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~Paris Riots~


H. Lecter

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Originally posted by MAR@Nov 6 2005, 11:40 PM

On topic though. The muslim people in France are really not making things better by rioting.

 

 

Actually no. It shows that they're united and serious and that they aint gonna take anymore shit. Also if it wern't for the rioting, the truth about what the cops did would have never seen the light of day.

 

Non-violent protest doesn't accomplish anything other than making you look silly and the cops attacking and teargassing and locking up the protesters anyway. Might as well fight back, at least it shows you're serious. And it draws more attention to what's been going on.

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Looks like things are getting worse, not better.

 

rench riots spiral out of control

 

Hugh Schofield | Paris, France

 

 

 

07 November 2005 01:27

 

 

Riots in France's poor city suburbs appeared to be spiralling out of control on Monday after the worst night of violence to date, in which more than 30 police were injured and 1 400 cars burned across the country.

 

"The shockwave has spread from Paris to the provinces," said Michel Gaudin, Director General of the national police, at a press conference in the capital.

 

For an 11th night in a row, youths predominantly from France's large Arab-Muslim minority rampaged through their out-of-town neighbourhoods, setting fire to vehicles, businesses and public buildings and attacking police with stones and other projectiles.

 

Police figures showed that 1 408 vehicles were destroyed overnight -- more than the previous record of 1 300 on Saturday -- and 395 people arrested. Most of the cars -- nearly 1 000 -- were targeted in towns and cities outside Paris, reflecting the way the violence has spread from its original flashpoint.

 

In addition, 36 police officers were injured overnight -- the worst figure to date -- amid signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with the security forces.

 

At Grigny in the southern Paris suburbs, two police officers were hospitalised after being hit by gun shots in what colleagues said was an ambush set by a gang of youths.

 

"Their aim is to get us. It is to kill policemen," an officer who witnessed the incident told Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who visited the officers' headquarters overnight.

 

Spreading violence

The violence -- which was sparked on October 27 by the accidental deaths of two teenagers in an electrical substation in a northern Paris suburb -- has fanned across the country in a nightly ritual of copycat attacks by disaffected youths complaining of economic misery and social discrimination.

 

Few regions of the country have been spared, with riots on Sunday night in the southern towns of Toulouse, Toulon and Draguignan, Strasbourg in the east and Nantes in the west. Tourist centres such as the Loire valley town of Blois and Quimper in Brittany were also hit.

 

Even the small village of Villedieu-du-Temple, 12km from the southern town of Montauban, saw six postal vehicles destroyed.

 

Among the targets of the rioters were churches, nursery and primary schools, town halls and police stations as well as warehouses, car dealerships and a film studio at Asnieres outside Paris. In the Normandy city of Rouen, rioters used a car as a battering ram against a police station.

 

Overall, more than 5 000 cars have been burned and more than 1 000 people arrested since the beginning of the trouble, which is the worst to hit France since the May student uprising in 1968.

 

Cabinet meeting

President Jacques Chirac intervened personally for the first time since the start of the unrest, summoning an inner Cabinet meeting on Sunday evening and afterwards declaring that "the absolute priority is the reestabishment of security and public order".

 

"The last word must belong to the law. Those who want to sow violence or fear must be caught, judged and punished," the 72-year-old president said.

 

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promised reinforcements for police and said fast-track justice procedures will be set up to cope with the growing number of arrests.

 

"We will not accept any lawless zone," he said.

 

Their remarks showed the government's determination to represent a united front, despite initial reservations over the hard line taken by Sarkozy, who has been much criticised by protesters and the political left for his uncompromising language.

 

A leading Muslim group -- the Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF) -- issued a fatwa or formal instruction urging Muslims not to take part in acts of violence.

 

"It is strictly forbidden for any Muslim ... to take part in any action that strikes blindly at private or public property or that could threaten the lives of others," the UOIF said.

 

The group -- which espouses a radical interpretation of Islam close to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood -- is the largest component of the French Council for the Muslim Religion, the official representative body for Islam in France that was set up by Sarkozy two years ago.

 

Australia and Japan on Monday joined Britain, Canada, Russia and the United States in issuing public advisories that recommended that tourists to France exercise caution because of the violence. -- AFP

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Guest imported_Tesseract
Originally posted by Dawood+Nov 4 2005, 09:32 PM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Dawood - Nov 4 2005, 09:32 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteBegin-symbols@Nov 4 2005, 01:18 PM

because we are a generally comfortable society, even for people living in poverty

 

 

that is an absolute true statement, think about it. When in history did a societies poor people ever have an obesity problem except in America?

