<p>
<a href=“http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,174533,00.html[/url]”>http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,174533,00.html</a></p>
<p>Two weeks into it and the French finally deploy riot police.</p>
<p>Riot police were deployed much earlier. They have since sent more as the riots have gotten more intense and spread.</p>
<p>France: the melting pot.</p>
<p>It was just a time bomb waiting to go off. I hope it stays in France and doesn’t spread to the rest of Europe.</p>
<p>France has a declining national birthrate. To compensate they have had years of excessive immigration but without sufficient assimilation. The result is riots. It looks like even the French hate the French.</p>
<p>Woodwork:
Ouch :).</p>
<p>Glad we were lucky enough to have the kids in Paris in June instead of now! This does not sound good. When you think about how the 1960’s riots here in this country changed forever the landscape of so many of our cities…</p>
<p>Paris violence prompts U.S. travel warning</p>
<p>By Jamey Keaten
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 5, 2005</p>
<p>LE BLANC MESNIL, France – The United States government warned Americans yesterday to stay clear of violence-wracked Parisian suburbs, as rioting gangs of Arab and African youths, mostly Muslims, torched cars, schools and buses for an eighth straight night.
French authorities struggled to gain control of the worst rioting the country has seen in a decade.
The unrest has spread beyond the Paris area, with five cars burned in the eastern city of Dijon and 11 set afire in the southern city of Marseille.
In a particularly gruesome incident, attackers doused a 50-year-old woman on crutches with a flammable liquid and set her afire as she tried to get off a bus in the suburb of Sevran, judicial officials said.
The bus had been forced to stop because of burning objects in its path. She was rescued by the driver and hospitalized with severe burns.
Justice Minister Pascal Clement deplored the incident yesterday, saying it caused him “great emotion.”
A national police spokesman, Patrick Hamon, said rioters were communicating by cell phone text messages or e-mail – arranging meetings and warning each other about police operations.
The violence, which started Oct. 27 and has continued every night since, has exposed the discontent simmering in France’s poor suburbs.
The Seine-Saint-Denis region, where the troubles are centered, is dominated by low-income housing projects that are home to many African Muslim immigrants and their children and beset by high unemployment and crime.
Across the Paris region, the burned hulks of at least 520 cars littered streets, an increase from previous nights. Five police officers were slightly injured by rioters throwing stones or bottles, the Interior Ministry said.
At a depot in Trappes, to the southwest, 27 buses were incinerated, officials said. In Sevran, flames also engulfed two elementary schools and the construction site for a new multimedia library, United Press International reported.
However, there were “few direct clashes” with security forces late Thursday and early yesterday, no bullets fired at police, and far fewer large groups of rioters, said Jean-Francois Cordet, the top government official in Seine-Saint-Denis.
Instead, Mr. Cordet said, the unrest in Seine-Saint-Denis was led by “numerous small and highly mobile groups” that burned 187 vehicles and five buildings, including three warehouses.
A commuter train line linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle Airport ran limited service yesterday after two trains were targeted Wednesday night.
At the State Department in Washington, spokesman Sean McCormack repeated the warning. He said the riots were a French internal issue. Certainly, as anybody would, we mourn the loss of life in these kinds of situations. But, again, these are issues for the French people and the French government to address."
The French Foreign Ministry said it was concerned that foreign media coverage was exaggerating the danger.
“I don’t have the feeling that foreign tourists in Paris are in any way placed in danger by these events,” ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said.
He said the government was “sometimes a bit surprised” by the foreign coverage.
However, the violence has alarmed the government of President Jacques Chirac, whose calls for calm have gone unheeded.
“This is the first time [suburban violence] has lasted so long, and the government appears taken aback at the magnitude,” said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Center for Study of French Political Life.
The unrest erupted with youths angry over the deaths of Bouna Traore, 15, and Zyed Benna, 17, who were fatally shocked when they hid in a power substation in the suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, thinking police were chasing them.
Bouna’s brother, Siyakah Traore, called for protesters to “calm down and stop ransacking everything.”
“This is not how we are going to have our voices heard,” he told RTL radio, adding his voice to neighborhood groups working to stop the violence.
Dozens of residents and community leaders are trying to defuse tensions, with some walking between rioters and police to urge rioters to back down.
