They're still at it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4423584.stm

occurs to me that if the weather in paris is anything like what we're getting - the rioters must be really pissed off. The anglo-irish rioting season occurs during the summer months when it's fairly pleasant to be outside.

Seem to recall mata being in favour of the way the French government handled Musilms - though hopefully that doesn't include shoving them into crappy high density ghettos with little prospect of employment until they start to go postal.

I'm afraid my french is nowhere near good enough to read french newpaper reports on the background to the riots so all my information has come from the BBC. I'd be grateful though if you could put it in a bit of context for me please Domino.

I do feel though that the BBC has attempted to go into the issues in some depth (not on that link admittedly) and to provide some information on the wider situation.

However, it was unclear if the attack was linked to the wider unrest, which has involved mainly youths from ethnic minorities living in deprived areas.

Well I've only got about 1/2 hour per day to read the internet, compose my posts and so on - I can't do a survey of global media outlets in that time.

this seems pretty typical of the BBC output that I've seen on the telly though



Its suprised me and a few of my friends that the rioting has been allowed to continue for so long... we're used to seeing the CRS clearing the streets in central Paris pretty brutally on the TV.
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I doubt anyone sensible actually thinks it's only muslims - like the people who got trapped in New Orleans weren't Only African Americans... just at a much higher percentage than if you were to average out the population of Louisiana.

So basically you are saying its all the fault of the government (authority) ,not that of the rioter (individual).

People used that one ,in regard to the Birmingham riots. No suprise at all ,socialist phylosophy is totally based on removing responsability of individual actions and placing them at the door of the establishment.

''and with a home secretary who behaves like a sheriff in the far west. If you want to blame it on single individuals, you can start with him''.... proves my point perfectly.

The establisment do something that is percieved as bad..They are Barstards.

Citizens do something that is pecieved as bad, and everyone just wants to 'understand there point of view', rather than condeme them.

I'm against racism and bigotry and the french have gained a reputation for being racist, I'm of the centre left,

BUT

punching a pensioner and then he dies is sick as is torching schools and an old folks home, and setting fire to a bus when the driver (a trade unionist?) and the passenger (working class?) has not got off.

The rioters are anti social, add ist and it becomes anti socialist.

I cannot defend people who make working class communites worse to live in.

Why not spend your time removing graffiti and picking up litter I do.

There's a lot of violence drink fueled and not in every other country, the rest of the world is not all sitting outside cafes chilling out drinking coffee and being chic and sophisticated.

Lovely idea but not true after all Paris is a bit violent these days!!!

Domino,

You seem to misunderstand some things let me explain;

I made no generalization, I commented on one, which you then seemed to broadly agree with,

I did not claim that drink was involved in french riots, my point was that many countrys have a violent element and that GB was not alone in that, thats all.

As for my litter and graffiti point that was to illustrate that in life we all have choices, we can do positive things or destructive things. In the face of prejudice I would suggest a responce thats more Martin Luther King not Malcom X.

As for your point about who is more right wing the British or the French.

GB's  nazi's can't even get elected to our parliament yours finish runner up in your presidential election to your right wing candidate.

Yes I'm centre left, I believe in gradual change and reform and negoiation not confrontation.
I hope that if you read my comments now you will have a better understanding of them.