[/b]

 

 

Actually no, only if by 'comfortable' you mean people so scared, ignorant and numb that they shallow everything with no complaints. Obesity is a good example used so badly, it totally reflects the way the majority of americans live, greedy. The american dream has become such a cliche but its still the reason why your people dont riot or manage to organise themselfs against anything. France has always been the center or social rearrangements through people saying clearly and loud. 'fuck you' May 68 was the start of a worldwide revolution. The euroconstitution was sabotaged first in france last year and now this.

Europe has learned from past experiences and that dynamic doesnt change. I hate to say it but americans act like 10 year old kids when it comes to that shit, some candy and few spanks in the ass and you go back to sleep.

 

 

SF1, try and check your behavior please. Its not like a give a fuck but its totally fuckin up a good conversation. If you feel like attacking kabar on such a low basis make a new thread about it and i'll gladly close it.

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the society i live has been made "comfortable"

 

that is to say: easy

people, namely, people who vote, have oppurtunities here, they have abundance of many things, including food and entertainment and are for the most part lulled into complacency

 

paranoid, ignorant and scared people in the u.s. generally seem to be people in the upper or upper-middle class who are afraid that their perfect picket fence houses are going to get ripped apart by terrorists

 

don't forget tesseract, that we have a MASSIVE portion of population who JUST DON"T GIVE A FUCK about anything, not their own country, not the world, etc etc

 

rioting is still alive and well in the u.s. as a means of political expression, it's just that the police have become so powerful, and in a country as big as the u.s., it's difficult to make a huge impact because it's all spread out and easilky controlled by our facsist cops.

 

besides these kids aren't really going to help anything by doing what they are doing. just as rioting in the u.s. would not accomplish anything.

 

you should hang out a bit in the u.s. before you go too far with all the assumptions

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Guest imported_Tesseract

Rent that Movie La haine (the hate) if you wanna realise how shit works there.

 

Symbols, i dont think i'm making foul assumptions when i say that americans in general are much more numb when it comes to raise their voice inside their own country. Its either that or, as you say about the police being so powerfull, they found a way to silence you and make you uneffective.

Which one is worse i dont know but the fact still remains and its not an assumption.

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Guest imported_Tesseract
Originally posted by symbols@Nov 7 2005, 12:10 PM

 

don't forget tesseract, that we have a MASSIVE portion of population who JUST DON"T GIVE A FUCK about anything, not their own country, not the world, etc etc

 

 

Furthermore, i aint trying to be offensive here but thats what i mean, not giving a fuck like that is pretty serious and without getting into details and weird conspiracystyle shit i say that it works really well for your leaders. Are they brainwashing you? NO, its just the fact that unless you're burned bigtime from your own fire you'll never be mature enough to educate your people in giving a fuck about whats going on. I know it sounds old and pretty annoying but thats it.

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i only think that singling out the american dream as the cause of our apathy is a little narrow minded..kind of a complex situation really.

plus not all americans, are ignorant and scared and dumb

i didn't say the assumptions were foul.. i think the class division in this country has polarized it and made the political situation very complicated. we can no longer be represented by our two party system and it has fractured, badly.. some people are those scared ignorant motherfuckers, and plenty of people are poor and angry and lazy and stupid, and then there's regular ass folk, just trying to get by

 

i can't really explain why so many people don't care, but it's like getting the minimum to get by: you can still eat and sleep, but you'll never be rich. it's not enough to make you get all wild and cause a revolution. people think their opinion doesn't matter so they don't vote. i even wonder sometimes if the vote matters. some of our recent elections have clearly been rigged.

people feel disenfranchised.

it is not always enough to get inside the system to change it. sometimes the forces that be are too powerful to be shaken.

 

we are comfortable enough here, we still have mcdonalds without carbombings and walks on the beach without kidnappings, that we can remain complacent.

 

i've seen the hate. i think about six years ago.

 

it's not offending me

the wasted lives of our youth and the demise of our inner cities is pretty sad and pathetic

 

i am quite sure the ignorance will come home to roost one day.

just as it is in paris. but will it actually change anything (except probably hurt the muslim image) ?? probably not.

