France's "Punk Jihad" Riots Worst Than 2005

The riots among the Muslim youth in the “suburbs” of Paris promise to be worse than 2005. The rioters are more violent and the response from France’s Interior Minister has been anything but decisive. This from the NYT today:

The number of police officers injured during clashes by French youths in a suburb north of Paris rose to 86 after a second bout of violence overnight in which 60 officers were hurt, including six who are in serious condition, police officials said.

Of the six in serious condition, four were hurt as a result of gunfire, said Francis Debuire, a representative of the General Union of Police Officers in the district where the fighting took place. One of the four lost an eye and another officer’s shoulder was shattered by a bullet after some of the youths used shotguns as well as firebombs and rocks.

Police union officials expressed concern that the violence was more severe than the fighting that had occurred in the Paris suburbs over three weeks of rioting in 2005. “The violence over the last days has been worse than two years ago in terms of its intensity,” Mr. Debuire said.

. . . Among the marchers, a young man who identified himself as Cem, 18, but who refused to give his full name, said: “This is war. There is no mercy. We want at least two policemen dead.”

Police officials said the government had ordered as many as 130 extra officers in addition to the 450 officers who confronted the youths on Monday night, and officers were being brought in from across France as reinforcements.

As in the 2005 riots, the youths on Sunday and Monday nights were attacking the police mostly with firebombs, rocks and other projectiles, but this time they also had guns. Mr. Debuire said youths used shotguns. . . .

Read the here. This from PJM’s Nidra Poller, gives a bit more background:

Monday 11 pm

Violence is spreading from Villiers le Bel to a dozen neighboring communities. At least twenty policemen have been injured so far tonight (forty injured last night according to the latest figures), some of them critically. The insurgents are using firebombs, iron rods, baseball bats, and firing buckshot. Journalists are attacked, their cameras are stolen. The mayor of Villiers le Bel is running a crisis center from an undisclosed location. Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie is strangely absent, silent, or ineffectual. This is not the way it is supposed to be happening in the Sarkozy government. Don’t be surprised if Alliot-Marie is replaced early next year.

. . . Police investigators and several eyewitnesses corroborate the patrolmen’s version of the accident. The police car was going at a normal speed, no sirens, no hot pursuit. The mini-motorcycle came down a side street at high speed and made a left turn, crashing directly into the police car. The police remained on the scene for approximately twenty to thirty minutes until the fire department ambulance arrived.

President Sarkozy, on a state visit to China, issued a plea for calm. It must have seemed quite logical from where he’s standing… but it’s totally inaudible here on the receiving end.

Monday morning

The tally on Sunday’s punk jihad outburst is heavy and rising.

. . . According to concurrent reports, the rage broke out immediately. The police claim the motorcycle ran into their patrol car at an intersection; the enraged know better—the police car in hot pursuit of the innocent boys, Moushin and Larami, smashed into their motorcycle. Moushin’s uncle was outraged because the bodies were left lying in the fire station. But it seems that the forces that came to pick them up had to turn back because they were attacked. The boys had gone out to do a little bit of rodeo, a favorite sport in the banlieue projects. Le Parisien posted You Tube videos filmed by reckless kids.

Reckless, yes, but when they get wrecked it’s the fault of the police, the Peugeot dealership, and McDonald’s.

The euphemism for these enclaves — “quartier sensible”—bears a nugget of truth if correctly translated as “touchy neighborhoods.” Villiers le Bel is in the administrative district of Sarcelles / Garges-les-Gonesses about 20 km north of Paris. Not so long ago Sarcelles was the home sweet home of Jewish refugees from North Africa; today it is their nightmare. They endure constant attacks and harassment from the permanently enraged African-Arab-Muslim residents who live cheek by jowl with their still neat clean streets.

Socialist leader François Hollande is demanding the truth, the whole truth and of course the right truth on this incident—it has to be the fault of the police, the fault of the brutal Sarkozy government, the fault of deaf ears turned to the suffering of youths in this, the touchiest of touchy neighborhoods. . . .

Read the entire post at PJM. France has an incredble problem with its immigrant Muslim community that it needs to solve. Sarkozy has discussed cutting off "foreign" - i.e., Wahhabi / Salafi - involvement in existing Muslim community prior to his election. To say that sounds like too little is a bit of an understatement.

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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.. . . .

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