war."
For a second night, a helicopter equipped with spotlights and video cameras to track bands of youths combed the poor, heavily immigrant Seine-Saint-Denis region, northeast of Paris, where the violence began and has been concentrated.
Dozens of vehicles, two gymnasiums and at least three classrooms were set afire in the Seine-Saint-Denis region, outside Paris, local officials said.
Even nursery schools were not spared, with five classrooms of the Sleeping Beauty Nursery School in Grigny, in the Essonne region south of Paris, burned late Saturday along with two classrooms of another school, police said. It was at least the third school set ablaze in several days.
Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy — blamed for inflaming violence with tough talk and calling troublemakers "scum" — visited the hard-hit Essonne region early Sunday to "give police support," he said.
1. Chiract waits 11 days, a week and a half, then calls a meeting. Real agressive stuff (sarcasm). Can you imagine, if we had something like that here and President Bush had just ignored it for a week and a half, then finally called a meeting with his advisors?!
2. Note the last paragrph: They are blaming Sarkozy, who had the only sensible approach of cracking down on these terrorists/criminals early. They are blaming him, instead of the rioting terrorists.
The answer---
Free cheese and porn mags to the yutes.
Put an end to it right there...
"As far as I'm concerned, war always means failure" ---Jacques Chirac, President of France
"As far as France is concerned, you're right." ---Rush Limbaugh
So they've raised their alert level from whine/wring hands to collaborate?
If it were war, you would have firearms. This is more like a prolonged capitulation, just like May 1940.
It's so difficult to figure out how to make gasoline bombs and learning how to text message. Gesh. What planet was the reporter born on?
Jacques Chirac will appease them somehow. He has no courage to put this down. 10 days of this and he hasnt stopped them yet? He wll appease them and comprimise. He will give the muslims some demands. Cowards.
Chirac exemplifies to a tee the brain-rot that is France today. There seems to be too few Sarkozy's left. Good luck France. You've made your bed, and now you're going to sleep in it, if people don't start torching your homes and businesses next.
Too early Mr. Chirac, you should wait few days more (extreme sarcasm).
Call a meeting - Form a committee - Surrender
SO WHAT! They can call all the meetings they want. Their little crappy country is down the tubes and the only one who knows how to save it is getting blamed for it.
I also highly recommend reading this article by Amir Taheri, which shows how France ignored the worsening problems of the Muslim immigrant basically setting up Muslim islands inside France:
WHY PARIS IS BURNING
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_10712.shtml
EXCERPTS (recommend reading the entire article at link above)
"With cries of "God is great," (=Allah Akhbar) bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.
But who lives in the affected areas? In Clichy itself, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants are Muslim immigrants or their children, mostly from Arab and black Africa. In other affected towns, the Muslim immigrant community accounts for 30 percent to 60 percent of the population. But these are not the only figures that matter. Average unemployment in the affected areas is estimated at around 30 percent and, when it comes to young would-be workers, reaches 60 percent.
In these suburban towns, built in the 1950s in imitation of the Soviet social housing of the Stalinist era, people live in crammed conditions, sometimes several generations in a tiny apartment, and see "real French life" only on television.
The French used to flatter themselves for the success of their policy of assimilation, which was supposed to turn immigrants from any background into "proper Frenchmen" within a generation at most.
That policy worked as long as immigrants came to France in drips and drops and thus could merge into a much larger mainstream. Assimilation, however, cannot work when in most schools in the affected areas, fewer than 20 percent of the pupils are native French speakers.
In some areas, it is possible for an immigrant or his descendants to spend a whole life without ever encountering the need to speak French, let alone familiarize himself with any aspect of the famous French culture.
The result is often alienation. And that, in turn, gives radical Islamists an opportunity to propagate their message of religious and cultural apartheid.
Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the "millet" system of the Ottoman Empire: Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs.
In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place. In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist "hijab" while most men grow their beards to the length prescribed by the sheiks.
"All we demand is to be left alone," said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local "emirs" engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities. "
Chirac will propose raising the price of gasoline...hell, it's not like anyone in France has a car that hasn't already been torched.
So how long do ya think it will take for Chirac to ask the UN for help?
Has there even been a curfew in any of the affected neighborhoods.... or is that to extreme?
Not necessarily. Firearms are a very recent addition to the weaponry of war. If you can beat your enemy with gasoline, matches, baseball bats, and hatchets, do you really need to invest in heavier stuff? War in Rwanda was mostly with machetes, and that was certainly a war.
My bad. What I meant to say, if the French really thought this was war, they'd be arming themselves with firearms.
I really need more coffee.
Chirac faced mounting criticism from opposition politicians for not publicly speaking about the violence
This is the problem. To the French, speaking aout the violence is what they fault him for. What about actually stopping the violence (by any means necessary)? The reason these youths are rampaging is because they know the police are playing footsie with them.
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