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The hate comment was for downmagic actually.

 

And, you know me better than giving me that. In a conversation like this i would never be able to speak about ALL americans, first because its impossible in my mind to treat all americans as one and secondly because it would be totally irrelevant. I respect and like a million things about america and even in the things i dislike i see something interesting. Back to the subject though, all this comfortable talk has to do with how one imagines comfort actually. Carbombings and kidnappings? Mass murder and criminality? Police brutality and an army that spreads death all over the place? Getting jacked on your way home? Terrorist hits? There are very few places in the western world where that shit happens and sadly enough the states is one of those.

 

I dont have to hang around there to know all that, but living someplace else makes me question your definition of comfort.

To end this, each american has a different view of the american dream and even if it aint yours, the one i'm talking about has worked as a regulator for lots of fucked up people there for ages, hope dies last they say so be carefull what you hope for.

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we don't suffer from or because of our army

that's why people have not even the first clue about what american military has really done

 

carbombings don't happen here. when some girl gets kidnapped, it makes national headlines (if she's white) the whole freakin amber alert thing was to save kids when they get kidnapped (only about 100 or so are abducted by a stranger every year)

we do not have terrorism here, that's all there is to it

 

when the serial sniper got loose in d.c. people freaked the fuck out, all the what if's..what if he's a terrorist, what if it's a team of militants, etc etc and he wasn't really a terrorist after all. just some crazed ex marine pissed at his old wife about a custody dispute

 

things are segregated here, except for a few select cities, like mine, where shitty neighborhoods are right on top of rich ones. people in suburbia do not have to worry about serious crime. they never see it.

and people in the ghetto are just used to it.

 

i know you aren't one for generalizations

but sometimes the antiamericanism around 12oz needs a check on it

(that isn't efing kabar)

 

 

people are starting to forget about 9.11; and the reaction i see from bush supporters when they find out that iraq really was all about some lies shows me, people are satisfied with their success and their ownership, and don't really give a shit about what our government is doing to other countries (or to its own poor) as long as their taxes aren't too high

 

it's the "support our troops" sticker on an SUV:

they are so blinded by the comfort and luxury of their SUV that they don't see or are too prideful to admit they are supporting terrorism simply by owning one

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I totally agree with the second part of your reply word to word, letter to letter. It is exactly what you mention that if analysed more deeply gives all the answers. As far as the us not being a dangerous place..you be the judge of that, since you're the one facing it. I'm not really informed on the stuff you're talking about on carbombings and kidnappings but i guess building bombings and youth with guns is even worse. I dont concider my self antiamerican at all to be honest and i dont make generalizations.

A very large portion of the world is unhappy with the way the us behaves and preaches what they're not loyal to. My country was almost blackmailed to buy millions worth of missiles and counter terrorism equipment or get the olympic games seriously sabotaged by the american team not even flying here to compete. Nothing happened in 04' while the 2 previous games organised in the states both suffered from hits. That example is probably a very light one compared to other places of the world. If something needs to be checked is why antiamericanism exists and people in general need to start putting argument in perspective instead of being defensive about it.

 

Completely seriously, i can only make one generalization. At this time, with the worst superpower leader ever in charge, americans seem way more comfortable than they should.

 

 

To return to the subject, someone mentioned muslims ending up hurt as a minority after the riots. To my knowldge, what fucks up a minorities image is the 'little' shit..theft, violence and a general behaviour that usually comes as a reaction to more serious stuff that dont surface. People have always respected standing up and saying clearly that they have been mistreated.

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The U.S. Army is rarely even seen in the U.S. Unless you happen to live in a "military" town like San Antonio, which has several large military bases, or Oceanside, CA (the southern gate to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton) you probably never see anyone wearing a military uniform except at a recruiting station. The army is not a problem because it barely exists. We only have 1.8 million service members in all the U.S. armed forces. The NRA is over twice as big. There are 31 million licensed deer hunters. And 97 million American gun owners. The government doesn't "run it." WE run it, and they know that, although they hate to admit it. Just the licensed deer hunters alone constitute a group larger than the World's FIVE LARGEST ARMIES combined. Our enemies have a lot more to fear from the armed American population than they do from our army. Our army is 99% kids barely out of high school. The armed civilian population is mostly grown, mature men.

