Posted on 11/12/2005 1:57:43 AM PST by ncountylee
PARIS (AP) - The number of cars torched overnight in France climbed slightly over the previous night to 502 in a 16th night of unrest that took its heaviest toll on the French provinces, police said Saturday.
Security was boosted in the capital with some 3,000 police officers fanning out around strategic points to counter feared weekend attacks targeting Paris. Gatherings were banned from Saturday morning until Sunday morning.
"We returned to an almost normal situation in Ile de France," said national police chief Michel Gaudin, referring to the Paris region. Arson attacks were counted in 163 towns around France, he said. The count of those detained overnight stood at 206, bringing to 2,440 the number of suspects picked up in just over two weeks of unrest.
Two Molotov cocktails were tossed at a mosque Friday evening in the southern town of Carpentras, but it was not immediately clear whether the attack was linked to the unrest that has wracked the poor suburbs and small towns of France since Oct. 27. President Jacques Chirac demanded that investigators quickly find out who was behind the attack.
Obviously, more talk is needed to say nothing about greater appeasement.
hey! only 502 cars. we're doin great mon ami!
So, how many cars total so far? I think at least about 5,000 cars have been burned so far. Imagine if this kind of thing happens in the US, the leftist MSM would have a front page dedicated to this every day...
Over 28,000 cars burned this year by islamofascists, someone hurls some lighter fluid at a Mosque and Jockstrap gets all teary-eyed?
Someone tell me, why haven't they hanged old jock from the Eiffel Tower yet? He should be pulling a Mussolini just about now.
Do they still have ESSO stations in France?
Are you thinking they may not for long at this rate? *grin*
Chirac is the friend of the utes, the French have not shown the will to stop the riots so only time will tell.
I wonder if things will heat up because it is the weekend.
More crazies free to participate in the fun.
Hell I have a neighbor that even I'd like to burn his car up.
This reporting is getting too abstract for me to understand if things are improving or getting worse. The MSM/French-MSM should issue daily bar charts showing trends. How about a TFE "Torching Futures Exchange" where, based on an informed and concerned public, one can as in Tradesports, buy a futures contract which would pay out big if levels increase and decrease (ie: shorting your position) in 1 week/ 1 month/ 3 months, etc. The Vich... I mean French government should be able to halt trading if prices swing over some number of francs per hour, to vent wild swings that may over time occur.
I wonder if Cal Worthington will open up a Paris office.
http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/
The Times of London has a handy table of the numbers of cars burned during each day of the French riots. Tim Blair and Mark Steyn have called this metric the Car-B-Q. A graph showing the numbers of cars Car-B-Qed against day is shown below.
From: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1513937/posts Is Paris Burning? ( Religion of Peace Alert )
There has been no change in France. The number of cars torched is not the best measurement of the situation. If, for some reason, 2000 untouched cars were driven down to the disaffected areas and parked over the weekend, the number would rise significantly.
France has a major problem, and it is about to get worse. Actual jihadists are probably getting settled in, and their bombing campaign will probably start pretty soon.
Via The Bad Hair Blog, here’s a map from The Economist showing the true extent of the French intifada:
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According to the American mainstream media (what's left of it), the riots in France have been quelled and France is once again a multicultural paradise. Kumbayah! Kumbayah!
Spinning by the French, encouraged by their worldwide leftist counterparts in the media.
Good for the auto industry
Waiting for all the usual hollyweirdos to tell us they're moving to France because they're so much more enlightened than we are here in the USA.
(Disarm the islamic state of france..dismantle their nukes now.)
Where the heck is the French Army ?
"Will Micheal Moore make a docudrama?"
Yes, about how the riots in France were caused by American businessmen.
Burn baby, burn.
"According to the American mainstream media (what's left of it), the riots in France have been quelled and France is once again a multicultural paradise"
That's about as accurate as the mainstream media gets.
French Going Wild For Senator Kerry In Election Fever
‘A CERTAIN ELEGANCE’ IS SEEN
By MICHAEL MANVILLE Special to the Sun
PARIS — It could be the flawless French he learned while at boarding school in Switzerland. Or that he summered in his youth at a picturesque village on the rocky shores of Brittany. Or his pledge to take America’s allies more seriously and pursue an inclusive foreign policy.
Or maybe it’s the simple fact that he’s not President Bush.
Whatever the reason, the French are going wild for John Kerry.