Mick

The retreat of the French riot wave leaves a landscape littered with the wreckage of failed policy initiatives and social models. The political class must find new and effective ones if France is to face its moment of truth, says Patrice de Beer.
It seems that the third week of November may bring a levelling down of the explosion in France’s banlieues (deprived suburbs). After eighteen nights of riots – involving the burning of thousands of cars, more than a thousand arrests, and the torching of schools, public utilities and police stations in suburban areas across France – a conjunction of increased repression and sheer weariness is having its effect; there were “only” 374 cars burned and 212 arrests on the night of Saturday 12 November.
But even if relative calm returns, the deeper problems revealed by the insurrection of France’s disaffected urban youth won’t go away. The anger and grievances pouring out of the banlieues will persist until French society, and those who represent it, take the measure of the crisis and become ready for imaginative solutions that go much further than the familiar combination of law-and-order plus financial palliatives.
A paradox of these frenzied nights is that French public opinion has come to realise the scale of their country’s crisis through its portrayal in global media: French citizens, used to CNN’s emblematic war reporter Christiane Amanpour reporting from battlefields all over the world, have been shocked to see her standing in front of burned cars in the banlieues (conveniently located, for many news organisations, near Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport).
But shock is one thing, understanding another: despite an intense national debate involving sociologists, journalists, philosophers and specialists of political Islam (Michel Wieviorka, Olivier Roy, Alain Touraine, Patrick Simon) no one has proposed fresh, persuasive proposals that seem to have a good chance of turning the tide. Three decades of ghettoisation, pauperisation, and expensive policies (like the “localisation” effort, the politique de la ville) that only postponed the current explosion will not be reversed overnight.
The politics of les événements are equally confusing. In the absence of innovative solutions, some leaders have accepted uncritically the curfew imposed by the government in some cities under a 1955 (Algerian war-era) law – now set to be extended today, 14 November, for a further three months. The opposition Socialist party is preoccupied with the vote at its congress this week that will confirm its first secretary, François Hollande’s, authority in advance of the 2007 presidential elections.
The president, Jacques Chirac – a populist who used to sneer at the “smells” pouring out of immigrant housing estates, and who then promised on election in 1995 to bridge the “social fracture” – addressed the nation on 14 November after being amazingly silent for long periods during the crisis; he spoke of a French “identity crisis”, a “profound malaise” that must be addressed with “firmness and justice”. His prime minister and interior minister, Dominique de Villepin and Nicolas Sarkozy, have been too entangled in rivalry for the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP’s) presidential candidacy to undertake the bold initiatives – such as a new agency for social integration and equality of opportunity – that are clearly needed.
Sarkozy’s demagogic zero-tolerance policy – this son of Hungarian immigrants has (deliberately?) provoked the banlieues by calling them racaille (rabble) that must be “cleaned out”, and threatened to expel non-French young people sentenced to jail for rioting – will reinforce the problems rather than open the way to solutions. Police sources indicate that only 6%-8% of rioters are foreign; the core of the violence comes from second-, third- or fourth-generation youngsters – frustrated, jobless, card-carrying French citizens (and more black African than Arab beurs) who can’t be expelled. Meanwhile, it is all too easy for politicians to play on another symbolic indicator of “foreignness” – the fear of Islamic extremism – even if (as the Islamic thinker Tariq Ramadan points out) the protests have far less to do with religion than with social grievances expressed with an anarchist rage against a society that has no place for them.
Such rabble-rousing could provoke an upsurge of xenophobic sentiment from a traumatised population ready to listen to the siren voices of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme right Front National. If everybody wants violence to stop, cars and schools protected, social peace restored, the primary need is to douse the flames not pour petrol on them.
The 1968 precedent
Some commentators have resisted the comparison between the 2005 riots and the student-worker rebellion of May 1968. But even if it was the educated urban youth who first took to the streets thirty-seven years ago, the comparison makes sense, for three reasons:
-1. then, as now, the protestors’ main grievance was that “power” did not listen to them
-1. without reform and with a continuation of irresponsible agitation, 2005 could shake French society as deeply as did 1968
-1. just as May 1968 was the avant-garde of a massive youth revolt throughout Europe, America and Japan, these racial riots could be a final warning to other complacent western democracies confronted with similar social and migration problems.
France has no choice but to accept profound changes to her way of life. But what makes a solution more difficult to find is that its social problems have long been obscured by an ideological framework of “integration” of foreign immigrants in the mould of republican egalitarianism. This model, inherited from the 1789 revolution, worked with previous waves of immigrants (Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Poles) – despite periodic xenophobic riots – but it doesn’t anymore. A conjunction of massive immigration from France’s former colonies in Africa and the Arab world and large-scale unemployment since the 1990s has made it unworkable, obsolete, even harmful – for it blinds the society to a reality that no longer fits the state’s founding principles. In this “integrated” society, “others” have to conform; the law bans statistics collected according to ethnic or religious indices.
Even a massive financial investment into public schemes is no substitute for the political, cultural or social will to carry this “integration” policy to its final consequences. France’s social-integration model has disintegrated in housing, employment and education. Housing estates in the banlieues have become ghettoes, schools in so-called priority education zones are places where kids who have grown up with unemployed parents wait to turn 16 then enter a job market closed to those whose names and addresses mark them as immigrants. Their entire situation is one of “exclusion” – not just from the job market but from national society as a whole. As the sociologist Alain Touraine wrote in Le Monde (a centre-left newspaper with few black, beur, or Asian journalists): “our republicanism, which identifies itself to universalism, rejects differences”.
If France’s political, bureaucratic or business elite still clings to the old model and repeats the tired mantra of equality – and perhaps implements new measures that only increase the system’s bureaucratic complexity – it will remain far apart from French citizens of immigrant origin who, despite a small minority of violent teenagers, drug dealers and petty thieves, only want to work and live like their fellows in other areas.
Some initiatives – like Sciences Po’s (the University of Paris school of political science) recruitment of young students from the banlieues to a crash course induction to degree-level study – have produced spectacular results. But far more is needed: French society has to become colour-blind, to stop talking of “we” and “them”, and to accept the reality of ghettoisation. This change of mentality represents a life-insurance policy for a country with a 10% unemployment rate where work is the solvent for so much: providing income and consumers, boosting production, increasing state resources through taxation, and reducing social expenditure. It is time for France to relearn the sound economic principles that led Bill Clinton’s first campaign to declare: “It’s the economy, stupid”!
France too has to (re)discover social engineering and to look favourably – as “Sarko” started to do before the latest crisis erupted – at positive discrimination. A clear, well-communicated long-term strategy, independent from political electioneering, is required. The obtuseness of earlier governments – the cuts in subsidies to voluntary organisations working in the banlieues by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Villepin’s Gaullist predecessor as prime minister; the disbandment of neighbourhood police by Sarkozy in 2002 – has been cruelly exposed. A massive budget must be provided for a sort of Marshall Plan for the banlieues – even at a time when France is breaching the European Union’s 3% budget deficit conditions – with a relentless focus on employment for young people from the banlieues.
The minister for promoting equality of opportunity, Azouz Begag – himself a beur from the banlieues – has just said: “young people need a social escalator that works rather than a police van”. France has heard the words; it waits for the politicians of courage, imagination and consensus who can transform them into action.