 

The reason we do not have riots in the streets here is because most people are not all that unhappy with daily life. We not only employ the vast majority of our citizens who want to work, we also employ millions of illegal aliens who sneaked into our country to get a job. There are a lot of people who are supposedly "unemployed" who basically feel entitled to a job more or less equal to the one they just lost. I guess that lasts until one runs out of money and UI benefits and then it's time to go to work at whatever you can get. I have never been burdened by that particular misapprehension. If I have no job, I take whatever I can get and continue looking for work.

 

I'm not so sure that the American epidemic of obesity is related to poverty. It's really related to attitude and behavior. The same poor attitude about personal responsibility that prevents one from improving one's skill set to improve one's chances of obtaining work is the same poor attitude that allows one to sit around all day watching TV and waiting for the welfare check to arrive, instead of exercising or looking for work. I see people all the time who are SEVERAL HUNDRED POUNDS overweight. Now, come on, guys. Who owns that body, anyway? This sense of entitlement and lack of personal responsibility is not "the system's" fault. We are responsible FOR OUR OWN LIVES. And so are the Muslims in France. I do not buy the idea that somehow or another the non-Muslim people of France are responsible for the problems that beset the Muslim community there. Each of us is responsible for our own lives. Nobody "owes" any of us a damned thing.

 

I think the rioting youths are damned lucky the average French citizen is not armed. They would not get away with that shit here, at least, not in Texas.

 

You know how they ended the "Rodney King" riots? First, the city suspended all city services, police services and mail service. Then, the city shut off the power to the riot areas "for safety reasons." Next step was to shut off the WATER. Did you ever see the huge crowds at the Post Office trying to get their welfare checks? THOUSANDS of people, in a huge crowd outside the Post Office. You damned sure won't see anybody burning down any Post Offices in Los Angeles, that's for sure. The L.A. cops didn't try to go in and bust anybody's head. They just sealed off South Central and let them go at it. Eventually, they started running out of food, but if the riots had not stopped, the city was fully prepared to shut off the water, too.

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yes tess, way more comfortable than we should be.

i'm not too fucking happy with this place, especially the government and not so especially the society.

i wish i had the cure for it, because crystal meth sure as hell didn't work (haha)

 

......................

and haha tough talk from a man who clearly has not been affected by discrimination

 

 

is it that hard to believe that one segment of a society could systematically opress another, even in modern times? that a media and a workforce and a government could value one group of people more than another? if it is hard to believe, maybe you should pick up a history book

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Originally posted by Tesseract@Nov 7 2005, 05:27 PM

Rent that Movie La haine (the hate) if you wanna realise how shit works there.

 

Symbols, i dont think i'm making foul assumptions when i say that americans in general are much more numb when it comes to raise their voice inside their own country. Its either that or, as you say about the police being so powerfull, they found a way to silence you and make you uneffective.

Which one is worse i dont know but the fact still remains and its not an assumption.

 

 

You're absolutely right and it's a combination of both.

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Originally posted by Tesseract+Nov 7 2005, 05:34 PM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Tesseract - Nov 7 2005, 05:34 PM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteBegin-symbols@Nov 7 2005, 12:10 PM

 

don't forget tesseract, that we have a MASSIVE portion of population who JUST DON"T GIVE A FUCK about anything, not their own country, not the world, etc etc

 

 

Furthermore, i aint trying to be offensive here but thats what i mean, not giving a fuck like that is pretty serious and without getting into details and weird conspiracystyle shit i say that it works really well for your leaders. Are they brainwashing you? NO, its just the fact that unless you're burned bigtime from your own fire you'll never be mature enough to educate your people in giving a fuck about whats going on. I know it sounds old and pretty annoying but thats it.

[/b]

 

This is the truth!

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People been rioting mostly over dumb shit here lately. Like every time the bulls won a championship, there was riots in chicago. Plenty of sports riots lately. Kinda reminds me of how a character in "Foucaults Pendulum", a revolutionary from brazil, absolutely hated soccer because she said it stole the peoples revolutionary spirit and mischanneled it. I wonder if that is happening here now to go along with our "bread and circus" on more normal days as a means of control.

People here got plenty of angst. Don't forget we have the highest violent death rate of any industrialized nation. It's just we haven't managed to channel that violence politically of recent years. So I guess we still look stupid and complacent, since we aren't forming a viable opposition to our oppressors.

