Posted on 11/04/2005 5:36:05 AM PST by JohnLongIsland
If President Chirac thought he was going to gain peace with the Muslim community in France by taking an appeasement line in the Iraq war, it certainly looks like he miscalculated. Today the streets of the French capital are looking more like Ramallah and less like the advanced, sophisticated, gay Paree image Monsieur Chirac likes to portray to the world, and the story, which is just starting to grip the world's attention, is full of ironies. One is tempted to suggest that Prime Minister Sharon send a note cautioning Monsieur Chirac about cycles of violence.
Back in the 1990s, the French sneered at America for the Los Angeles riots. As the Chicago Sun-Times reported in 1992: "the consensus of French pundits is that something on the scale of the Los Angeles riots could not happen here, mainly because France is a more humane, less racist place with a much stronger commitment to social welfare programs." President Mitterrand, the Washington Post reported in 1992, blamed the riots on the "conservative society" that Presidents Reagan and Bush had created and said France is different because it "is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world."
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
The Aussies need to return to their pre-80s immigration policies, just like the UK-and we-should, if we have any hope of surviving.
:)
There are no long waits for medical care in France.
"WTF does a thread about France have to do with Bush's border policy (or lack thereof)?"
..................................................
just an intelligence test. LOL
Friday, November 04, 2005
LE POT III [Jonah Goldberg]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081835
From the September 21, 2005 LA Times:
Some French commentators have been dismayed by the tone of the media coverage concerning the destruction across the Atlantic. Some prominent people in the French press and politics, they believe, have eagerly turned the catastrophe into an all-purpose symbol of American ills, real or imagined.
"If the United States didn't exist, it would have to be invented so that elsewhere we can reassure ourselves, as if to better hide our own defects and incoherencies," warned a recent editorial in Le Figaro newspaper. "It's easy to ramble on about the decline of the American empire. Some even see the difficulties encountered by the U.S. as the work of a vengeful hand from the beyond.... Derision and demonizing are out of place."
The extensive coverage has tended to paint the picture of a superpower brought down by economic inequality, racial conflict and neglectful government. A recent Nouvel Observateur cover summed up this stark view: "America Stripped Naked: The cyclone reveals the wounds of the every-man-for-himself society."
Marianne, a left-leaning newsmagazine, declared: "The American giant folds beneath the weight of its failures and struggles to enforce an order that it wanted to impose on the world."
Marianne's take typified the profound disdain for President Bush in evidence here. A special issue titled "The Fall of the Pyromaniac Fireman" blamed Bush for a planetary flash fire of crises -- from Iraq to global warming -- that, in the magazine's view, discredit an entire free-market-driven, militaristic "Anglo-Saxon model" of governance.
In the newspaper Liberation, Gerard Dupuy accused the Bush administration of "contempt for victims who without a doubt were doubly at fault for being both poor and black." He concluded that the neoconservative "crusade," which was "already mired in the Mesopotamian marshes" of Iraq, had "foundered in the Louisiana bayou."
LE POT CONT'D [Jonah Goldberg]
From the September 1 roundup:
France's LIBERATION also feels this is a huge crisis for the US, and its society.
"This is a major crisis. The proof is that Bush - whom no tragedy nor international crisis seemed to be able to bother during his Texan holidays - went to Washington on the gallop," the left-leaning daily says.
"But the most striking thing, and the most revealing, is the brutal collapse of a rich and highly developed society," it comments. "The greatest power in the world knocked out by a punch from the gods," it says.
"The authorities," both state and federal, "are floundering, helpless", it goes on.
"And violence, which is never very far in a region where it is often forgotten that misery and social exclusion are endemic, is taking over in the form of pillaging.
"After the rules of the gods comes the law of the jungle," it concludes.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081833
LE POT MEET MSSR. KETTLE [Jonah Goldberg]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_10_30_corner-archive.asp#081832
From a September 8 BBC Newspaper summary of the French press:
"Katrina's devastation points the finger at Bush's system," announces LE MONDE's top headline.
Below the headline sits an large cartoon of George Bush watching wide-screen footage of black people floating dead in the water or screaming for help as an army patrol sails by on a boat, heavily armed. Bush is being briefed by his generals. Distraught and determined, he says: "But, what country is this? Is it far away? We absolutely have to do something!"
"The ravages of hurricane Katrina, which has swallowed up New Orleans...have provoked in the United States a debate on George Bush's model of government," says the French daily, noting that "for some...the page is turning on September 11, and this is perhaps the end of triumphant conservatism".
