A few more links to stuff on the Paris riots, hope this isn't getting boring...
- Police have started, erm, rounding up bloggers who have been encouraging the unrest. I'd better watch my back.
"A 16-year-old French teenager and an 18-year-old of Ghanaian nationality are being questioned by Paris prosecutors, according to reports.
One of the blogs was called "sarkodead", a reference to the interior minister and presidential contender, Nicholas Sarkozy, who referred to the rioters in disparaging terms and has been singled out for criticism by many French bloggers.
The pair have been placed under investigation, which is a step short of formal charges under French law, for "inciting harm to people and property over the internet".
One of the blogs was here, but as you can see, it isn't anymore.
- Elsewhere, John West, a British blogger and journalist living in Paris, makes the following observation:
"Speaking of the rioters here, it is very instructive.The astonishing thing about them is just howpolitical they are. The interviews on the TV show the immigrant youth(whether first, second or third generation) to be eloquent and angry. Theylive in total shitholes. One Morrocan young man held up his French ID cardand said "I've had this three years, three years - but it means nothing.They only see my name and I never get the job." Much of the graffititargets Nicholas Sarkozy specifically, who called trouble makers "rabble"and insisted that the areas had to be industrially cleaned of thesepeople. It is stated fact that he opens his gob and the rioting massivelygets worse. His stoking the fire with hard-line rhetoric will eitherimplode his vile run for the presidency by linking him with division andviolence or will boost his standing with average-Joes who think it's hightime to bring back the guillotine."
- Doug Ireland, meanwhile, draws deserved attention to the disgusting behaviour of Sarkozy in recent days:
"Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille" - words the U.S. press, with glaring inadequacy, has translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French.
"Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peels away the outer skin of encrusted dirt - like pigeon-shit - even at the risk of damaging what's underneath.
To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so.
And "Racaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers - it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth."
Back to more conventional media:
- Jonathan Freedland argues that what has happened in France was inevitable:
"The riots themselves are not hard to fathom; several French commentators have said the only mystery is why they didn't break out 15 years earlier. If you corral hundreds of thousands of the poor and disadvantaged into sink estates and suburbs in a misery doughnut around the city, expose them to unemployment rates of up to 40%, and then subject them to daily racial discrimination at the hands of employers and the police, you can hardly expect peace and tranquillity. Cut public spending on social programmes by 20% and you will guarantee an explosion. All you have to do is light the fuse."
- French youths spit invective in Jon Henley's latest round-up from Paris:
"We hate France and France hates us," he spat, refusing to give even his first name. "I don't know what I am. Here's not home; my gran's in Algeria. But in any case France is just fucking with us. We're like mad dogs, you know? We bite everything we see. Go back to Paris, man."
Another states:
"We burn because it's the only way to make ourselves heard, because it's solidarity with the rest of the non-citizens in this country, with this whole underclass. Because it feels good to do something with your rage."
- Agnès Poirier sticks up for the French model, but admits that:
"Some commentators, especially across the Channel or the Atlantic, think the response is self-evident: the Republican model has failed. Intégration à la Française doesn't work. France's grands mots - liberté, égalité, fraternité - are hot air; racial discrimination is the fundamental problem. France must be blind not to see its 6 million Muslims suffer from endemic racism every day.
Those critics are right - but only in part. What do we see when we look at the "burning suburbs"? Dissatisfied youth with little education, hardly any job prospects, from poor and often broken families. Their misery is first of all social and economic. They are white, black, "beurs" (second- and third-generation north African migrants); they are from Muslim, Christian and secular backgrounds. They are the French people who feel they are not represented by any political party, and especially not by the French left. And this is more dangerous than any ethnic minority riot - it constitutes a revolutionary ferment."
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