 

And I don't know how some of these poor folk get fat. Honestly. When ghostface said "school lunch held us down like steel", I was feeling that shit like literally, cause I was about to float away most of my life.

 

This rioting in France is off the chain though. Those muslims came there under the guest worker program, and by all rights, they are french now. Some born and raised french, going to french schools. Now that the economy is in doldrums, the ethnic french want to disenfranchise the newly adopted french, shit just isn't right.

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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cf...=74&ItemID=9066

------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

WHY IS FRANCE BURNING?

by Doug Ireland

 

November 06, 2005

DIRELAND

 

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EMail Article to a Friend

 

 

Saturday night was the 10th day of the spreading youth riots that have much of France in flames -- and it was the worst night ever since the first riot erupted in a suburban Paris ghetto of low-income housing, with 1295 vehicles -- from private cars to public buses -- burned last night, a huge jump from the 897 set afire the previous evening. And, for the first time, the violence born in the suburban ghettos last night invaded the center of Paris -- some 40 vehicles were set alight in Le Marais (the pricey home to the most famous gay ghetto in Paris, around the Place de la Republique nearby, and in the bourgeois 17th arrondissement, only a stone's throw from the dilapidated ghetto of the Goutte d'Or in the 18th arrondissement.

 

As someone who lived in France for nearly a decade, and who has visited those suburban ghettos, where the violence started, on reporting trips any number of times, I have not been surprised by this tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion that is engulfing France. It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes -- of both right and left -- to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing.

 

To understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important to step back and remember that the ghettos where festering resentment has now burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French state.

 

If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two World Wars, which killed many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too. Moreover, these immigrant workers were considered passive and unlikely to strike (unlike the highly political French working class and its Communist-led unions.) This government-and-industry-sponsored influx of Arab workers (many of whom saved up to bring their families to France from North Africa) was reinforced following Algerian independence by the Harkis.

 

The Harkis (whose story is movingly told by Dalila Kerchouche in her Destins de Harkis) were the native Algerians who fought for and worked with France during the post-war anti-colonial struggles for independence -- and who for their trouble were horribly treated by France. Some 100,000 Harkis were killed by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) after the French shamelessly abandoned them to a lethal fate when the French occupying army evacuated itself and the French colonists from Algeria. Moreover, those Harki families who were saved, often at the initiative of individual military commanders who refused to obey orders not to evacuate them, once in France were parked in unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never benefited from any government aid -- a nice reward for their sacrifices for France, of which they were, after all, legally citizens. Their ghettoized children and grandchildren, naturally, harbor certain resentments.

 

France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos -- known as "cités" (Americans would say "the projects") -- specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers today encircled by flames. Often there was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the "peripherique" -- the suburban peripheries that encircled Paris and its smaller sisters -- but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centers.

 

Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities -- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent. Both apartments and schools are over-crowded (birth control is a cultural taboo in the Muslim culture the immigrants brought with them and transmitted to their children, and even for their male grandchildren of today -- who've adopted hip-hop culture and created their own French-language rap music of extraordinary vitality (which often embodies stinging social and political content) -- condoms are a no-no because of Arab machismo, contributing to rising AIDS rates in the ghettos.

 

The first week in December will mark the 22nd anniversary of the Marche des Beurs (Beur means Arab in French slang). I was present to see the cortege of 100,000 arrive in Paris -- it was the Franco-Arab equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice The Marche des Beurs was organized from Lyon's horrific, enormous suburban high-rise ghetto, Les Minguettes, with the help of a charismatic left-wing French Catholic worker-priest, Father Christian Delorme, and its central theme was the demand to be recognized as French "comme les autres" -- like everyone else ... a demand, in sum, for complete integration. But for the mass of Franco-Arabs, little has changed since 1983 -- and the integrationist movement of "jeunes beurs" created around that march petered out in frustration and despair. In recent years, its place has been taken by Islamist fundamentalists operating through local mosques -- the mediatic symbol of this retreat into a separatist, communitarian-religious politics is the slick demagogue Tariq Ramadan, a philosophy professor who uses one cosmetically democratic discourse when he's speaking on French TV, and a fiery, hard-line fundamentalist discourse in the Arab-language cassettes of his speeches that sell like hotcakes to Franco-Arab ghetto youth. (Ramadan's double language has been meticulously documented by the Arab-speaking journalist Caroline Fourest in her book published last fall by Editions Grasset, "Frere Tariq: discourse, methode et strategie de Tariq Ramadan," extracts from which have been published in the weekly l'Express.) But the current rebellion has little to do with Islamic fundamentalism.