course if you're french you can substitute 'french people of north african descent' for french muslims in the above if it makes you feel better

In Clichy-sous-Bois and the neighbouring banlieue of Aulnay-sous-Bois the whole community rebelled.

Hanane is a young Muslim woman from Seine-Saint-Denis, which includes the sink estates of Clichy and Aulnay.

“Before, if a young man was picked up by the police, his parents would say, ‘You must have done something,’ or ‘It’s your fault for hanging around the streets at night.’ But now parents are telling their sons ‘Get into the streets and defend our neighbourhood’,” she said.

While the media and the politicians are blaming “vandals” for the riots, Hanane says on the first day of the riots in Clichy-sous-Bois the whole community was behind the youths. “During the height of the riot both old and young were leaning over their balconies pelting the police with anything to hand.”

The banlieues of Seine-Saint-Denis have come to represent the belts of misery and grinding poverty that exist on the edges of many towns and cities across France.

A violent mob attacked two police officers after they asked a teenage girl to pick up a piece of litter.

The incident occurred in North End, central Croydon, at about 3pm on Wednesday.

It started when the male officers on patrol saw a teenage girl drop a piece of litter and asked her to pick it up. She did so but immediately dropped it on the ground again.

When they asked her again to pick it up one of the girl's friend became aggressive towards to officers. A group of teenagers then gathered around the officers and attacked them. It is believed the crowd grew to about 30 people.

The two officers, aged 34 and 29, suffered from bruising and knee injuries and at one point the 34-year-old was bitten and needed hospital treatment for his injury.

Accompanied by photographer Anaik Frantz, Francois Maspero embarked on a journey along the RER, the express subway which leads through the Paris suburbs. Getting off the train at each stop, he and Frantz present a picture of daily life in France which tourists seldom see: a world where names don't make sense, where immigrants from Burkino Faso live in run-down tower-blocks called Debussy on the avenue Karl Marx, their children dodging the police between the lycee Jules Valles and the Yuri Gagarin youth-club; a world where there are still memories of the Commune, the Popular Front or the camp at Drancy from where French officials sent a hundred thousand Jews to Auschwitz; a world where no one is a racist, but National Front posters are everywhere. Maspero's aim is to put this world back on the map.