Riots In France Again

This today from the New York Times on renewed rioting in Parisian suburbs:

Dozens of youths clashed with the police for the second night in a row in a working- and lower-class suburb north of Paris on Monday, throwing stones, glass and firebombs against large contingents of heavily armed riot police officers and moving nimbly from target to target on several fronts, torching cars and a garbage truck.

. . . The clashes began when two teenagers traveling on a motorbike died in a collision with a police car on Sunday afternoon in the town of Villiers-le-Bel, about 12 miles north of Paris, in the Val d’Oise department. The two teenagers were identified in the French news media merely as 15-year-old Moushin and 16-year-old Larami, who were riding a motorbike in Villiers-le-Bel.

On Monday night, more than 100 youths had pushed riot police officers into the middle of a four-way intersection, raining projectiles on them from at least two directions. Police officers responded with tear gas and paint guns to mark the attackers for future arrest. Broken glass and used tear-gas canisters littered the roads.

At least one police officer was wounded. Within sight of the intersection, a garbage truck was on fire, apparently unattended as youths were lined up behind it.
At least 15 cars were burned, with the police guarding the local fire department and protecting firefighters as they put out fires. At least three buildings suffered some fire damage, including a library and a post office, a spokesman for the police in Val d’Oise said.

. . . The police expected more unrest on Monday night.

“We’ve talked to our colleagues from the domestic intelligence services, who themselves talked to their contacts, in particular in schools, and what they are hearing are the little brothers saying, ‘My big brother told me to stay home tonight because they are going to destroy everything,’” Patrick Trotignon, who is in charge of the Paris area for the Synergie Officiers police union, said Monday.

The two deaths in Villiers-le-Bel recall the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, teenagers who were electrocuted in a power station in another suburb, Clichy-sous-Bois, in October 2005. Their deaths led to the three-week civil unrest that eventually spread to many urban areas in France. Mr. Sarkozy, who was interior minister at the time, made a name for himself by calling for tough measures against the youths involved.

There were riots just a few months ago in Parisian suburbs when police arrested an illegal immigrant with 22 convictions after he jumped a subway turnstyle and then headbutted one of the inspectors. The violence subsided after a few days.

The 2005 riots that convulsed France lasted for twenty nights and effected 19 provinces. By the time it was over, one person was dead, 8,973 vehicles had been destroyed and damage to property amounted to over 200 million euros. 2,888 people were arrested.

The problems of “suburban violence” by the disaffected, largely Muslim youth has been ongoing in France for decades. As Harvard Professor Jocelyne Cesari wrote after the 2005 riots, the riots resulted from three separate problems of poverty, ethnicity and radicalized Wahhabi / Salafi Islam:

. . . [V]iolence in the suburbs is nothing new. In the 1980s, the suburbs of Paris and Lyon were similarly set aflame. And in November of 2004, the violence of the suburbs broke out in the very heart of Paris when two rival gangs clashed on the Champs Elysées. Nor is the isolation of French youth a new phenomenon. Since the 1981 “rodeo riots” in the Lyon suburb Les Minguettes, social and economic conditions in the suburbs have only deteriorated, despite the often generous funding of urban development projects. It is not sufficient, however, to attribute these outbreaks of violence solely to factors of social and economic marginality. This marginality is exacerbated by a general context of urban degradation: a degradation, furthermore, which affects a very specific sector of the population. That is, the crisis of the banlieues primarily concerns first- and second-generation immigrants from the former colonies of the Maghreb. This population has frequently been treated as a separate case, not only in terms of the history and conditions of immigration, but also in terms of the politics of integration. This constant exclusion results in the fact that the issues of poverty, ethnicity, and Islam tend to be conflated, both in current political discourse and in political practice. The recent violence is but the direct consequence of the constant amalgamation of these three separate issues. . . .

Read the entire article.

The riots are just the most visible symptom of a violent subculture in the suburbs, much of it associated with Wahhabi / Salafi Islam. Other notable examples of this violent subculture are here and here.

And there is this from an essay by Fjordman in May, 2007, highlighting the problems with France's large population of Muslim youth

. . . In France, Muslims already have many smaller states within the state. Criminologist Lucienne Bui Trong wrote that: “From 106 hot points in 1991, we went to 818 sensitive areas in 1999.” The term she used, “sensitive areas,” was used to describe Muslim no-go zones where anything representing a Western institution (post office truck, firemen, even mail order delivery firms) was routinely ambushed with Molotov cocktails. The number was 818 in 2002, when the French government decided to stop collecting the statistics.

In some of these areas, the phenomenon of gang rape “has become banal.” Violence against and pressure on women is part of daily life in the suburbs, where boys can dictate how girls should dress. Pressure is mounting for Muslim women to wear veils. In 2002, a 17-year-old girl was set alight by an 18-year-old boy as his friends stood by. The support group “Ni Putes, Ni Soumises” (“Neither Whores nor Submissives”) says the number of forced marriages has risen in recent years, with roughly 70,000 girls pressured into unwanted relationships each year in France. A leaked study conducted between October 2003 and May 2004 under the auspices of France’s inspector-general of education, Jean Pierre Obin, described an educational system where Muslim students regularly boycotted classes that concerned Voltaire, Rousseau and Moliere, whom the students accused of being anti-Islamic. Orbin’s report cited Muslim students’ refusal to use the “plus” sign in mathematics because it looks like a crucifix; Muslims boycotting class trips to churches, cathedrals and monasteries; and forcing wholesale changes in school lunch fare to accommodate their religious practices.

The influence of radical Islamist groups is a growing threat to French business, too, a leading intelligence expert warned, citing the discovery of secret prayer-rooms at the Disneyland theme-park outside Paris. A report commissioned by several retail and courier companies stated that the Islamists’ strategy is to “take control of Muslims within the workforce” and then “challenge the rules in order to impose Islamic values.” French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said that the riots in 2005 were rather “well organized.” Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post noted that some Muslim leaders explained that what they wanted was autonomy in their ghettos: “They seek to receive extraterritorial status from the French government, meaning that they will set their own rules based, one can assume, on Sharia law. If the French government accepts the notion of communal autonomy, France will cease to be a functioning state.” Following three weeks of unrest, the police said 98 vehicles torched in one day marked a “return to a normal situation everywhere in France.” Some of the rioters left boasting messages on various Internet forums. “We aren’t going to let up. The French won’t do anything and soon, we will be in the majority here.” One observer stated: “In France, the majority of young Muslims believe that French society is dying, committing suicide. More like 10 percent to 20 percent of them believe that they are in the process of replacing European civilization with an Islamic one.” In the southern city of Marseille, Muslims make up at least a quarter of the population, and rising fast.. . . .

Read the entire essay.