The riots in the suburbs of Paris and other parts of France have now continued for eleven straight days, and are spreading to other cities. In the midst of all this, President Chirac has spoken out about the riots for the first time.
PARIS, Nov. 6 — French President Jacques Chirac addressed the public Sunday for the first time in 11 days of the country’s worst violence in decades, saying his government’s “absolute priority” was “reestablishing security and public order.” His brief appearance came hours after the arson rampages struck the heart of Paris and accelerated their spread to other major French cities.
Those sowing “violence or fear” will be “arrested, judged and punished,” Chirac said from the steps of the Elysee Palace after an emergency meeting of his national security council.
The interesting thing about this is the difference it points out between politics in France and politics in the United States. If something similar were happening here and President Bush had waited eleven days to make a public statement, the calls for impeachment would be coming from all quarters. Despite this tough rhetoric, its unclear whether the authorities will be able to act in accordance with Chirac’s rhetoric:
Law enforcement officials said the unrest — including nightly arson and what they described as copycat attacks — was spreading more rapidly than their ability to respond to it. The violence began in the northern suburbs of Paris, where large populations of immigrants and their French-born children live.
Police said gangs of youths, apparently roused by television images and summoned by Internet blogs, torched 51 cars in Paris on Saturday night, including in attacks at the congested Place de la Republique near the trendy Marais district. Blazes were also set in 42 cities from Rennes, the capital of Brittany in the north, to Nice on the Cote d’Azur in the south. Details from each day’s violence are not fully known until the next morning
(….)
The violence continued Sunday night with more arson attacks across the country and rioters shooting at police in the suburb of Grigny, south of Paris. Ten police officers were injured, two of them seriously, according to early reports.
Violence is now erupting in towns with little history of unrest, underscoring the widespread dissatisfaction with the government’s policies toward its poorest citizens.
Meanwhile, the country’s national police chief as acknoweldged that riots that started out in the suburbs of Paris are now a nationwide phenomenon.
France’s national police chief warned Monday that a “shock wave is spreading across the country” as rioting intensified in cities throughout France during an eleventh night of violence. Officials from neighboring countries expressed concern that the unrest could leap across international borders.
Spread across borders ? I don’t like the sound of that. Clearly all is not well in the Fifth Republic.
Meanwhile, the American media continues to largely ignore the events in France and to refer to the rioters as “youths” while ignoring the fact that they are predominantly, if not exclusively Muslim. As I said several days ago, France is reaping the whirlwind for its lax immigration policies of the past 40 years or so and for the fact that it has largely ignored its immigrant population. They are, it seems, dealing with an angry, most likely radicalized population in their midst. And, as events in Denmark and elsewhere demonstrate, it is a problem that all of Europe will eventually have to deal with.
As Captain Ed points, out there is alot more at stake here than how many cars these “youths” will burn before the gendarmes are able to bring the situation under control:
This kind of multi-culti blindness will cause France and the West to lose the war on terror. The Islamists are playing for keeps, and the media organs of the West want to pretend that all religions are equal and that only “youths” cause unrest. Until the Islamists have the French government under the knife, we can expect the global media to continue its apologism for terrorists who use legitimate social concerns to start armed insurrections in the heart of the West. Even with guns and bombs aimed against the French, the media will not recognize a war when they see it.
Update @ Noon: Fox News is reporting that the rioting has claimed its first victim.
PARIS ? A man who was beaten by an attacker while trying to extinguish a trash-can fire during riots north of Paris has died of his injuries, becoming the first fatality since the urban unrest started 11 days ago, a police official said Monday.
and police are being injured:
It was the first time police were injured by weapons fire amid signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with police, officials said.
Among the injured police, 10 were injured by youths firing fine-grain birdshot in a late night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigney, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized but their lives were not in danger. One was wounded in the neck, the other in the legs.
One wonders what tonight will bring.
Update @ 1:oopm: The answer to my earlier question may be contained in this report from the Washington Times.
PARIS — Police officers, exhausted and dispirited after 11 nights of street battles, say their mainly young African and Arab adversaries have access to sophisticated weapons including grenades and could soon begin using them.
If this is true, the question then becomes how they have access to such weaponry.
Update @ 4:45pm: Jay at Wizbang sums up how I’m feeling about this story pretty succinctly:
What’s going on in France is a warning to the rest of the world: this is what can happen when you combine unrestrained immigration, unenforced assimilation, and unfettered nationalism, all embodied in a single group. France has a large body of unassimilated North African Muslims, who have established their own enclaves entirely separate from the larger French culture (and no, that’s not quite an oxymoron) surrounding them. They’ve been allowed to build their own culture and society and rules, and now are looking to establish that as a legally-recognized fact.
As he points out later in the post, the United States has a not-too-dissimilar situation with its own illegal immigration problems. As these riots continue, they seem to be less a statement of radical Islam than a lesson in the consequences of multiculturalism.
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Barbarian At The Gates
