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Saturday November 5, 10:56 AM
Violence flares again in France, deepening sense of crisis
Photo : AFP
PARIS (AFP) - Arson attacks flared overnight around Paris and police made more than 30 arrests as the worst violence the capital has seen in decades dragged on into its ninth straight night.
Two textile warehouses and a car showroom were set on fire to the northeast of the city, while some 180 vehicles were torched in the Paris region.
A fire-bomb was also thrown against the wall of a synagogue in the northern suburb of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, police said.
At least 30 people were arrested, including some minors found to be carrying material to make incendiary bombs.
Similar scenes were also reported in the northern city of Lille, the western city of Rennes and in Toulouse, in the southwest.
The gangs of youths from low-income, high-immigration neighbourhoods blamed for the violence largely ditched their earlier tactics of pelting police with stones, bottles and Molotov cocktails, preferring instead to run away after setting the fires.
The new round rampages came just hours after Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin held a crisis meeting with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy on the riots, which are the worst since a 1968 student revolt.
Villepin also met a group of suburban youths for two and a half hours in his office to discuss the situation and hear their grievances.
Much of the fury in the streets, though, has been aimed at Sarkozy and his hardline policies aimed at cleaning up the crime-ridden suburbs with, as he put it, "a power-hose."
Shots have been fired at riot police, without causing injury, and at least three people -- including a handicapped woman -- have been badly burnt by Molotov cocktails.
The enduring troubles have dealt Sarkozy's ambition of running in 2007 presidential elections a heavy blow. Many of the youths in the disaffected suburbs have called for his resignation over his description of them as "rabble" -- a demand echoed Friday by the opposition Communist and Greens parties.
The riots were sparked October 27, when two teenagers were electrocuted in a tough, low-income suburb north of Paris as they hid in an electrical sub-station to flee a police identity check.
Since then, they have spread every night. On Thursday, copycat violence occurred in Marseille, Dijon and in Normandy.
Overwhelmed police have found themselves powerless to stop the conflagration, which has seen a total of over 1,000 vehicles torched and more than 200 people arrested.
Those responsible are groups of young Muslim men, the sons of families from France's former Arab and African colonial territories, who have said in interviews that they are protesting economic misery, racial discrimination and provocative policing.
The leader of one police union, Bruno Beschizza, has described the riots as "urban terrorism", but Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe of the opposition Socialist Party warned against hastily lumping together "one religion, Islam, and a few extremists" in apportioning blame.
Mark Steyn on the Euroarabian war currently happening in the suburbs of France.
HH: Hello, Mark. Where do we find you today?
MS: I'm in the great state of New Hampshire, Hugh.
HH: Okay, you've gone to ground up there for almost three weeks in a row. That's really quite remarkable for you.
MS: Yeah, the early winter. I'm hibernating early.
HH: And so, you're not going to Paris anytime soon?
MS: I'm actually thinking of going to Paris. I went to one of these suburbs that's currently ablaze three years ago. And what was interesting to me is I had to bribe a taxi driver a considerable amount of money just to take me out there. They're miserable places. But what was interesting to me is that after that, I then flew on to the Middle East, and I was in Yemen, and a couple of other places. And what was interesting to me was that I found more menace in the suburbs of Paris than I did in some pretty scary places in the Middle East. I mean, there is a real...this, I think, is the start of a long Eurabian civil war we're witnessing here.
HH: Now that's a pretty provocative statement. Let's begin by...describe these for us. Are they like the Moscow or the Leningrad or the St. Petersberg tenements that stretch on and on?
MS: Well, actually, I would say they're more miserable than that...
HH: Wow.
MS: ...because a lot of them are like concrete bunkers. They have very strange things there...these public buildings that you have to have a kind of security card to get into. So, you'll be going to see someone, and you'll be frantically sticking this kind of key card in the door, while you're standing outside on this very exposed sidewalk. They're places where people who are not Muslim feel very ill at ease. They're places where the writ of the French state does not run. The police don't police there. They basically figure if you go there, you're on your own. You're taking your own chances there. I mean, I don't think Americans understand quite the degree of alienation of some of these groups. You know, there's a French cabinet minister whose title is the minister for social cohesion. And I think that would be a pretty odd title to have for a cabinet secretary in the United States.
HH: Or the U.K. for that matter. Now, it's the seventh night of rioting as we speak, and it got very violent last night. I don't know what's going on tonight. Do you...how do they solve this? I mean, what do they even do in France to get a handle on this?
