Liverpool FC Forum

by **Ciggy** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 9:29 am

Youve all seen the news, before last, as the riots continued into the 12th night of violence.
What is society coming to you have to ask yourself, and watching Sky news one of the ministers said send them all to Britain cheeky b@stard weve got enough of our own problems.

PARIS - France will impose curfews under a state-of-emergency law and call up police reservists to stop rioting that has spread out of Paris' suburbs and into nearly 300 cities and towns across the country, the prime minister said Monday, calling a return to order "our No. 1 responsibility."

The tough new measures came as France's worst civil unrest in decades entered a 12th night, with rioters in the southern city of Toulouse setting fire to a bus after sundown after ordering passengers off, and elsewhere pelting police with gasoline bombs and rocks and torching a nursery school.

Outside the capital in Sevran, a junior high school was set ablaze, while in another Paris suburb, Vitry-sur-Seine, youths threw gasoline bombs at a hospital, police said. No one was injured. Earlier, a 61-year-old retired auto worker died of wounds from an attack last week, the first death in the violence.

Asked on TF1 television whether the army should be brought in, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said, "We are not at that point."

But "at each step, we will take the necessary measures to re-establish order very quickly throughout France," he said. "That is our prime duty: ensuring everyone's protection."

The recourse to curfews followed the worst overnight violence so far, and foreign governments warned their citizens to be careful in France. Apparent copycat attacks took place outside France, with five cars torched outside the main train station in Brussels, Belgium. German police were investigating the burning of five cars in Berlin.

National police spokesman Patrick Hamon said there was a "considerable decrease" in the number of incidents overnight into Tuesday in the Paris region.

Nationwide vandals burned 814 cars overnight compared to 1,400 vehicles a night earlier, according to national police figures. A total of 143 people were arrested down from 395 the night before.

The violence started Oct. 27 among youths in a northeastern Paris suburb angry over the accidental deaths of two teenagers but has grown into a nationwide insurrection.

The mayhem is forcing France to confront anger building for decades in neglected suburbs and among the French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants. The teenagers whose deaths sparked the rioting were of Mauritanian and Tunisian descent. They were electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation, apparently thinking they were being chased.

by **Ciggy** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 9:31 am

Edit.

by **Woollyback** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 9:43 am

cue yet another race-related thread

by **Ciggy** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 10:10 am

Woollyback wrote:cue yet another race-related thread

It wasnt appropriate for me to put this in the other topic

.

by **babu** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 10:10 am

c'oooooommmmmnnnnnnn you mighty REDS !!!!!

by **woof woof !** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 10:48 am

Woollyback wrote:cue yet another race-related thread

Does that mean we shouldn't discuss it ?

It is a fact of life that the "disadvantaged" tend to be "ethnic minorities" , the events in France are nothing new , ethnic minorities have rioted in many countries including this one over the last 50 years .Certainly in most instances their grievances are valid and need to be addressed but the violent manner in which they choose to express their anger and disatissfaction is not acceptable and neither is the position of some who say that because they are black/muslim/gay/homeless/crack addicted/students etc (take your pick) we shouldn't discuss or condem their actions .
Certainly governments have a responsibility for the welfare and aspirations of their people , similary the people from ALL levels of any nation have a responsibility towards the society in which they live to abide by the laws that bind a society together .Burning your neighbours property and attacking innocent civilians can hardly be described as civilised behaviour or the actions of a coherent and deserving section ,however marginalised the may feel .
France has a very high proportion of right wing extremists ,the incidents of the last 12 days will only harden their stance towards the ethnic minorities and will swell their ranks as previously ambivelant French people react with disgust to the lawlessness on their streets,

by **Judge** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 11:00 am

i feel sorry for the 61 year old french guy who was beaten to a pulp, who died later in hospital

RIP

by **Woollyback** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 11:27 am

fuck 'em, they're french. let them burn the whole place down and kill eachother

as long as there's someone left to carry on brewing kronenbourg then that's fine by me

by **Judge** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 11:43 am

Woollyback wrote:fuck 'em, they're french. let them burn the whole place down and kill eachother

as long as there's someone left to carry on brewing kronenbourg then that's fine by me

ee bah gum woolly

by **112-1077774096** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 11:55 am

im an ethnic minority in malaysia and i never rioted.

the point is that just because your a minority it does not give you the right to riot, i dont buy into all this disadvantaged rubbish, also the people who say that race is a bar to getting educated.
they go to the same schools and get the same education. they live in the poor areas because they did not work hard would rather have a chip on their shoulder for the rest of their lives. while people mollycoddle them and make excuses for them it will continue.

this is the same for whites (or majority in whichever country), they all have the same chances and hard work pays dividends.

before anyone says that ethnics dont have the same chances, then why do we have ethnic lawyers, ethnic doctors, ethnic scientist etc etc etc. i will tell you why, because they worked hard and made something of themselves

by **greenred** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 12:12 pm

The French though,do have an issue with immigrants in general.During the summer i witnessed an anti immigration march by a couple of hundred people in rural western France.They blamed foreigners(mainly British and Irish)on clogging up schools and hospitals,pushing up local house prices,and the worst crime of all,being cra.p at speaking French.Im not planning a riot,but it certainly hasnt helped "race" relations in my neck of the woods.

by **woof woof !** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 12:13 pm

peewee wrote:im an ethnic minority in malaysia and i never rioted.