His face graces the covers of magazines and newspapers on Paris newsstands. He’s the subject of radio phone-in and television talk shows. Journalists chase down distant relatives and long-forgotten acquaintances in search of anecdotes.
If November’s presidential election were being held here, there’s no doubt that Mr. Kerry, the Massachusetts senator and Democratic candidate, would win by a landslide.
“People are going crazy. My phone is ringing from morning to night because everybody wants to know about Kerry,” said the head of the France chapter of Democrats Abroad, Constance Borde. “I’m even getting calls from French people asking if they can contribute to the campaign, and of course I have to tell them no.This is something I’ve never seen happening.”
It seems hard to imagine the French being enthusiastic about anything American these days. Under Mr. Bush, relations between France and America have been at their lowest ebb in decades, with the two nations trading jabs for more than a year over French opposition to the war in Iraq.
While Americans were muttering about “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” the French were crying foul over “American imperialism” and burning Mr.Bush in effigy on the streets of Paris.
“There is no question the Bush administration is unpopular in France, as it is across Europe,” said the director of the French Center on the United States, Guillaume Parmentier.“Bush himself is deeply unpopular. He is perceived as being non-presidential; even his demeanor makes Europeans uneasy.”
But in Mr. Kerry, the French seem to have found an American they can embrace.
On the streets of Paris, his candidacy is being welcomed with open arms.
“He is very much admired in France,” said a municipal office worker, Patrick Forestier, as he strolled with his lunch through the Latin Quarter. “It seems like he will be more sympathetic to Europe… .And of course anyone who is opposed to Bush will be popular with us.”
A shop worker on Boulevard St-Germain, Dominique Van Oudenhove, said Mr. Kerry seems the perfect antidote to four years of Mr. Bush.
“It is so important to have a president who knows Europe, whose spirit is open to its people and culture. Bush is so closed to the world.With Kerry there is a hope that we can start getting along with the United States again,” she said.
Mrs. Borde said the French see in Mr. Kerry the kind of leader they are more accustomed to.
“He is the closest thing that you will have to a French politician, with a certain diplomacy, a certain elegance,” she said.“He is more like a leader would be in Europe,” Mr. Parmentier said. Asked in what way, he laughed and replied: “Well, he doesn’t look Texan.”
Instead, he looks like the kind of American the French have always appreciated — urbane, well traveled, and sophisticated. Mr. Kerry’s connection with France dates back to his youth, when he spent summers with a flock of cousins in St-Briac-sur-Mer, a summer resort town where his maternal grandfather had built an estate.
James Grant Forbes, an international lawyer and banker,settled there with his wife, Margaret Winthrop, in 1908. The couple raised 11 children, including Mr. Kerry’s mother.
Their rambling cliffside property, called “Les Essarts,” was destroyed when Nazi troops occupied St-Briac, but Mr. Kerry’s grandfather rebuilt the estate and it became a regular summer haunt of far-flung relatives.
One of Mr. Kerry’s cousins, 58-yearold Brice Lalonde, is a former French environment minister and now mayor of St-Briac.In an article in L’Express under the headline “My cousin JFK,” Mr. Lalonde recently wrote of how Mr. Kerry always took charge of his cousins’ activities when he visited the estate.
“He was the one who organized the games, who led the gang,” wrote Mr. Lalonde, whose car sports a “Kerry For President” bumper sticker.
Still, Mr. Kerry has not returned to St-Briac in 20 years. At the height of American-French tensions last year, he skipped a family reunion that saw more than 200 relatives gather at the estate.
In fact, some here are looking to downplay his European connections, fearful that they may harm him in the campaign and give ammunition to the Republicans. One Bush administration official has commented that Mr. Kerry “looks French.”
Mr. Lalonde has repeatedly told reporters Mr. Kerry is a quintessential American with a deep sense of patriotism.“To cut off all suggestion,well-meaning or ill-meaning depending on what side of the Atlantic it comes from, John Kerry is in no way a Frenchman, even if he knows France,” Mr. Lalonde wrote.
Mrs. Borde said she believes Mr. Kerry’s past will be more of an asset than a drawback.“I think this could play in his favor,” she said. “Ordinary Americans are beginning to understand what damage has been done to our international reputation and they’re getting worried about it.”
Some observers here wonder if the French are not in for a disappointment if Mr. Kerry becomes president.
Mr. Parmentier said French fans tend to forget the fact that Mr. Kerry supported the war in Iraq and that he isn’t likely to drastically change American foreign policy.