Abderrhamane Bouhout, head of the Bilal mosque in Clichy-sous-Bois, said he had enlisted 50 young men to try stop the violence. “We’ve had positive results,” he said.</p>
<p>What’s going on in Paris/France should be a warning to us in the U.S.</p>
<p>I’m surprised that some of the Bush haters on this message board haven’t logged in to blame Bush for the riots. Just wait, they will.</p>
<p>chief:
Oh, pulllease…</p>
<p>Chief6:
I second Weenie’s comment. With bells on.</p>
<p>An interesting commentary.</p>
<p><a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113131949542689562.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep[/url]”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113131949542689562.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep</a></p>
<p>I read that article, too, and I find it very accurate. I had a message from my brother, who thankfully, lives in a suburb on the opposite side of Paris from where all the riots are taking place. He blames Sarkozy for his inflammatory comments. The situation, however, has been building up for decades. Back in the 1960s, I visited an acquaintance in one of those subsidized housing high-rise buildings. My friend whisked out of the elevator and into her apartment as though we were in a danger zone. But I could not help notice all the graffiti and signs of decay all around. England has had its share of riots in the past. It’s a wonder that it’s taken so long for things to come to the boil in France.</p>
<p>I haven’t discussed the current unpleasantness with my French relatives yet, but you’re correct as to how long this problem has been festering. We have relatives in a northern suburb of Paris. They come to visit when we’re staying with other relatives in Paris, but they always stay overnight because the public transportation is unsafe at night once you leave the city. Very ironic that the inner city is safe, but the suburbs are dangerous–and it’s been that way for the last two decades (at least) that I’ve been visiting France.</p>
<p>It’s only ironic to Americans. My Parisian nieces and nephews have a way of talking about “les zonards” that speaks volume about Parisian attitudes toward the underclass. Back in the 1970s, I was in Aix for a short while and heard of clashes at discos and bars between North African immigrants and white Frenchmen. You may also remember the anti-racist movement “Touche Pas a Mon Pote” of the early 1980s which was very nice but did nothing to address the issue of unemployment.</p>
<p>" Very ironic that the inner city is safe, but the suburbs are dangerous–and it’s been that way for the last two decades (at least) that I’ve been visiting France."</p>
<p>Only ironic if one sticks to a US viewpoint. The inner cities have monuments, high priced apartments, excellent transportation, museumws, gorgeous scenery such as the lovely walks along the Seine. The suburbs have ugly high rise housing projects where the low income and jobless people congregate.</p>
<p>In the Paris area, if one lives in a suburb, that’s like saying that one lives in a slum.</p>
<p>The issue of unemployment is enormous with my lily-white French family as well. The adults are safely ensconcenced in academia, Euro-bureaucracy, government, etc., …but their kids are scrambling. The French economy/political system stinks. Some of the young people I know are meeting up with more success than others. Obviously, if they’re having trouble reaching their dreams, the residents of les banlieues are having an even tougher go at it. Yes, and I shouldn’t have used the word “irony.” It’s not ironic, it’s just the opposite of what we expect in the US.</p>
<p>Driver, I agree. My brother is in the private sector and it’s no picnic. And we all worry about the kids. </p>
<p>NSM: It depends on which suburb. There is a world of difference between Neuilly and Bobigny.</p>
<p>I think it’s quite unfortunate that all these riots are happening. I think the root causes are the Parisian youth’s general hatred of their government. The government, of course, helpless as they are, have this sort of an attitude: I don’t care what the root causes are, (as I can’t solve it anyway) there’s just no way am I going to let those thugs impose their warped rules on French society. </p>
<p>The rest of the French apparatus have a different take on it, sort of like, more appeasement is needed, but let’s do as we traditionally do and capitulate to these willful enemies who are going to sujugate us anyway.</p>
<p>The French have in fact, dealt with Islamic insurgency far longer than the US and most of Europe for that matter. They’re just not very good at it. I guess we have all finally seen the real Paris, just as we finally saw the real New Orleans.</p>
<p>seth blue:</p>
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<p>Can you name a country that is “very good” at dealing with their poor and minorities?</p>
<p>NSM: It depends on which suburb. There is a world of difference between Neuilly and Bobigny."
Very true.</p>