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Title: Rioting Spreads to 300 Towns in France
Source:
Yahoo News
URL Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051107 ... u=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--
Published: Nov 7, 2005
Author: Angela Doland
Post Date: 2005-11-07 09:44:52 by Zipporah
Keywords: Rioting, Spreads, France
Views: 368
Comments: 56
PARIS - Rioting by French youths spread to 300 towns overnight and a man hurt in the violence died of his wounds, the first fatality in 11 days of unrest that has shocked the country, police said Monday. As urban unrest spread to neighboring Belgium and possibly Germany, the French government faced growing criticism for its inability to stop the violence, despite massive police deployment and continued calls for calm. On Sunday night, vandals burned more than 1,400 vehicles, and clashes around the country left 36 police injured, setting a new high for overnight arson and violence since rioting started last month, national police chief Michel Gaudin told a news conference. Australia, Austria, Britain, Germany and Hungary advised their citizens to exercise care in France, joining the United States and Russia in warning tourists to stay away from violence-hit areas. Alain Rahmouni, a national police spokesman, said the man who was beaten died at a hospital from injuries sustained in the attack, but he had no immediate details of the victim's age or his attacker. The man was caught by surprise by an attacker after rushing out of his apartment building to put out a trash can fire, Rahmouni said. Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels' main train station, police in the Belgian capital said. The mayhem started as an outburst of anger in suburban Paris housing projects and has fanned out nationwide among disaffected youths, mostly of Muslim or African origin, to become France's worst civil unrest in more than a decade. Attacks overnight Sunday to Monday were reported in 274 towns, and police made 395 arrests, Gaudin said. "This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected," Gaudin said, noting that the violence appeared to be sliding away from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and worsening elsewhere. It was the first time police had been injured by weapons' fire and there were signs that rioters were deliberately seeking out clashes with police, officials said. Among the injured police, 10 were hurt by youths firing fine-grain birdshot in a late-night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized, but the injuries were not considered life-threatening. One was wounded in the neck, the other in the legs. The unrest began Oct. 27 in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the deaths of two teenagers of Mauritanian and Tunisian origin. The youths were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation. They apparently thought they were being chased. About 4,700 cars have been burned in France since the rioting began and 1,200 suspects were detained at least temporarily, Gaudin said. The growing violence is forcing France to confront long-simmering anger in its suburbs, where many Africans and their French-born children live on society's margins, struggling with high unemployment, racial discrimination and despair — fertile terrain for crime of all sorts as well as for Muslim extremists offering frustrated youths a way out. France, with 5 million Muslims, has the largest Islamic population in Western Europe. President Jacques Chirac, whose government is under intense pressure to halt the violence, promised stern punishment for those behind the attacks, making his first public comments Sunday since the riots started. "The law must have the last word," Chirac said after a security meeting with top ministers. France is determined "to be stronger than those who want to sow violence or fear, and they will be arrested, judged and punished." France's biggest Muslim fundamentalist organization, the Union for Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, that forbade all those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others." Arsonists burned two schools and a bus in the central city of Saint-Etienne and its suburbs, and two people were injured in the bus attack. Churches were set ablaze in northern Lens and southern Sete, he said. In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, Hamon said, while a daycare center was burned in Saint-Maurice, another Paris suburb. Much of the youths' anger has focused on law-and-order Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, whose reference to the troublemakers as "scum" appeared to inflame passions. ___ Associated Press writers Emmanuel Georges-Picot in Paris, Thierry Boinet in Grenoble and Jan Sliva in Strasbourg contributed to this report. 
A firefighter extinguishes a truck in Cenon, near Bordeaux, southwestern France, Sunday night, Nov.6, 2005 on the tenth day of unrest. Vehicles and buildings were torched by youths in largely immigrant areas began rampaging after two of their peers were electrocuted last week at a power substation while hiding from police they feared were chasing them. (AP Photo/Bob Edme)
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#24. To: Zipporah (#0)
I can't help but think back to the beginning of the Iraqi war when France refused to participate, and a lot of hatred towards France was generated by our media. Posters on FR were calling the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" and such, there was a lot of French bashing going on with some calls even to bomb France. And now this. For this to grow this big there had to be some planning, I'm thinking there is a revenge factor involved by people in the background pulling some strings.
