A French teenager was hospitalized after an attack by a group of youths who had taken issue with her choice of clothing on a night out left her face disfigured.
The attack occurred in the early hours of Wednesday morning when the 19-year-old victim, named as Nissan, was on a date with her boyfriend in the southern French city of Toulouse.
For the past few weeks, women archaeologists working on an excavation site near the royal basilica of Saint-Denis in the north of Paris have been subjected to intimidation and insults on the grounds that they wore ‘indecent’ clothing and did ‘men’s work.’ Posters calling for respect for their work and their persons have been put up around the site. The verbal abuse the women have been subjected to has reignited the controversy surrounding the origin of the perpetrators, who belong mainly to North African immigrant populations that have become the majority in certain areas of Seine-Saint-Denis.
Robert McLiam Wilson on the Islamist atrocities that are still haunting France.
Last week, the seventh anniversary of the 2016 Nice attack passed with very little notice outside of France. When Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel deliberately drove a 19-tonne truck into a crowd of Bastille Day revellers, he murdered 86 people, including 15 children. This was one of the deadliest terror attacks on European soil in the 21st century. And yet, like many similar Islamist atrocities, it seems to have been largely forgotten about.
Over 2,300 people have been arrested in connection with the multiple-day riots that shook France earlier this month following the fatal shooting of a teen named Nahel in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.
Many have speculated about a connection between immigration and the rioting, with former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour explicitly blaming French immigration policy during an interview published last Sunday.
“No one can ignore reality anymore,” Zemmour said and added, “in spite of everything, most of the political class wants to believe that it is a social crisis when the root cause is obvious: immigration.”
Apart from the 96 arrests and 255 burned cars, Bastille Day passed off without a hitch in France. A bullish Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin, expressed his satisfaction in a tweet, thanking the 45,000 policemen and women who had been deployed across the country. It says much for the state of France that avoiding a riot on their national day is a cause for celebration.
Still, one can understand why the government is grateful for small mercies after the trauma of the recent uprising. The financial cost of the damage caused by the rioters is predicted to top €1 billion (£858 million), a staggering sum for a country that is already dangerously indebted. This figure is double that of the unrest of 2005, when for three weeks youths went on the rampage.
More than seven in ten people in France are in favour of stripping citizenship for foreigners who participated in the violent riots that broke out following the death of an Algerian teenager last month.
A survey conducted by French broadcaster CNews this week found that 73 per cent of the country would support removing French citizenship from dual nationals who took part in the recent spate of racially-inspired riots accross the country.
Forget the damned Bastille — it was an ugly scene of death. Go for the pure and holy.
PARIS, FRANCE — Arriving here late last Friday evening, I had essentially a full Saturday with my family to see as much of this historic city as we could muster. I had never visited before. The weather was hardly ideal — mid-90s, nasty hot. The week preceding likewise had not been exactly ideal for a visit. Rioting had broken out over the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy. For several consecutive days, protests raged. Fortunately, the street fires had cooled by the time we got there.
“Has the rioting stopped?” I asked our cab driver. “Yes,” he replied. “It is finished.”
A disturbing new trend is emerging in the country’s quiet suburbs
One of the most disturbing pieces of footage doing the rounds during the recent rioting which swept France shows an off-duty police officer lying motionless on the ground, as a helpless colleague tries to shield him. Despite their casual t-shirts and jeans, the officers were recognised by rioters and attacked in Marseille’s city centre. Following claims from both riot sympathisers and opponents online that the officer was killed, it was made clear that he had been hospitalised with a broken jaw.
Montargis, 15,000 inhabitants, 68 miles south of Paris, will refuse on Friday to celebrate the National Holiday of France, Bastille Day — no fireworks, no street balls. Instead, a brief ceremony will take place to thank the police forces and the fire brigade who rescued the town two weeks ago.
“Three hundred thugs, coming out of nowhere, stormed the inner city. They burned several houses to the ground,” Mayor Benoît Digeon said. “The population had to be evacuated to safer areas.”
Rioting in French cities over the past two weeks has left a trail of destruction costing €650 million, according to insurers.
The cost was calculated from 11,300 insurance claims already filed and is expected to rise.
The violence began on June 27 after the fatal shooting by police of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French-Algerian. Rioters used social media to co-ordinate attacks on public buildings that they saw as symbols of the state.
Zemmour said, “If we continue in this direction, due to demography and democracy, France could one day become an Islamic republic.”
In a wide-ranging interview, the first he has given to the foreign press since the French race riots erupted late last month, Éric Zemmour—the former journalist who now leads the national Right party Reconquête—answered questions relating to Islam in France, the future of the country, the nature of the civil insurrection, its source, who is to blame, and what measures must be taken to prevent subsequent catastrophes.
The interview, conducted by Jose Maria Ballester Esquivias for the Spanish digital newspaper El Debate, gave Zemmour ample opportunities to speak his mind on the perilous issues facing France, and as usual, speak his mind he did.
June 27, 2023. Nanterre, in the western suburbs of Paris, shortly before 8 a.m. Two policemen on a motorcycle try to stop a car. The driver, 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, is obviously dangerous, driving erratically, barely avoiding people crossing the street. A 15-second video circulating on social networks shows the car stopped, with the two policemen aiming their weapons at Merzouk. One policeman, gun drawn, leans his elbow on the windshield. He tells Merzouk to turn off the engine and place his hands above his head. The car drives off. The policeman shoots at the car. Merzouk is shot and dies shortly after.
Just over a week since riots erupted in dozens of places across France, things have calmed down in Montmorency, an affluent Parisian suburb not far from the banlieue of Nanterre, where a French police officer fatally shot 17-year-old Nahel M, of north African descent, during a traffic stop on 27 June.
Beatrice, 37, who is on maternity leave, says the first two nights after the killing were calm in her neighbourhood, though constant sirens and bangs from fireworks could be heard.
Reasonably balanced for the Guardian.
… The French nation is deeply divided. But does it still exist? The various political forces have virtually no control over the current phenomenon. The far Left, through the left-wing coalition of the NUPES, and more particularly La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, have played the very dangerous game of fanning the flames by justifying the violence of the rioters in a lamentable exercise in revolutionary one-upmanship of which the French Left, since 1789, has participated. That said, their mobilisation came to a serious halt, forcing them to recognise the limits of their rhetoric of universal fraternisation of the oppressed. In Brest, rioters attacked the Happy Café, an LGBT bar identified on social media as a “fag bar” by the angry rioters. The bar had to close its doors … and the local far-Left had to admit that the fantasy of a convergence of struggles was nothing but a sham.
… France has welcomed millions of people to its shores but has been careful not to teach them to love their country. Today, the seeds of hatred have been sown among the displaced young people, the French nationals, who loathe the country in which they grew up, aided and abetted by a national education system that has taken great care over the years to instil in them the ‘right to be different’ and ‘respect’ for their cultures of origin. Further harm is then inflicted by a new phenomenon, since 2005, of the assumed Islamisation of the rioters’ discourse, as researcher Florence Bergeaud-Blackler points out: some rioters are allegedly responding to the supposed ‘Islamophobia’ of those in power.
Lots of interesting tid bits in this article.
