“Islamophobia”

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.

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.

The riots that recently swept across France were a result of “failures of migration policy” according to six in ten in the country, despite attempts by the political establishment to gloss over the role of mass migration in the social breakdown in France.