Islamic Propensity For Terrorism (Parisian Riots)

Support for Sarkozy as French rioting subsides

By John Lichfield in Paris
Published: 14 November 2005

A tense calm returned to most riot-torn areas of France at the weekend, despite skirmishes in the centre of Lyons, and Molotov cocktail attacks on two mosques.

A threatened mass assault on central Paris by multi-racial, suburban gangs failed to materialise but the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, was booed and jostled by a small group of youths on the Champs-Elysées.

There were suggestions yesterday that the minister's security cordon had been left surprisingly weak ­ possibly to "punish" M. Sarkozy for taking a hard line with police officers filmed beating a suspect last week. By the commonly accepted barometer of nightly car burnings, Saturday night and Sunday morning were the calmest since the riots started to spread.

"Only" 374 vehicles were torched nationwide, compared to 1,400 at the peak of the riots last weekend.

There were, however, serious skirmishes and arson attacks at several towns and cities in the south of the country, including Lyons, Carpentras and Toulouse.

In Lyons yesterday, large gatherings were banned by the regional authorities after Molotov cocktails were hurled at mosques in the city on Saturday night, and in Carpentras on Friday night. Authorities are investigating whether these were attempts by ultra-right groups to stir the embers of the riots and plunge France into outright racial conflict. The youth gangs, who have been rioting for 17 days, reflect the racial mixture of France's deprived and crime-ridden suburbs.

Police are also investigating the possibility that the two attacks on mosques ­ in which no one was injured ­ were carried out by militant elements among the mainly Muslim rioters.

If it was provocation, it worked. Carpentras, in the hills east of the Rhone valley, was quiet before Friday night's mosque attack by a hooded youth on a scooter.

On Saturday night, there were several "revenge" attacks in the town, including the ramming of a disused old people's home with a burning car and the wrecking of a nursery school.

Even before the attack on Lyons' grand mosque on Saturday night, the city was tense. There were running fights in the centre on Saturday evening between police and suburban gangs ­ apparently joined by local " anarchists". Despite this, the national chief of police, Michel Gaudin, spoke of a "significant lull" in the violence. He predicted " things could now return to normal quickly".

The longer-term consequences of the riots are harder to forecast. The Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, has promised a programme of new investment in France's 750 poor suburbs and a controversial plan to take disaffected youths out of school at 14 to find them "apprenticeships".

The deeper background causes of the violence ­ the hidden racial barriers in French society; the belief of many suburban youths that they have no future in France, other than low-level crime ­ will take much longer to address.

In the meantime, the great political victim of the riots has been President Jacques Chirac. A weekend poll in the Journal du Dimanche suggested that only 29 per cent of French people thought he had anything to offer to solve the violence. M. Sarkozy and M. de Villepin ­ likely rivals for the presidency in 2007 ­ topped the poll with 53 per cent and 52 per cent.

* The EU has offered France ¤50m (£33m) to help tackle the problems. The EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said the main problem behind the unrest was youth unemployment, and that the challenge of integrating immigrants occurred in many European cities.

A tense calm returned to most riot-torn areas of France at the weekend, despite skirmishes in the centre of Lyons, and Molotov cocktail attacks on two mosques.

A threatened mass assault on central Paris by multi-racial, suburban gangs failed to materialise but the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, was booed and jostled by a small group of youths on the Champs-Elysées.

There were suggestions yesterday that the minister's security cordon had been left surprisingly weak ­ possibly to "punish" M. Sarkozy for taking a hard line with police officers filmed beating a suspect last week. By the commonly accepted barometer of nightly car burnings, Saturday night and Sunday morning were the calmest since the riots started to spread.

"Only" 374 vehicles were torched nationwide, compared to 1,400 at the peak of the riots last weekend.

There were, however, serious skirmishes and arson attacks at several towns and cities in the south of the country, including Lyons, Carpentras and Toulouse.

In Lyons yesterday, large gatherings were banned by the regional authorities after Molotov cocktails were hurled at mosques in the city on Saturday night, and in Carpentras on Friday night. Authorities are investigating whether these were attempts by ultra-right groups to stir the embers of the riots and plunge France into outright racial conflict. The youth gangs, who have been rioting for 17 days, reflect the racial mixture of France's deprived and crime-ridden suburbs.

Police are also investigating the possibility that the two attacks on mosques ­ in which no one was injured ­ were carried out by militant elements among the mainly Muslim rioters.

If it was provocation, it worked. Carpentras, in the hills east of the Rhone valley, was quiet before Friday night's mosque attack by a hooded youth on a scooter.
On Saturday night, there were several "revenge" attacks in the town, including the ramming of a disused old people's home with a burning car and the wrecking of a nursery school.

Even before the attack on Lyons' grand mosque on Saturday night, the city was tense. There were running fights in the centre on Saturday evening between police and suburban gangs ­ apparently joined by local " anarchists". Despite this, the national chief of police, Michel Gaudin, spoke of a "significant lull" in the violence. He predicted " things could now return to normal quickly".

