November 03, 2005

Rioting Spreads to 20 Towns Around Paris

Rampaging youths shot at police and firefighters Thursday after burning car dealerships and public buses and hurling rocks at commuter trains, as eight days of riots over poor conditions in Paris-area housing projects spread to 20 towns.
[...]
Nine people were injured in Seine-Saint-Denis and 315 cars burned across the Paris area, officials said. In the tough northeastern suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois, youth gangs set fire to a Renault car dealership and burned at least a dozen cars, a supermarket and a local gymnasium.

Traffic was halted Thursday morning on a suburban commuter line linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle airport after stone-throwing rioters attacked two trains overnight at the Le Blanc-Mesnil station. They forced a conductor from one train and broke windows, the SNCF rail authority said. A passenger was lightly injured by broken glass.
[What's to stop these louts from seizing another of these Metro trains and taking their "war" into central Paris? Rien, nothing.--Jen]
[...]
The violence also cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest by playing down differences between ethnic groups. Rather than feeling embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities.
[This is also attributable to France's moribund economy with its 10%+ unemployment, its numerous labor laws that virtually forbid bosses from firing current jobholders, lock in wages that are too high and benefits that cut into any profits like weeks of vacation and short working hours.
There is no incentive anywhere in France for businesses to create more jobs and manufacturing jobs that were once done by the rioters' parents and grandparents are being sent out to China.
It's a hellofa mess.
For an even more terrifying and first-hand look at these hotbeds of rage, the Parisian suburbs of violent Muslim youths, don't miss Theodore Dalrymple's piece Barbarians at the Gates of Paris from 2002.--Jen]
[...]
Right-wing French lawmaker Philippe de Villiers, who has said he wants to "stop the Islamization of France," told RTL radio that the problem stemmed from the "failure of a policy of massive and uncontrolled immigration."

Has the dawn of the Age of Eurabia just broken in Clichy?
I very much fear that it has.
Not only has the faltering French economy contributed to this state of affairs, but there are other "wonderful" liberal policies like the eradication of the death penalty and the weakening of all other criminal punishments as well as the emasculation of the police, rendering them unable or unwilling to arrest and prosecute lawbreakers.
And no-one seems to have guns, except the rioters.
And then, these angry, young men have radical Islam to channel and direct their murderous rage to where Mecca think it needs to go--to kill or subdue infidels like Jacques Chirac, Gerard Depardieu and Brigitte Bardot.
I have great fondness for France having spent some considerable time there, but I see no end in sight for this orgy of violence, now that it's begun.
It's time for another Charles Martel (who turned back the Muslim invasion of France at Tours in the year 732 A.D.)!