Is that because the police there can't be a'rsed with messin' about with batons and water cannon and go straight to the "make 'em eat lead" policy ?

by **Ciggy** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 12:17 pm

Interesting article.

WHY PARIS IS BURNING By AMIR TAHERI
Fri Nov 4, 6:00 AM ET

AS THE night falls, the "troubles" start — and the pattern is always the same.

Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. When the police arrive on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats.

The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back — with real bullets.

These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control.

The troubles first began in Clichy-sous-Bois, an underprivileged suburb east of Paris, a week ago. France's bombastic interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, responded by sending over 400 heavily armed policemen to "impose the laws of the republic," and promised to crush "the louts and hooligans" within the day. Within a few days, however, it had dawned on anyone who wanted to know that this was no "outburst by criminal elements" that could be handled with a mixture of braggadocio and batons.

By Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of "an unprecedented crisis." Both Sarkozy and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel foreign trips to deal with the riots.

How did it all start? The accepted account is that sometime last week, a group of young boys in Clichy engaged in one of their favorite sports: stealing parts of parked cars.

Normally, nothing dramatic would have happened, as the police have not been present in that suburb for years.

The problem came when one of the inhabitants, a female busybody, telephoned the police and reported the thieving spree taking place just opposite her building. The police were thus obliged to do something — which meant entering a city that, as noted, had been a no-go area for them.

Once the police arrived on the scene, the youths — who had been reigning over Clichy pretty unmolested for years — got really angry. A brief chase took place in the street, and two of the youths, who were not actually chased by the police, sought refuge in a cordoned-off area housing a power pylon. Both were electrocuted.

Once news of their deaths was out, Clichy was all up in arms.

With cries of "God is great," bands of youths armed with whatever they could get hold of went on a rampage and forced the police to flee.

The French authorities could not allow a band of youths to expel the police from French territory. So they hit back — sending in Special Forces, known as the CRS, with armored cars and tough rules of engagement.

Within hours, the original cause of the incidents was forgotten and the issue jelled around a demand by the representatives of the rioters that the French police leave the "occupied territories." By midweek, the riots had spread to three of the provinces neighboring Paris, with a population of 5.5 million.

But who lives in the affected areas? In Clichy itself, more than 80 percent of the inhabitants are Muslim immigrants or their children, mostly from Arab and black Africa. In other affected towns, the Muslim immigrant community accounts for 30 percent to 60 percent of the population. But these are not the only figures that matter. Average unemployment in the affected areas is estimated at around 30 percent and, when it comes to young would-be workers, reaches 60 percent.

In these suburban towns, built in the 1950s in imitation of the Soviet social housing of the Stalinist era, people live in crammed conditions, sometimes several generations in a tiny apartment, and see "real French life" only on television.

The French used to flatter themselves for the success of their policy of assimilation, which was supposed to turn immigrants from any background into "proper Frenchmen" within a generation at most.

That policy worked as long as immigrants came to France in drips and drops and thus could merge into a much larger mainstream. Assimilation, however, cannot work when in most schools in the affected areas, fewer than 20 percent of the pupils are native French speakers.

France has also lost another powerful mechanism for assimilation: the obligatory military service abolished in the 1990s.

As the number of immigrants and their descendants increases in a particular locality, more and more of its native French inhabitants leave for "calmer places," thus making assimilation still more difficult.

In some areas, it is possible for an immigrant or his descendants to spend a whole life without ever encountering the need to speak French, let alone familiarize himself with any aspect of the famous French culture.

The result is often alienation. And that, in turn, gives radical Islamists an opportunity to propagate their message of religious and cultural apartheid.

Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the "millet" system of the Ottoman Empire: Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs.

In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place. In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist "hijab" while most men grow their beards to the length prescribed by the sheiks.

The radicals have managed to chase away French shopkeepers selling alcohol and pork products, forced "places of sin," such as dancing halls, cinemas and theaters, to close down, and seized control of much of the local administration.

A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.

"All we demand is to be left alone," said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local "emirs" engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

President Jacques Chirac and Premier de Villepin are especially sore because they had believed that their opposition to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 would give France a heroic image in the Muslim community.

That illusion has now been shattered — and the Chirac administration, already passing through a deepening political crisis, appears to be clueless about how to cope with what the Parisian daily France Soir has called a "ticking time bomb."

It is now clear that a good portion of France's Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into "the superior French culture," but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire.

So what is the solution? One solution, offered by Gilles Kepel, an adviser to Chirac on Islamic affairs, is the creation of "a new Andalusia" in which Christians and Muslims would live side by side and cooperate to create a new cultural synthesis.

The problem with Kepel's vision, however, is that it does not address the important issue of political power. Who will rule this new Andalusia: Muslims or the largely secularist Frenchmen?

Suddenly, French politics has become worth watching again, even though for the wrong reasons.

Amir Taheri, editor of the French quarterly "Politique internationale," is a member of Benador Associates.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nypost/20051104/cm_nypost/whyparisisburning

by **woof woof !** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 12:21 pm

greenred wrote:the worst crime of all,being cra.p at speaking French.Im not planning a riot,but it certainly hasnt helped "race" relations in my neck of the woods.

Jeezuz , I always thought english and gaelic were the main languages in Ireland .

Get yer shillelagh out Greenred .

by **Judge** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 12:24 pm

peewee wrote:im an ethnic minority in malaysia and i never rioted.

nah, you just open them an account then rip them off whilst covering your tracks, and claim youve never seen them

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