MS: Well, I think this is the dispute that's going on between Monsieur Sarkozy, whose the, what passes, I think, for a conservative figure in French politics, who really wants to crack down, and who wants to say to these people you can behave like respectable French citizens, or we're going to take action and we're going to clean up these street. And then Monsieur de Villepin, whose currently the prime minister, whose line is basically that we should accommodate their grievances, and all the rest of it. And judging from Chirac's speech, where he says we have to understand their grievances and their alienation, I think the European tendency to appease these people is coming into play in the French cabinet. And I would say the one consequence of that is that a lot more people are going to be voting for fringe parties in the next election. We forget. The last presidential election, 20% of the French electorate voted for the fascist candidate.
HH: For Le Pen. Yeah. This is what...what option do they have if these riots continue, though? They can't appease people who won't be appeased.
MS: No, they can't. And essentially, you're dealing with communities that are totally isolated from the mainstream of French life. Where all kinds of practices that wouldn't be tolerated, that are not officially tolerated by French law, such as polygamy, for example. Polygamy is openly practiced in these...in les Banlieux, as they call these suburbs, these Muslim quarters of Paris. I mean, we're talking about five miles from the Elysee Palace. Five miles from where Jacques Chirac sits. And you finally got...you know, we kept hearing all this stuff ever since September 11th, you know, the Muslim street is going to explode in anger. Well, it finally did, and it was in Paris, not in the Middle East.
HH: 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. That's the kind of thing that doesn't help the tourist industry, either.
MS: No, if you look at where these riots are taking place, they're actually near not only Charles De gaulle, but also Le Bourget, the other airport in Paris. So, in actual fact, they're...France has a kind of highly-refined sense of itself, and sense of status. And these are embarrassments to it, because they're effectively happening between Charles De gaulle Airport and downtown Paris. In other words, they're happening in a part of the city where it's all too easy for people arriving at the airport and heading downtown to come across it. This is a serious issue for France, and it's been mimicked in Denmark, and to one degree or another, in parts of Belgium as well. This is a fuse that's been lit all over Europe.
HH: Mark Steyn, how do you account for the indifference or ignorance of the mainstream media in America?
MS: Well, I think this is now basically becoming a willful effort at misleading. It's not just the United States. Other countries, too, are reporting this as their youths, or their French youth. And it isn't until you get thirteen paragraphs into the story, and they're quoting one of these youths, and you realize he's called Mohammed, that it occurs to you that there might be an ethno-cultural religious component to this situation. And this is absolutely grotesque, because the one...I'm sometimes accused of being terribly pessimistic when I speak in North America. And I always tell Americans and Canadians, that the one great advantage people have, you know, everything may...there may be a lot of bad news in the world, but the one advantage North Americans have, is that Europe is ahead of you in the line. And you have to learn what's happening. You have to confront honestly what's happening with these disaffected Muslim populations in Europe. I mean, most of the September 11th bombers, the Millenium bomber, a lot of these people all passed through various parts of the European welfare state. It's relevant to U.S. security, too.
HH: Now, two nights ago, John Howard warned of an imminent terrorist attack in Australia. Yesterday, the British commissioner of metropolitan police said the sky is dark. I have to think that this is the chaos around Paris is the perfect opportunity or context in which if they have any cells, those cells would want to strike. Don't you agree with that, Mark?
MS: Well, they had surface to air missiles that were smuggled into France recently. And it was very interesting to me that the defense that was mounted of this, that the reason we shouldn't worry, is because they were intended for non-European targets.
HH: Oh.
MS: So apparently, it's okay if terrorism is conducted in Europe, as long as it's against selected targets. And that's, I think, really what a lot of this was about. You know, the Europeans have been tolerant of, for example, Palestinian terrorism for years, and of the intifada that's been going on in France against synagogues and Jewish schools and Kosher butchers and all the rest. And now, it's moved on to more general targets. They're suddenly finding it's kind of harder to appease these people.
HH: Well now, a couple of other subjects before we run out of our too short time, Mark. There is a cabinet minister that resigned from Tony Blair's government. And reading the British papers this morning, it sounds like the American papers last week about George Bush. I'm wondering, are they as accurate as the American press was about Bush last week, which means hardly at all?