Posters on FR were calling the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" and such, there was a lot of French bashing going on with some calls even to bomb France. And now this. For this to grow this big there had to be some planning, I'm thinking there is a revenge factor involved by people in the background pulling some strings. I found it odd that several in the administration keep using the term 'old' europe.. why the hatred for 'old' europe other than France's refusal to participate in the war.. ?
I wouldn't be surprised if Germany is next on the list. They have a lot of Turks there, and since the borders in Europe were opened some years ago, lots of illegals from North Africa have migrated all over Europe. When I lived in Holland there were already a lot of north African muslims there, plus many Turks as well. I've heard the ones in Holland have become radical in these past few years too. There are some people very skilled at getting the masses to raise hell and I think this has all been planned out, I thought it odd that they used that term "old Europe" but I think now they had a good reason to come up with that term as they intend on destroying "old Europe".
Brigitte Bardot fined for slurring Muslims in book Agence France Presse English; 6/10/2004 Agence France Presse English 06-10-2004 Former French actress Brigitte Bardot arriving with her husband Bernard d'Ormale at a tribunal in Paris Former French actress Brigitte Bardot arriving with her husband Bernard d'Ormale at a tribunal in Paris to answer charges of provoking racial hatred in her book "A Scream in Silence". Bardot was fined 5,000 euros (6,000 dollars) by a Paris court for writing a book in which she declared disgust with her country's tolerance of Islam. Former French actress Brigitte Bardot was fined 5,000 euros (6,000 dollars) by a Paris court for writing a book in which she declared disgust with her country's tolerance of Islam. The judgement added to a number of previous decisions which have found the 69- year-old of provoking racial hatred in her expression of right-wing, xenophobic views. Bardot's publisher, Rocher, was also fined 5,000 euros for last year bringing out the book, "Un Cri Dans le Silence" (A Cry in the Silence). Bardot, who lives in the French Riviera town of Saint-Tropez, was not present for the verdict. Two civil rights groups, the Movement Against Racism and For Friendship Between People and the League of Human Rights, brought the lawsuit because of several passages in the book. One of the most incriminating sections read: "I am against the Islamisation of France! This obligatory allegiance, this forced submission disgusts me.... Our ancestors, the elderly, our grandfathers, our fathers have for centuries given their lives to push out successive invaders." The two groups which sued the ex-actress were each awarded a symbolic one euro in damages. A complaint over a tirade in the book against "mixing our genes" with non- European immigrants -- taken in context to mean Muslims -- was not upheld. In its verdict, the court ruled that Bardot had deliberately tried to draw a link between Islam and terrorism by mentioning the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in a chapter on a Muslim holiday celebrated in France and elsewhere. It found that the book argued that "the presence of Muslims on French territory and only seem undesirable to the reader, who is ineluctably led ... to reject members of the Muslim community through hate and violence." France has Europe's biggest Muslim community, estimated at five million out of a total population of 60 million. In her defence, Bardot admitted in court last month that she may have been too direct in the expression of her views but she did not seek to hurt anyone. "It's my overall view of a society becoming completely decadent, where it's like mediocrity has become more important than beauty and greatness, where there are more dirty, badly kept people invading the world," she said. © Copyright Agence France Presse
#40. To: Jethro Tull (#32)
Not only beautiful, but smart too. If only the French had listened to Brigette instead of their loathsome politicians. I think it's too late for France, they should have closed their borders many years ago. The Intifada will, no doubt, spread to the other EUropean counties that have been stupid enough to allow such massive immigration. I think they're starting to understand the REAL price of cheap labor.
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#28. To: Diana (#24)
I can't help but think back to the beginning of the Iraqi war when France refused to participate, and a lot of hatred towards France was generated by our media.
#31. To: Zipporah (#28)
#32. To: All - we are next - its over BUT GOOD (#31)
Replies to Comment # 32.
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