 

In 1990, Francois Mitterrand -- the Socialist President then -- described what life was like for jobless ghetto youths warehoused in the overcrowded "cités":

 

"What hope does a young person have who's been born in a quartier without a soul, who lives in an unspeakably ugly high-rise, surrounded by more ugliness, imprisoned by gray walls in a gray wasteland and condemned to a gray life, with all around a society that prefers to look away until it's time to get mad, time to FORBID."

 

Well, Mitterrand's perceptive and moving words remained just that -- words -- for his urban policy was an underfunded, unfocussed failure that only put a few band-aids on a metastasizing cancer -- and 15 years after Mitterrand's diagnosis, the hopelessness and alienation of these ghetto youths and their "gray lives" has only become deeper and more rancid still.

 

The response to the last ten days of violent youth rebellion by the conservative government has been inept and tone-deaf. For the first four days of the rebellion, Chirac and his Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin decided to let the hyper-ambitious, megalomaniacal Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, lead the government's response to the youth's violence and arson. Chirac and Villepin detest Sarkozy, who has been openly campaigning to replace Chirac as president in 2007 (Villepin was made P.M. in the hopes that he could block Sarkozy for the right's presidential nomination), The President and his P.M. thought that "Sarko," as he's commonly referred to in France -- who won his widespread popularity as a hardline, law-and-order demagogue on the issue of domestic insecurity -- would be unable to stop the violence, and thus damage his presidential campaign.

 

But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression. "Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille"-- words the U.S. press has utterly inadequately translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peals away the outer skin of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses completely the inflammatory violence of what Sarko was really saying. And "racaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth.

 

As the rebellion has spread beyond the Paris suburbs as far south as Marseilles and Nice and as far north as Lille, Sarkozy has been thundering that the spreading violence is centrally "organized." But on the telephone this morning from Paris, the dean of French investigative reporters -- Claude Angeli, editor of Le Canard Enchaine -- told me, "That's not true -- this isn't being organized by the Islamist fundamentalists, as Sarkozy is implying to scare people. Sure, kids in neighborhoods are using their cellphones and text messages to warn each other where the cops are coming so they can move and pick other targets for their arson. But the rebellion is spreading because the youth have a sense of solidarity that comes from watching television -- they imitate what they're seeing, and they sense themselves targeted by Sarkozy's inflammatory rhetoric. The rebellion is spreading spontaneously -- driven especially by racist police conduct that is the daily lot of these youths. It's incredible the level of police racism -- they're arrested or controlled and have their papers checked because they have dark skins, and the police are verbally brutal, calling them 'bougnoules' [a racist insult, something like the American "towel-heads", only worse] and telling them, 'Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes!' as if they had no right to look a policeman in the face. It's utterly dehumanizing. No wonder these kids feel so divorced from authority."

 

A team report in today's French daily, Liberation (where I was once a columnist), interviews ghetto youths, and asks them to explain the reasons for their anger. And, the paper reports, "All, or almost all, cite 'Sarko'....a 22-year old student says, 'Sarkozy owes us his excuses for what he said. When I see what's happened, I come back to the same image: Sarkozy when he went to Argenteuil, raising his head and thundering, Madame, we're going to clean all that up. Result? Sarko sent every body over the top, he showed a total disrespect toward everybody" in the ghetto." A 13-year-old tells the Liberation reporters: "'It's us who are going to put Sarkozy through the Karcher...Will I be out making trouble tonight?' He smiles and says, 'that's classified information.'" Another 28-year-old youth: "Who's setting the fires? They're kids between 14 and 22, we don't really know who they are because they put on masks, don't talk, and don't brag about it the next day ... but instead of fucking everything up where they live, it would be better if they held a demo, or went and fucked up the people and the stores in Paris. We've got minister, Sarko, who says 'You're all the same.' Me, I say non, we all say non -- but in reply we still get, 'You're all the same.' That response from the government creates something in common between all of us, a kind of solidarity. These kids want to get attention, to let people know they exist. So, they same to themselves, 'If we get nasty and create panic, they won't forget us, they'll know we're in a neighborhood where we need help."