MS: I would say so. I mean, this guy, David Blunkett, he's the home secretary, which is like the interior minister, and I mainly know him, because he had a very celebrated affair with my publisher at the British Spectator. There were in one of these things, what they call a love child in the British tabloid press, and DNA testing, and all the rest of it. And I'm probably speaking out of turn here, but I mean the sex life...I hasten to add I'm not getting any action at the Spectator. But everyone else at that magazine seems to be. And I think this is just one of those curious scandals that won't impact on Tony Blair. I think the Bush thing is slightly different. That's a much more explicitly effort to in effect, criminalize American foreign policy, which I think it disgusting, but also rather absurd.
HH: It's also, I think, going to be ineffective. Let's switch over to Alito. They announced only an hour ago, the hearings will not begin until January 7th, or January 9th. The Democrats have succeeded. They're trying to push him back and out of the parental consent decision. What do you make of the Alito reaction of the judge, and of Senate obstructionism by Democrats?
MS: Well, I think that's a temporary success for them. But I think it's also a sign of weakness that they know that they can't actually pile on and do anything to this guy. And I think they're in a very difficult situation here, that it's much harder to Bork someone than it was in 1987, when we were all rather naive about this kind of thing. And I think the conservative voices in the media, and judges themselves are much more savvy about this sort of thing now. I don't think the Democrats are going to be able to derail this nomination. And delaying it is the best they can do.
HH: And finally, after the week that was, is Bush on the upswing in your opinion, Mark Steyn?
MS: I think so. I mean, he is a provocative figure. You know, someone said oh well, you look at Clinton at the height of the Monica thing, and his approval ratings were 55%. Bush is only 40%. Well, Bush is a controversial figure, in the sense that he wants to accomplish something. Obviously, if you like Clinton, and I don't know what Clinton accomplished? Did he...was it federally mandated bicycling helmet legislation?
HH: Something like that.
MS: Something like that. I mean, if you don't want to accomplish anything, of course you'll keep your ratings in the 60's.
HH: Mark Steyn, always a pleasure. Steynonline.com, America.
End of interview.
Posted at 6:01PM PST
Saturday November 5, 10:56 AM
Violence flares again in France, deepening sense of crisis
Photo : AFP
PARIS (AFP) - Arson attacks flared overnight around Paris and police made more than 30 arrests as the worst violence the capital has seen in decades dragged on into its ninth straight night.
Two textile warehouses and a car showroom were set on fire to the northeast of the city, while some 180 vehicles were torched in the Paris region.
A fire-bomb was also thrown against the wall of a synagogue in the northern suburb of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, police said.
At least 30 people were arrested, including some minors found to be carrying material to make incendiary bombs.
Similar scenes were also reported in the northern city of Lille, the western city of Rennes and in Toulouse, in the southwest.
The gangs of youths from low-income, high-immigration neighbourhoods blamed for the violence largely ditched their earlier tactics of pelting police with stones, bottles and Molotov cocktails, preferring instead to run away after setting the fires.
The new round rampages came just hours after Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin held a crisis meeting with Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy on the riots, which are the worst since a 1968 student revolt.
Villepin also met a group of suburban youths for two and a half hours in his office to discuss the situation and hear their grievances.
Much of the fury in the streets, though, has been aimed at Sarkozy and his hardline policies aimed at cleaning up the crime-ridden suburbs with, as he put it, "a power-hose."
Shots have been fired at riot police, without causing injury, and at least three people -- including a handicapped woman -- have been badly burnt by Molotov cocktails.
The enduring troubles have dealt Sarkozy's ambition of running in 2007 presidential elections a heavy blow. Many of the youths in the disaffected suburbs have called for his resignation over his description of them as "rabble" -- a demand echoed Friday by the opposition Communist and Greens parties.
The riots were sparked October 27, when two teenagers were electrocuted in a tough, low-income suburb north of Paris as they hid in an electrical sub-station to flee a police identity check.
Since then, they have spread every night. On Thursday, copycat violence occurred in Marseille, Dijon and in Normandy.
Overwhelmed police have found themselves powerless to stop the conflagration, which has seen a total of over 1,000 vehicles torched and more than 200 people arrested.
Those responsible are groups of young Muslim men, the sons of families from France's former Arab and African colonial territories, who have said in interviews that they are protesting economic misery, racial discrimination and provocative policing.
The leader of one police union, Bruno Beschizza, has described the riots as "urban terrorism", but Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe of the opposition Socialist Party warned against hastily lumping together "one religion, Islam, and a few extremists" in apportioning blame.