The longer-term consequences of the riots are harder to forecast. The Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, has promised a programme of new investment in France's 750 poor suburbs and a controversial plan to take disaffected youths out of school at 14 to find them "apprenticeships".

The deeper background causes of the violence ­ the hidden racial barriers in French society; the belief of many suburban youths that they have no future in France, other than low-level crime ­ will take much longer to address.

In the meantime, the great political victim of the riots has been President Jacques Chirac. A weekend poll in the Journal du Dimanche suggested that only 29 per cent of French people thought he had anything to offer to solve the violence. M. Sarkozy and M. de Villepin ­ likely rivals for the presidency in 2007 ­ topped the poll with 53 per cent and 52 per cent.

* The EU has offered France ¤50m (£33m) to help tackle the problems. The EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said the main problem behind the unrest was youth unemployment, and that the challenge of integrating immigrants occurred in many European cities.

Walter, you're killing my eyes...lol

<looks at watch>

It's Caliphate time again.

Finally, Setanta answers a mystery I've been wondering about for the longest time.

Why are some people (they've all been liberals, in my experience) hell bent against admitting facts when it combines a minority race and a criticism. Why, oh why?

A look at his mindless, knee-jerk post above is the answer.

If you criticise a minority--the obvious next step in the mind of a liberal is to exterminate them.

There may be a few steps you are leaving out.

Sarkozy blames French model for riots Chirac's riot speech criticised as timid

By John Lichfield in Paris
Published: 16 November 2005

President Jacques Chirac's response to almost three weeks of urban riots in France was widely criticised yesterday as belated, timid and confused. Even in his own centre-right political "family" the President's 13-minute television and radio address to the nation was damned with faint praise.

His Interior Minister, and detested political rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, went even further. In an outspoken speech to the National Assembly, he implicitly blamed M. Chirac, and the whole of the French political system, for allowing economic and social problems to pile up over 30 years, not just in the poor suburbs, but in France as a whole.

The "sickness in the suburbs" was a reflection of a wider French "malaise", and the blockages in French society caused by selfishness and corporatism, M. Sarkozy said. "The troubled suburbs are the extreme expression of a country which despairs for the future. They are not another France but France as we have built, and managed it, for the past 30 years."

This amounted to a brutal repudiation of the approach of M. Chirac, but also of the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin. Both insist that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the French social "model".

The centre-piece of M. Chirac's statement on Monday was a plan to create a "civil volunteer" force to help unemployed and disaffected youngsters acquire skills for the workplace. Even politicians on the centre-right poured cold water on the idea. The plan turned out in any case to be a reworking of proposals already announced. Some politicians said the idea was too limited, and too vague, to substitute for the "nation-building" influence of compulsory military service which was abolished in 1996 - by M. Chirac himself.

President Chirac also called for all French people to examine their consciences and help to root out the "poison" of racial discrimination "in words, and in looks, in the heart and in deeds". He promised to hold a meeting with media executives to try to persuade them to include more faces of people from Arab or African backgrounds on French television screens. He will also urge French employers to give equal treatment to job-seekers with Arab- or African-sounding names.

M. Chirac bowed to the prejudices of many on the right by suggesting that the unrest might be connected to France's generous laws on "family" immigration. Leaders of M. Chirac's UMP party were talking yesterday of introducing a law to clamp down on the "reunification" of immigrant families.

The National Assembly and Senate were expected last night to rubber-stamp M. Chirac's call for a three-month extension of emergency powers, despite a clear reduction in the level of violence in recent days.

Of the 2,800 youths arrested since the troubles began, only 120 were not born in France. Many of the rioters are the children of North African or African immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s.

On Monday night and yesterday morning, only 215 cars were incinerated, compared to 1,400 at the height of the riots. The "normal" average for car burnings in France is 100 a day.

President Jacques Chirac's response to almost three weeks of urban riots in France was widely criticised yesterday as belated, timid and confused. Even in his own centre-right political "family" the President's 13-minute television and radio address to the nation was damned with faint praise.

His Interior Minister, and detested political rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, went even further. In an outspoken speech to the National Assembly, he implicitly blamed M. Chirac, and the whole of the French political system, for allowing economic and social problems to pile up over 30 years, not just in the poor suburbs, but in France as a whole.

The "sickness in the suburbs" was a reflection of a wider French "malaise", and the blockages in French society caused by selfishness and corporatism, M. Sarkozy said. "The troubled suburbs are the extreme expression of a country which despairs for the future. They are not another France but France as we have built, and managed it, for the past 30 years."

This amounted to a brutal repudiation of the approach of M. Chirac, but also of the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin. Both insist that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the French social "model".

The centre-piece of M. Chirac's statement on Monday was a plan to create a "civil volunteer" force to help unemployed and disaffected youngsters acquire skills for the workplace. Even politicians on the centre-right poured cold water on the idea. The plan turned out in any case to be a reworking of proposals already announced. Some politicians said the idea was too limited, and too vague, to substitute for the "nation-building" influence of compulsory military service which was abolished in 1996 - by M. Chirac himself.
President Chirac also called for all French people to examine their consciences and help to root out the "poison" of racial discrimination "in words, and in looks, in the heart and in deeds". He promised to hold a meeting with media executives to try to persuade them to include more faces of people from Arab or African backgrounds on French television screens. He will also urge French employers to give equal treatment to job-seekers with Arab- or African-sounding names.