 

Yesterday, when Sarkozy -- who is Minister of Religion as well as Interior Minister -- wanted to make an appearance at the Catholic Bishops' conference in Paris, they refused to let him speak -- and instead, the Bishops issued a ringing statement denouncing "those who would call for repression and instill fear" instead of responding to the economic, social, and racial causes of the riots. This was an unusually sharp rebuke directed squarely at Sarkozy.

 

Under the headline "Budget Cuts Exasperate Suburban Mayors," Le Monde reports today on how Chirac and his conservatives have compounded 30 years of neglect of the ghettos by slashing even deeper into social programs: 20% annual cuts in subsidies for neighborhood groups that work with youths since 2003, cuts in youth job-training programs and tax credits for hiring ghetto youth, cuts in education and programs to teach kids how to read and write, cuts in neighborhood police who get to know ghetto kids and work with them (when Sarkozy went to Toulouse, he told the neighborhood police: "You're job is not to be playing soccer with these kids, your job is to arrest them!") With fewer and fewer neighborhood cops to do preventive work that defuses youth alienation and violence, the alternative is to wait for more explosions and then send in the CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, hard-line paramilitary SWAT teams). Budget cuts for social programs plus more repression, is a prescription for more violence.

 

That's why Le Monde's editorial today warned that a continuation of this blind policy creates a big risk of provoking a repeat of 2002, when the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the runoff.

 

And a majority of the country, empoisoned even more by racism after the violence of the last ten days, seems willing to accept more and more repression: a poll released last night on France 2 public TV shows that 57% of the French support Nicolas Sarkozy's hard-line approach to the ghetto youths' rebellion, now spreading right across France. Sarko's demagogy seems to be working -- at least with the electorate -- but it won't stop the violence, it will only increase it.

 

 

Doug Ireland, a longtime radical journalist and media critic, runs the blog DIRELAND, where this article appeared Nov. 6, 2005.

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Guest KING BLING
Originally posted by KaBar2+Nov 7 2005, 11:40 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (KaBar2 - Nov 7 2005, 11:40 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'> We only have 1.8 million service members in all the U.S. armed forces. The NRA is over twice as big. There are 31 million licensed deer hunters. And 97 million American gun owners. The government doesn't "run it." WE run it, and they know that, although they hate to admit it.

 

[/b]

 

The army isn't huge, but factor in policing agencies and the resources afforded them and the numbers increase PLUS the weapons far out weigh any impact a few machine guns would have. In a worst case situation we have bullets, they have missles or atleast tanks and tactical training...plus, anytime anyone gets organized behind guns in a posture that remotely looks like it could be a rebellion the group gets crushed quick.

 

Originally posted by KaBar2@Nov 7 2005, 11:40 AM

The reason we do not have riots in the streets here is because most people are not all that unhappy with daily life.

 

 

See my previous post - we have riots here quite often.

 

 

<!--QuoteBegin-KaBar2@Nov 7 2005, 11:40 AM

I'm not so sure that the American epidemic of obesity is related to poverty.

 

 

Have you ever shopped at a health food store? The prices on healthier foods are way more expensive because they cost more to produce but also because wealthier people are the target market. I don't disagree with the general premise that the options are available to eat healthier - the problem is the isolation of poor areas and the overwhelming convinience of bad foods. I used to live right next to the Red Hook projects in Brooklyn and I shopped the same bodegas and greasy Chinese food spots - to get anything remotely healthy you had to go to the more gentrified and far away portion of the area and spend much more money - and sometimes required a car, which project and poor people don't aften have. Its also a cultural thing, which of course people should try to address - but the foods eaten, be it fried chicken, fast food, cheap fatty meats, french fries, etc all are poor food because they are inexpensive and fill you up easy. I guess my point is that I don't disagree with you on personal responcibility, but it is influenced by your position in society and thus harder to be healthy...

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Not to mention that, (if were talking nutrition and poor folks)

Take soul food for example. What exactly is a chitterling?