"Issues forgotten for years are back to the fore: poverty, the state's absence, latent racism," it goes on.
"After the 2001 attacks, the blacks had felt better integrated. Problems concerning society and poverty disappeared behind anti-terrorist concerns," it concludes.
Good post.
(so, were you a big pink flamingo on halloween?)
Have your son give this Time article to the weasel teacher.
http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,1125401,00.html
Why Paris is Burning
Failure to integrate immigrants has brewed a potent cocktail of rage
By JAMES GRAFF/PARIS
Officially, the French state doesn't recognize minorities, only citizens of France, all of them equal under the law. But that republican ideal has seemed especially hollow over the past week as the children of impoverished, largely Muslim immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa fought running battles with police throughout the banlieues, or suburbs, to the east and north of the French capital. On Sunday night, tear gas from a police canister filled the air in a Muslim prayer hall, sending worshipers out into the street gasping for air—and enraged at an act of desecration for which the police denied responsibility. By Wednesday, after five nights of violence, more than three dozen arrests had been made as the rioting spread from community to community—one official even warned that it threatened to become an "insurrection." And France's political class was embroiled in a fierce debate over how best to put a lid on their boiling banlieues.
Anger and resentment have been long brewing in the belt of immigrant misery that surrounds Paris, where jobs are rare and poverty rampant. It exploded last Thursday night when two teenagers in the northeastern banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois were electrocuted after they climbed into a electric relay station and touched a high-voltage transformer. The youths—one Malian, the other Tunisian—had apparently thought they were being chased by police after fleeing a police identity check. Though a preliminary investigation has found that they weren't being pursued, their senseless deaths were quickly blamed on the police. After two nights of violence, hundreds marched through Clichy-sous-Bois on Saturday morning, many of them wearing white t-shirts with the slogan "Mort Pour Rien"—dead for no reason.
More Violence Feared
The rapid spread of the violence showed that it was about more than the death of the two teenagers. Unemployment in many of these communities runs at 30 to 40 percent, even higher among young people. The banlieues are monuments to France's failure to integrate large parts of its Muslim population, despite many of them being from families that have lived in France for two or three generations.
France's tough-talking Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, blamed the trouble on "riffraff" and years of neglect of the problem by Socialist governments. For many, though, he was throwing salt into an open wound. The families of the electrocuted youths refused Sarkozy's offer to meet with them, and his hard-nosed approach drew criticism even from within his government. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, a probable rival to Sarkozy in the race to represent France's conservatives in the 2007 presidential election, arranged a meeting with the families, and calls for calm were resonating from all sides of the political spectrum. On Wednesday night the fires were burning again in the banlieues, consuming three dozen cars, two buses, two primary schools and an auto showroom. Government ministers were meeting in crisis session on Thursday, increasingly wary of the prospect that the violence, which until now has spread by what one official called "mimickry," could take on a more organized form. Says a French interior ministry official: "If these things continue and spread to places like Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg, we'll have a state of insurrection." If that happens, the real debate about how to integrate France's poor people will be postponed again. And the fire next time could be even worse.
American GDP = 3.9%
french GDP = 0%
American unemployment = 5%
French unemployment = 10% and an amazing 23% among people 25 years or younger.
The US is on the decline? In the french presses dreams.
" How the times have changed. Muslims in Paris's suburbs are out shooting at police and firefighters, burning cars and buildings, and throwing rocks at commuter trains. "
I have been lectured at least one hundred times by Europeans about America's racist society and why we have riots here in the US of A.
The fact is this is not a social problem but a moral problem that won't get fixed with more welfare benefits.
Thanks for the link to the Theodore Dalrymple article. This is an excellent piece that everyone who wants to understand the situation in France should read. The attitudes of the police, civil servants, etc. remind me vividly of pre-Giuliani New York City, though apparently it is even worse in Paris. As Giuliani proved, change is possible, but it takes both strong leadership and civic will power.
I bet there are now!
Damn! I hope they throw every last one of these punks back to Tunisia. This sickens me. I love France--unlike many people, I find the French very warm, except in the big cities, which are like any big city.
You know, there never was that big French immigration wave to the US--the French looked at the British and Germans and Irish leaving their teeming shores and said, "no thanks, we're good; think we'll hang out here..." LOL.
Shame to see it ruined because they lost their healthy nationalism to being politically correct. Ship 'em out, I say
No. There has not been much violence against persons. Nobody's been killed at all, and injuries are light.
The rioters have aimed at property, not persons, and the police have not used deadly force.
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