Bonne année, courtesy of the 'youths' !
Al-Reuters would of course never mention it, but the 'youths' are almost entirely Muslim, who live in France's no-go suburbs where the police only venture in armed bands. Most non-Muslim French refer to these areas, especially in Paris as 'la Zone.'
The 'youths' celebrated the New Year in their own traditional way - the car-B-que.
They had a pretty good time with it too, coming up only ten shy of the record with a mere 1,137 cars burned. The 'youths' made up for it in arrests, which at 549 were almost double last year. Part of reason for the increased arrests is because the French mobilized an extra 10,000 police on the streets.
That's also probably why there were no major violent clashes between the 'youths' and police this year, and comparatively few problems with buildings being set on fire as compared to past occasions.
This sort of civil unrest in predominantly Muslim areas is now pretty much a tradition in France.The French are essentially being held hostage in their own country, and it will be interesting to see how they end up dealing with this.
Thank you for the link to Reuters' article. I see rouge ( red ) when I read about these hoodlums, vandals, thugs, & hooligans. I keep thinking about W B Yeats' famous lines from the ' 2nd Coming ' : Things fall apart ; the centre cannot hold ; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned ; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.
ReplyDeleteI ran across this old favourite of mine by pure serendipity at a site called www dot online-literature dot com just before checking your column. It's just 22 lines long for anyone interested. It was W B Yeats' prescient view of the West. I've always liked it, but it now scares me.
--dragon/dinosaur