-- I've already added French blog No-Pasaran on my RSS page, to monitor what's goin on in Paris. Here, Joe N. exposes French media's demonization of France's Interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
It appears that Nicolas Sarkozy was deliberately demonized in the TV reports of him using his strong language earlier in the week. In fact, there was footage available showing Sarkozy using the word “racaille” (riff-raff) while speaking to an inhabitant of Clichy-sous-Bois who herself had just used the word while expressing how fed up she was with local crime.
Sarko answered her using her own words. In politics, that’s a way of communicating empathy. Her words were edited out and never shown in the insuing days. His weren’t. “Arrêt sur Images” showed the whole exchange today.
they're behaving like the US MSM over there too, no?
-- Paul Belien: Not "anger," but hatred.
What is happening in France has been brewing in Old Europe for years. The BBC speaks of “youths” venting their “anger.” The BBC is wrong. It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularised welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The “youths” do not blame the French, they despise them....
Unlike their fathers, who came to France from Muslim countries, accepting that, whilst remaining Muslims themselves, they had come to live in a non-Muslim country, the rioters see France as their country. They were born here. This land is their land. And since they are Muslims, this land, or at least a part of it, is Muslim as well. The society they live in is a homogeneous Islamic one. For them that is society, there is no other. Consequently there is also no question of their “leaving” that society to become part of another society, the putative Western one. “Society” is the society they live in and from which they view and interpret what goes on around them. To understand their language we must understand how they see us, where we fit in in their society. Multiculturalism does not exist: it is always a matter of several cultures living side by side in defined territories, and the laws of one culture not applying in the territories of the others....
Dyab Abou Jahjah, the young and charismatic Brussels-based leader of the Arab European League, rejects assimilation and demands segregated schools and self-governing, Arab-speaking ghettos. “We reject integration when it leads to assimilation,” Jahjah says: “I don’t believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I’m in my country, not the country of the [Westerners].”
The Western authorities quietly accepted this when they abandoned the suburbs to the immigrants a decade ago. The attempt by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a second-generation immigrant himself (though not from a Muslim country), to assert the authority of the French Republic over its lost territory has triggered the current civil warfare in France. For the “youths” this is a declaration of war. They are not in Sarkozy’s country but in their own country, where the West promised they could retain their own cultural values and spread them.
Those media that tell us that the rioting “youths” want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs. The violence in France is in no way comparable with that of the blacks in the U.S. in the 1960s. The Paris correspondent of The New York Times who writes that this a “variant of the same problem” is either lying or does not know what he is talking about. The violence in France is of the type one finds when one group wants to assert its authority and drive the others out of its territory. American MSM who imply that there is a direct line from Rosa Parks, the black woman who refused to stand up for a white man on an American bus in 1955, to the rabble that are now throwing molotov cocktails into French buses containing passengers, are misrepresenting the facts. (The only comparison between America and France is that many of the bus drivers in the Parisian suburbs, like those in New Orleans, seem to be white women whose vulnerability attracts rioters and looters).
Read the whole thing.
-- Roger L. Simon reprints another email he received from someone living in Paris.
-- Pieter Dorsman:
Watching TV last night it struck me that the one thing at the core of CNN reporting was that the ‘rioters’ in France were 'angry'. The link to the two accidental deaths that prompted the riots and unemployment rates leave the average viewer with a distinct message: the situation in France is hopeless for many and many immigrants are thus rightfully ‘angry’. Very little attempts in the media have been made to explain that:
(1) In very few – if any – other places in the western world have certain, often far worse, economic conditions spawned such devastating violence and destruction for such a pro-longed period of time;
(2) That setting entire bus fleets and daycare centers on fire may be, just maybe, a fairly disproportional response to not having a job;
(3) That these admittedly miserable circumstances exist in spite of years of accommodation, social spending and other help targeted at defusing the potential time bomb that has now exploded;
(4) And that consequently solutions from the old book of the well-meaning government possibly will have very little effect on the chaos we are now witnessing.
-- Belmont Club comments the "youth's" hit-and-run tactics.
More Wretchard:
It's not a joke. One of the real problems in dealing with fundamentalist Islam, as opposed to the old Soviet Politburo, is that it has no command and control structure. One of the things that made deterrence possible was the circumstance of a centralized Soviet leadership.
In the case of the French riots, the problem of who to negotiate with (because the French government is pushing for a political solution) is a real one. Assuming, arguendo, that you wanted to surrender, then who to?
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