It's pig intestines , yes it is! So this nasty thing that has become a soul food staple comes from slavery ,when massa used to feed the slaves that nasty pig gut (because it was left over and white people werent going to eat it ) Same as fat back and all those nutritional things that poor black folks eat even today. but on the real, Obesity is definately something that is a direct connection with the way society is set up with the availability and affordability of fast foods. Some people eat out at fast food restaurants the majority of the week. Don't get me wrong , it's a personal decision, to be obese or no to be obese, but, If you lived in somalia, you would'nt be obese, simple as that.

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Last time I checked it was free to run on the sidewalk, it's free to do sit-ups, its free to fill milk jugs with water and lift them(ok, water isnt free, but damn cheap). I don't buy into the notion thats its just too expensive to live a healthy life, so people result to McDonalds' dollar menu. Yes, McDonalds, is very cheap and quick, but how fucking long does it make to make a sandwich or scramble some eggs? The fact of the matter is people are lazy and want convenience, and many simply don't care that they are fat. Sure, they don't like being obese, but I know more fat people that bitch about being overweight than I do fat people who exercise regularly and eat healthy. I'd even be down for limiting what people can buy with foodstamps. At my store we order less donuts towards the end of the month, geez, I wonder why. This country is going to have a heavy (no pun intended) burden on it financially because of all these obese people. And all these fatties buying 20$ worth of candy bars from me with their foodstamps are going to be the same ones with their hand out when it comes time to pay the medical bills. Sorry, neeeded to vent...

 

EXERCISE, GO TO SCHOOL AND DONT USE METH

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Originally posted by SPORTO@Nov 6 2005, 08:23 PM

IGNORANT AMERCIANS, EVERY TIME.

 

 

 

An "ignorant American" started this thread...

 

Those who make assumptions are themselves only displaying the upmost of ignorance..

 

 

...et pour qui est t'haine mon mec..?

 

----

 

 

 

anyway, all the comments are interesting, to say the least~

I'm glad to see that people recognize the significance of what is going on~

 

My feeling and perspective have been clearly and concisely started in my inital post,

 

but I'd like to just add somethings to fit the direction that this conversation has taken...

Poverty in France is quite different from poverty in America..

and comparing the two should be done with notice to such differences..

France is a socialist republic.. their welfare system gives "underprivledged" residents a

quality of life level uncomparable with the complete nothingness and desparation of the majority

Americans living below the poverty line...who yes are in great part to blame for the rise of WalMart

& Fastfood only because of thier lack of options and ability to pay the price of what some

bare-essentials cost to be made by "normal", conventional and/or domestic means..

 

I'd also like to add that the discontent which the "fils des immigrants" have is truely more of a matter of the idea that nearly all of their problems are subsequent of cultural alienation...

of which the otherhand would like to argue is only a consequence of their lack of will to integrate, respect or even partake in the traditions of the nation they inhabit;

as well as the overwhelming burden this non-integrated, vastly unemployed segement is putting on the taxes and budget of the nation..

 

Now does it really matter weither the chicken or the egg came first?

Bottom line, there is a full grown problem that needs to either be killed and cut to peices,

or fed 'til tamed..

 

 

There is still much bitterness hanging from the frayed loose-ends of recent history between them and the "colonizers" whom they know sit next to on the bus..

It is not a matter of language, because I'd bet the bank that 95+% of those rioting

all speak fluent French,(albiet they incorporate arab words into the street-slang)...

And despite the relgious undertones, I'll bet that NONE of these rioters are out there throwing molotov cocktails in kufi's and djellaba's

Many of them consider themselves French and want to be recognized as so...

this being a main source of their frustration.

And there are also quite a few that want to take over France because France took over

their country until 50years ago...then in thier opinion, invited them to mock and further exploit them under a new guise..

They remember the Algerian War and they remember the FLN.. and to them that strugle continues.

 

It is truely a conflict of ideology, perspective and miscommunications..

No one is right (or wrong) in war.. and make no mistake, this is one sense or an other, war.

And like any other war, all good people wish a senseable, fair and prompt end to it..

 

 

P.S.

 

1st night of relative calm in Paris for 12days..

due to imposed curfews that is..

and no such luck for the rest of France..

 

Hotspots-

_40993814_paris_clichy9_map416.gif

----

 

& about this bullshit fat talk...

the whole medical care system is a big money wash~

as much that goes in it, comes out of it...

The general public are simply pawns;

here , there or anywhere.

You'll just run yourself in endless circles talking all this rhetoric bullshit..

If you're not riding the wave, you've done your part and that's it.

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