Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

The violent riots spreading across France took several worrying directions Sunday night, Nov. 6, and Monday. The mostly Muslim gangs of youths began surging out of the immigrant suburbs to invade town centers; they fired their first gunshots at policemen; the number of torched cars peaked to 1,400; and disturbing new slogans were hurled, depicting Paris as ”Baghdad-on-the Seine” and their campaign as the start of Europe’s Ramadan Intifada.

A single slogan made a mockery of president Jacques Chirac’s efforts of the last three years to distance France from President George W. Bush’s Iraq war. Furthermore, the French government’s helplessness in quelling the trouble is encouraging other European communities to follow suit - in Denmark, Belgium, Spain and Sweden, for starters.

Chirac, after lying low for 10 days, finally called an emergency security meeting in Paris Sunday, Nov. 6. He then promised arrests, trials and punishment for those who “sow violence or terror” across France. But politics as usual held him back from instituting tough measures or naming those responsible for the violence, let alone deploying the necessary forces. French police are still under orders not to open fire unless fired on first. No names have been released of ringleaders despite several hundred arrests.

Saturday, Nov. 5, as the disorders went into their second week, the French prosecutor-general Yves Bot said he had detected an organized hand and a strategy behind the riots. Witnesses reported vehicles without number-plates distributing petrol bombs. A fuel bomb factory was in fact discovered Sunday in Paris with 150 bottles and gallons of gasoline ready to distribute to the bands of arsonists. Also found there were masks to hide rioters’ faces. In Clichy-sour-Bois, where the accidental electrocution of two teenagers in flight from the police ignited the first protests, residents said: This is just the beginning.

There are plenty of indications that the riots are not simply spontaneous outbursts of frustration by disadvantaged youths of North and black African descent, but centrally organized mayhem, an “intifada” activated by Muslim networking.

The Chirac-de Villepan government, trying to live down interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy’s provocative pledge to deal with what he called “scum,” is not acknowledging this. Because they refuse to recognize the rampage for what it is, they are withholding the forces required to restore order and so letting the danger get out of hand. Police, firemen and paramedics are no match for a fast developing civil war. The army will have to be brought in at some point, preferably sooner rather than later. For a start, marksmen need to be posted to pinpoint the ringleaders and the bottle-bomb wielders targeting cars, schools, shops, warehouses and public buildings.

France’s leaders, like the British and Dutch, are clinging to the hope that sympathetic dialogue with moderate Muslims will calm the street, despite all the evidence that radical, activist Muslims do not heed established Islamic authorities. On Nov. 6, the Union of Islamic Organizations in France, UOIF, issued a fatwa forbidding Muslims to seek “divine grace” by blindly attacking private and public property and urging meditation and calm.

The following night, bands of marauding Muslim youths extended their areas of attack from outlying city districts to urban centers and started shooting at police officers.

The controlling hand, far from being legitimate Muslim authority, is beginning to emerge as the very organization that has for several years been recruiting young fighters in French Muslim ghettos fight al Qaeda’s wars against the West in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and other sectors.

LIBERTÉ? French Muslims banned from wearing headscarves in school. ÉGALITÉ? France's non-whites twice as likely to be unemployed.
FRATERNITÉ? French government admits integration policies have failed.
RÉALITÉ: Riots erupt for eleventh night.

Is this France's intifada? Do the riots have wider significance for the West?

Talk of an intifada is absurdly misleading. Firstly, the rioters are far from being all Muslim (although more than half are from Islamic backgrounds). Second, they have no sense of political or religious identity and no political demands. Their allegiance is to their quartier and their gang. Their main demand, so far as can be established, is to be left alone by police and the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sark-ozy, to continue with their life of low-level violence and drugs trading. The wider significance is therefore not politico-religious but a warning of what happens if problems of deprivation and violence are allowed to fester.

Who are the rioters? How valid are their grievances?

Judging by the youths who have been arrested, and by comments by social workers and "big brothers" - older, more responsible young people - the rioters are almost exclusively kids involved in permanent gang violence, theft and drug dealing.

They are mostly aged 17-22 with some as young as 10. Depending on the district, maybe half of the rioters may be second or third generation. French-born young people of Arab descent. Maybe 30 or 40 per cent are black, often from families which have migrated to France more recently, legally or illegally. The remainder are local French youngsters or from eastern or southern European immigrant families.

Their immediate grievance is a threat by M. Sarkozy to "clean out" the suburban gangs as "scum". Many residents, of all races, in the banlieus would agree with M. Sarkozy's sentiments, but not his inflammatory language.

Such an approach fails to grapple with the question of how these kids came to be so viciously asocial in the first place. They tend to be from troubled or broken homes or to be willing educational failures in the often chaotic school system of the poor suburbs.

Are they as well organised as M. Sarkozy suggests?

M. Sarkozy has spoken darkly of organisation of the riots by drugs overlords or Islamist radicals. His own senior police officers, and social workers dismiss this as luridly unrealistic. The gangs from different areas detest, and fight, one another. But there is evidence of an organised, and tactical, approach in each district, with leaders directing groups by texts. ...

• France's Intifada

Tags: News, Paris, riots