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Seventh Day of Violence Erupts Near Paris
 Menacing youths smoked cigarettes in doorways Wednesday and hulks of burned cars littered the tough streets of Paris' northeastern suburbs scarred by a week of riots that left residents on edge and sent the government into crisis mode.
| Non-menacing youths chew tobacco. That's the way you can tell the difference. |
In a seventh consecutive night of skirmishes, young people threw rocks at police Wednesday in six suburbs in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris â about a 40-minute drive from the Eiffel Tower.
| I've occasionally wondered why the cops don't throw rocks back at them. Seems to me that a disciplined formation of police replying to the yoots in kind with their weapon of choice should be able to clobber them. The yoots are a pickup team, and the cops presumably are trained. And it'd be hard for even an AP writer to work up much sympathy for young Mahmoud blubbering about his busted head because Officer Friendly chucked a rock back at him. |
In one of them, Le Blanc-Mesnil, about a dozen cars burned and curious residents, some in slippers and bathrobes, poured into the streets.
Some said the unrest â sparked by the accidental deaths of two teenagers last week â is an expression of frustration over grinding unemployment and police harassment in the communities, where many North African immigrants live. "It is not going to end. It is going to explode," said an 18-year-old who would only give his name as Amine.
| "Ah, Mahmoud! I'm so frustrated! I must give my frustration expression!" |
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy both canceled trips abroad to deal with the unrest. "The government is entirely mobilized. Its immediate priority is to restore public order, and restore it without delay," de Villepin said.
| In that case, start conking some turbans. Or at least throw their rocks back at 'em and set fire to their cars... |
Muslim leaders at Clichy-sous-Bois' mosque, meanwhile, prayed for peace and asked parents to keep teenagers off the streets after skirmishes broke out after two teenage boys were electrocuted last Thursday while hiding in a power substation because they believed police were chasing them. The unrest spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, exposing the despair, anger and criminality in France's poor suburbs â fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.
| Despair. Anger. Seething. And lots of violence. European Islam in a nutshell. |
The violence, concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European nations face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from the continent's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values, too. "They have no work. They have nothing to do. Put yourself in their place," said Abderrahmane Bouhout, president of the Clichy-sous-Bois mosque, where a tear gas grenade exploded Sunday evening. Local youths suspected a police attack, and authorities are investigating.
| Even better, let's put my grandaddy in their place. He left the social unrest of post-WWI Italy to come to the U.S. He arrived speaking Italian, Croatian, Greek, German and French, but not English. He worked in a stone quarry, learned English, saved some cash, bought a home, raised two daughters. He lived in a predominantly Italian neighborhood but never, to the best of my knowledge, ever took part in a riot â though he and Harry Alonzo did have a fairly spectacular duke-out one time over a bocce game. He got along with his non-Italian neighbors just fine. He lived to a moderately ripe old age, and died respected by his peers. He's buried next to his beloved wife under the spreading branches of an oak tree, brought flowers a couple times a year by his grandchildren, who remember him fondly. Most of the other old Italians had similar lives and their sons and daughters married the locals of English, German, Irish and other descents as often as they married each other. Obviously they can't do that in France because... ummm... they don't have stone quarries. |
The violence cast doubt on the success of France's model of seeking to integrate its large immigrant community â its Muslim population, at an estimated 5 million, is Western Europe's largest â by playing down differences between ethnic groups. But rather than be embraced as full and equal citizens, immigrants and their French-born children often complain of police harassment and of being refused jobs, housing and opportunities. "If French society accepts these tinderboxes in its society, it cannot be surprised when they explode," said Claude Dilain, the Socialist mayor of the Clichy-sous-Bois suburb.
| In that case, why accept them? Why allow people from a foreign culture to swarm into your country and large numbers and set up their own local caliphates? |
Eric, a 22-year-old in Clichy-sous-Bois who was born in France to Moroccan parents, said police target those with dark skin. He said he has been unable to find full-time work for two years and that the riots were a demonstration of suburban solidarity.
| Could it be that he can't find full-time work because he can't speak the language and has no salable skills? And maybe dresses funny and makes faces at the natives? |
"People are joining together to say we've had enough," he said. He refused to give his surname because talking to reporters was poorly regarded in his neighborhood. "We live in ghettos," he added. "Everyone lives in fear."
| That might have something to do with the menacing yoots smoking cigarettes on the street corners and making faces at people. |
Many immigrant families are trapped in housing projects that were built to accommodate foreign laborers welcomed by post-World War II France but have since succumbed to despair, chronic unemployment and lawlessness. In some neighborhoods, drug dealers and racketeers hold sway and experts say Islamic radicals seek to recruit disenchanted youths by telling them that France has abandoned them. "French society is in a bad state ... increasingly unequal, increasingly segregated, and increasingly divided along ethnic and racial lines," said sociologist Manuel Boucher. Some youths turn to Islam to claim an identity that is not French, "to seize on something which gives them back their individual and collective dignity."
| Speaking French, dressing well, having an education, finding gainful employment, caring for your family and contributing to the nation give you individual and collective dignity. Wearing funny hats and rolling your eyes doesn't. |
Posted by: Fred 2005-11-03 |
