November 01, 2005
I'm surprised...
...that the political blogs I enjoy reading - Instapundit and his children - have not become obsessed with the riots in France. Is it not incredible that these Frenchmen (and/or French Arabs?) have been rioting night after night, destroying their own property? Does this not further demonstrate so many points about French society, world politics, socialism?
And I thought that - at least - the French newspapers would be flipping out. I would be if this happened in New York. (Question: when was the last time there was a full-fledged riot in NY? I think I have vague memories reading of rioting in Bed-Stuy when I was a kid...).
So I looked at Le Monde to see the French perspective. Totally predictable. First of all, it's the third article on the fron page of their web site, behind the new German government forming a coalition. And here are the various headlines:
Clichy-sous-Bois : Dominique de Villepin reçoit les familles et se pose en médiateur Réaction Azouz Begag en première ligne face à Nicolas Sarkozy Les faits Clichy-sous-Bois cristallise les tensions politiques et sociales
Yes, these riots do crystallize the political and social tensions--but your citizens are destroying your cities, shouldn't this be an acute crisis, consuming your attention that you should be working hard to try to solve?
So I just clicked on the lead article in the group, Clichy-sous-Bois : Villepin reprend la main en rencontrant les familles. From the headline and my poor French, I assumed that the families that the Prime Minister would be meeting with were those of people caught in the riots, whose lives are being destroyed by their neighbors--to go into the war zone and try to calm things down just by being there. But it actually turns out that he visited the families of the hoodlums whose death sparked the crisis. (Quick background: the ostensible reason for these riots is because two hoodlums, while trying to escape from the police, ran into an electric machinery and were, well, electrocuted.) In other words, if two gang members in New York were running away from the police, and died while fleeing, and a riot ensued, would you go visit the family members of the dead hoodlums, or the town of the riot and talk to the good people of the town and try to stop the rioting? I know what Giuliani would do.
PS: There is an article in The Australian with some excellent facts on the riots.
Posted by Morgan at 03:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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Hey, some of us are on the case. :)
The extent to which it is a crisis will, I believe, be known with much more clarity after tonight. Last night was the first night that disorder spread outside of Paris, and if it gets worse in other cities, that is a IMHO sign that the French state as currently constructed is incapable of maintaining long-term order.
As an aside, the looting during the 1977 NYC blackout was more or less a riot. But that was obviously a long time ago.
Posted by: evan at November 4, 2005 02:13 PM
You're "surprised" that Glenn "Cherokee Chief" Reynolds has little interest in highlighting the failure of the postmodern open borders "we're all bo-bo yuppies' now" and "hip tech toys and alt sci-fi novels solves all problems" world?
Do you read his blog?
Posted by: fghj at November 4, 2005 02:22 PM
You ain't got no riot. In LA we have real riots and let me tell you something, real riots don't have start times each day and stop times; and they don't happen every day. A real riot is a mob that burns loots and rapes. In the daytime when they can see better they shoot guns. The only way to stop them is to send in the army with guns and orders to shoot. That ends them. You have a Francofada, an attack. And it ain't poverty causing it, all you guys are so into Marxism that you think everything is a class war. This is religion based. I posted on it here if you want to read it.
Posted by: Howard Veit at November 4, 2005 03:02 PM
Maybe the Crown Heights riots concerning Tawana Brawley?
There's also a good Dalrymple piece on life in the Cités, up at City Journal.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html
Posted by: Bild at November 5, 2005 03:24 PM
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