France Is Burning Again

You would think news that 112 cars are being torched nightly in France would be real news. You would be wrong. The media has been doing its best to avoid the issue.

France has big problems on its hands, and the fact that its doing its level best to bury its problem shows that it is quickly passing the point of no return. But French politics is going to get in the way of taking control of the banlieus and no-go areas.

The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths who are bent on more than vandalism.

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”

Car-burning has become so routine on the estates that it has been eclipsed in news coverage by the violence against police. Sebastian Roche, a sociologist who has published a book on the riots, said that torching a vehicle had become a standard amusement. “There is an apprenticeship of destruction. Kids learn where the petrol tank is, how to make a petrol bomb,” he told The Times.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister who hopes to win the presidency next May, has once again taken the offensive, staging raids on the no-go areas and promising no mercy for the thugs who reign there.

With polls showing law and order as the top public concern, his presidential chances hang on his image as a tough cop.

M Sarkozy’s muscular approach is being challenged not just by Socialist opponents. President Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, his Prime Minister, are waging their own, softer, campaign to undermine the colleague whom they do not want to be president. M de Villepin called in community leaders this week and promised to accelerate hundreds of millions of pounds of measures that were promised last autumn to relieve the plight of the immigrant-dominated suburbs.

Throwing money at the problem will not fix it. Saying that you'll do more to promote more jobs will not fix the problem. The problem is that too many Muslim teens are taking matters into their own hands, encouraged by the Islamists, and torching and rioting all around them. They do not respect the French authorities - which is why there's the increased violence against French law enforcement. Sarkozy's law and order solution is not the cause of the violence, but the cure, but Chirac and de Villepin can't let Sarkozy win the day because of the politics of the matter.

In other words, when will the Muslims who are rioting take responsibility for their own actions instead of blaming all around them. The nanny statism that France endures, and much of Europe suffers from, is perpetuating the situation.

No pasaran has much more - and should be read regularly on the ongoing situation in France.

Others blogging: The Moderate Voice and Gates of Vienna.

Technorati: france, riots, sarkozy, chirac, france, villepin.