Have French Passport, Will Travel

For more on France's Algerian experiment:

The rituals and acts of rage have an eerie sameness to them: roving gangs of angry youths clashing with the riot police in France's edgy suburbs, the government appealing for calm, local officials and residents complaining that their problems are ignored.

"Angry youths"? We started with "Muslim terrorists" and then went to "men of Middle Eastern dissent" after Reuters announced that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter". Now the acronym is "youths". You have to read down to the 8th paragraph to learn - if you weren't familiar with the new lingo and the situation - that the gangs of young French people are the "offspring of Arab and African immigrants".

Two years after an orgy of violence in which rioters in more than 300 suburbs and towns torched cars, trashed businesses and ambushed the riot police and firefighters, Villiers-le-Bel and several nearby suburbs of Paris similarly have erupted in violence and destruction.

In one sense, the unrest seems to be more menacing than during the early days of the three weeks of rioting in 2005. Then, the youth seemed disorganized, their destruction largely caused by rock-throwing and arson and aimed at the closest and easiest targets, like cars. This time, hunting shotguns, as well as gasoline bombs and rocks, have been turned on the police.

This is one war that France should try to win, or else the Mona Lisa will be wearing a burka.

"From what our colleagues on the scene tell us, this is a situation that is a lot worse than what we saw in 2005," Patrice Ribeiro, a police officer and senior union official, told RTL radio Tuesday. He added, "A line was crossed last night, that is to say, they used weapons, they used weapons and fired on the police. This is a real guerrilla war."

Ribeiro warned that the police, who have struggled to avoid excessive force, would not be fired upon indefinitely without responding.

That would be a break with history. This is a perfect time for excessive force. France should consider another Rainbow Warrior move.

More than 80 police officers already have been wounded the clashes, several of them seriously, Ribeiro said later by telephone. Thirty of them were hit with pellets from shotguns, and one of the wounded was hit with a type of bullet used to kill large game, he added. It is legal to own a shotgun in France - as long as the owner has a license - and police circles were swirling with rumors that the bands of youth were procuring more shotguns.

Only in France would the police not return fire when they're dropping like flies.

It is impossible to predict whether the violence will continue and spread to the much larger cluster of Parisian suburbs around the town of Seine-Saint-Denis, the area where violence was concentrated in 2005, or to the rest of the country.

I would like to go on record as predicting that it will continue and spread.

But the events of the past three days make clear that the underlying causes of frustration and anger - particularly among unemployed, undereducated youth, mostly the offspring of Arab and African immigrants - remain the same.

"We have heard promise after promise, but nothing has been done in the suburbs since the last riots, nothing," said François Pupponi, the Socialist mayor of Sarcelles, which has been struck by violence. "The suburbs are like tinderboxes. You have people in terrible social circumstances, plus all the rage, plus all the hate, plus all the rumors and all you need is one spark to set them on fire."

The underlying causes remain the same because France didn't do anything about them the first time around. Try this (it's working OK in the US): you are welcome in this country so long as you attend local schools, not madrases, get jobs, assimilate and don't cause trouble. Otherwise, we will send you back to that great sanddoon that you came from. Possibly in a pine box.

Indeed, after the unrest in 2005, the government of then-President Jacques Chirac - with Nicolas Sarkozy, now president, as the tough law-and-order interior minister - announced measures to improve life in the suburbs, including extra money for housing, schools and neighborhood associations and counseling and job training for unemployed youths. None has gone very far.

Handouts generally don't.

Next the article explains that while France's new president, Sarkozy, is busy creating jobs, his junior minister is holding town meetings to create a "Marshall Plan" which appears, unfortunately, to focus on additional handouts.

I love this little sympathetic account of the death of two teens preceded by the electrocution of two other teens who "according to some accounts, were running away from police." Those were probably police "accounts" and they were probably accurate.

It was there that on Sunday afternoon the deaths of two teenagers identified as Moushin, 15, and Larimi, 16, occurred, the event that sparked the latest unrest. The teenagers were riding without helmets in a mini-motorbike that crashed into a police car on Sunday.

The accident was reminiscent of the electrocution deaths of two teenagers in another Paris suburb in October 2005, who, according to some accounts, were running away from the police. That event triggered the worst civil unrest in France in four decades.

But Sarkozy, still reeling from massive transit strikes and student protests this month throughout France, is unlikely to use the current unrest as a vehicle to turn introspective or vent his rage too loudly at those he once called "thugs."

"Thugs" is a fairly accurate description I'd say.

In 2005, he vowed to clean out young troublemakers from one Paris suburb with a Kärcher, the brand name of a high-powered hose used to wash off graffiti; when he pledged in one suburb that year to rid poor suburban neighborhoods of their "thugs," he was pelted with bottles and rocks.

The high-powered hose would be a good start. A plane ticket would be a better one.

UPDATE: Tim Blair jumps into the fray -

It’s car-b-q time again:

"Rioting broke in one of Paris’s tinder box suburban housing estates last night after two young boys were killed when their moped collided with a police car.

Molotov cocktails were thrown, and cars and plastic bins set on fire ... One police station was set alight and another, in a neighbouring suburb, was ransacked after youths threw cocktails, and set bins alight and upturned cars."

The rioters are described as ... well, just “rioters”, although Presbyterianism is suspected. According to one witness, certain national stereotypes were observed:

"There were four police cars here, but they’ve retreated. They were charged by the rioters. Some rioters are climbing up to electric cables to try and break them and put the whole district into darkness.”