“His attitude is very different, so the atmosphere will probably be better,” he said. “But there is a limit to what he can do.” In an opinion piece published last week in Le Figaro, Bruno Tertrais, an analyst with France’s Foundation for Strategic Research, warned that the French are “dreaming” if they expect Mr. Kerry will give them “an America they can love.”
Writing that the French are expecting a victory for Mr. Kerry will mean an end to “neo-conservatives and fundamentalists, to military super-strength and attempts to reshape the world,”Mr. Tertrais said he wanted to “shatter some illusions.”
He wrote that American political culture was so changed by the September 11 attacks that the Democrats would be no less likely than the Republicans to exercise American military power.
“Bush or Kerry, the next occupant of the White House will still be a war president,” he wrote.
And as for rebuilding U.S.-French relations, Mr.Tertrais held out little hope that Mr. Kerry would be any different from his predecessor.
“The transatlantic crisis of 2003 is still too fresh for any American president, no matter who he is, to reach out his hand too visibly to our country.”
The French aren’t the only Europeans laying claim to a connection with John Kerry. In the tiny Czech village of Horni Benesov — the birthplace of Mr. Kerry’s paternal grandfather — residents are hoping to one day host a presidential visit. “I believe he will become the American president. He seems a very reasonable, very likeable person,” the town’s mayor, Josef Klech, told Reuters recently. “He has said he has an interest in coming here if he visits the Czech Republic. This can put our small town on the world map.”
Mr. Kerry’s grandfather was Fritz Kohn, an ethnic German Jew born in Horni Benesov, a former mining town near the Polish border. A brewer in a land known for its fine beers, Khon moved to America at the turn of the last century, converted to Catholicism, and changed his name to Frederick Kerry. Mr. Kerry was unaware of his grandfather’s roots until a genealogist dug up the news last summer.
"President Jacques Chirac demanded that investigators quickly find out who was behind the attack."
Round up the usual suspects.
"French Going Wild For Senator Kerry In Election Fever"
Yes, and who was Senator Kerry's francophile foreign policy advisor? Ah yes, Joe Wilson.
The obvious solution to this is to mandate fire-proof cars.
Yeah, that's a real puzzler, isn't it?
Ya think?
Only two days earlier, the Iraqi Constitution was officially validated
Are the French Muslims upset that they don't have the hopeful future that their Iraqi brethren have?
Someone reported on this page a few weeks ago that the French EM corps was 23 percent Muslim.
"Obviously, more talk is needed to say nothing about greater appeasement."
Agreed. France is far too conservative. And while right winger, La Pen is, getting more popular by the day, he's not worth considering because well, just because. Allah Nutbar!
' Do the "suspects" happen to be muslims? '
Nah. Muhammad over there, that guy with the camel? He's baptist. And Acccchh Jihad over there? He's budhist.
"The obvious solution to this is to mandate fire-proof cars."
Absolutely. And fire-proof gasoline.
Of course the french government is made up of a bunch of racist snobs and they also play footsies with the islamic extremists (who suppress moderate Muslims) in underhanded business deals.
They're afraid to use an army which is around 15% Muslim in the enlisted ranks
Exasperated by lack of coverage BUMP.
A reliable source put the figure at 23 percent. Scary.
Report: Racism rife in French military
PARIS, Oct. 28 (UPI) -- Ethnic immigrants face endemic racism and discrimination in the French army, a new study reports.
Published by the French Institute for International Relations in Paris, the study finds recruits from mostly Muslim backgrounds face prevailing racism and mistrust, particularly when it comes to their cultural and religious practices.
The institute largely based its report on roughly 100 interviews that took place between March and July 2004.
The report is not due out until early November, but excerpts were published in Le Monde's Friday edition.
One corporal in the French army, who gave a fake name "Hocine," recounted regular slights he received from his counterparts and senior officers over years of service. A typical slur, he said, was "Behave yourself, you're not in the housing projects anymore."
A large chunk of France's ethnic immigrants come from the country's former North African colonies. Many have failed to break away from low-income housing projects, and experts say they are often marginalized in terms of educational opportunities and jobs.
Today, these ethnic immigrants represent between 10-20 percent of French soldiers, a figure that is growing, the French Institute report notes.
23 percent would make the French think they were being taken over. 10 percent---no worries, eh ?
Dites "Oui" au tigre?
I think the French should withdraw immediately for the sake of world peace.
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