M. Chirac bowed to the prejudices of many on the right by suggesting that the unrest might be connected to France's generous laws on "family" immigration. Leaders of M. Chirac's UMP party were talking yesterday of introducing a law to clamp down on the "reunification" of immigrant families.

The National Assembly and Senate were expected last night to rubber-stamp M. Chirac's call for a three-month extension of emergency powers, despite a clear reduction in the level of violence in recent days.

Of the 2,800 youths arrested since the troubles began, only 120 were not born in France. Many of the rioters are the children of North African or African immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s.

On Monday night and yesterday morning, only 215 cars were incinerated, compared to 1,400 at the height of the riots. The "normal" average for car burnings in France is 100 a day.

Riots are a class act - and often they're the only alternative

By the end of last week it looked as though the fortnight of struggle between minority French youth and the police might actually have yielded some progress.

Condemning the rioters is easy. They shot at the police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses, rammed a car into a retirement home. But those who wondered what French youth had to gain by taking to the streets should ask what they had to lose.

Unemployed, socially excluded, harassed by the police and condemned to poor housing, they live on estates that are essentially open prisons. Statistically invisible (it is against the law and republican principle to collect data based on race or ethnicity) and politically unrepresented (mainland France does not have a single non-white MP), their aim has been simply to get their plight acknowledged. And they succeeded.

Even as the French politicians talked tough, the government unrolled a package of measures that would give career guidance and work placements to all unemployed people under 25 in some of the poorest suburbs; there would be tax breaks for companies who set up on sink estates; a €1,000 (£675) lump sum for jobless people who returned to work as well as €150 a month for a year; 5,000 extra teachers and educational assistants; 10,000 scholarships to encourage academic achievers to stay at school; and 10 boarding schools for those who want to leave their estates to study.

The reality is that none of this would have happened without riots. There was no petition these young people could have signed, no peaceful march they could have held, no letter they could have written to their MPs that would have produced these results.

Amid the charred chassis and broken glass there is a vital point of principle to salvage: in certain conditions rioting is not just justified but may also be necessary, and effective. From the poll tax demonstrations to Soweto, history is littered with such cases.

Rioting is a class act. Wealthy people don't do it because they have the levers of democracy at their disposal, or they can rely on the state or private security firms to do their violent work for them, if need be.

The issue of when and how rioting is effective is more problematic. Most powerful when they stem from a movement, all too often riots are instead the spontaneous, leaderless expression of pent-up frustration void of an agenda or clear demands. Many of these French youths may have had a ball last week, but what they really need is a party - a political organisation that will articulate their aspirations.

Gary Younge has written a thought-provoking, radical Comment in The Guardian of last Monday.

I wholly agree with it.

This is a short summary of the article, made up of compiled excerpts. But of course it'd be better to read the whole thing.

Quote:

Riots are a class act - and often they're the only alternative

By the end of last week it looked as though the fortnight of struggle between minority French youth and the police might actually have yielded some progress.

Condemning the rioters is easy. They shot at the police, killed an innocent man, trashed businesses, rammed a car into a retirement home. But those who wondered what French youth had to gain by taking to the streets should ask what they had to lose.

Unemployed, socially excluded, harassed by the police and condemned to poor housing, they live on estates that are essentially open prisons. Statistically invisible (it is against the law and republican principle to collect data based on race or ethnicity) and politically unrepresented (mainland France does not have a single non-white MP), their aim has been simply to get their plight acknowledged. And they succeeded.

Even as the French politicians talked tough, the government unrolled a package of measures that would give career guidance and work placements to all unemployed people under 25 in some of the poorest suburbs; there would be tax breaks for companies who set up on sink estates; a €1,000 (£675) lump sum for jobless people who returned to work as well as €150 a month for a year; 5,000 extra teachers and educational assistants; 10,000 scholarships to encourage academic achievers to stay at school; and 10 boarding schools for those who want to leave their estates to study.

The reality is that none of this would have happened without riots. There was no petition these young people could have signed, no peaceful march they could have held, no letter they could have written to their MPs that would have produced these results.

Amid the charred chassis and broken glass there is a vital point of principle to salvage: in certain conditions rioting is not just justified but may also be necessary, and effective. From the poll tax demonstrations to Soweto, history is littered with such cases.

Rioting is a class act. Wealthy people don't do it because they have the levers of democracy at their disposal, or they can rely on the state or private security firms to do their violent work for them, if need be.

The issue of when and how rioting is effective is more problematic. Most powerful when they stem from a movement, all too often riots are instead the spontaneous, leaderless expression of pent-up frustration void of an agenda or clear demands. Many of these French youths may have had a ball last week, but what they really need is a party - a political organisation that will articulate their aspirations.