The Associated Press reports that rampaging Muslim youth in Paris suburbs shot at police and firefighters yesterday after burning car dealerships and public buses and hurling rocks at commuter trains. The eighth night of riots has spread to 20 towns.
The riots started October 27, after two teenagers hid from police in a power station in the northeastern suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois and were electrocuted. Rioters claim police chased the boys to their death. French authorities said that officers were investigating a suspected burglary and not pursuing the boys, a view backed up by an interim report by the national police inspectors office released yesterday.
According to the BBC the riots have spread to new areas and outside the French capital as more than 500 vehicles were burned last night.
The most descriptive report I've read is Amir Taheri's commentary in the New York Post:
Bands of youths in balaclavas start by setting fire to parked cars, break shop windows with baseball bats, wreck public telephones and ransack cinemas, libraries and schools. When the police arrive on the scene, the rioters attack them with stones, knives and baseball bats.
The police respond by firing tear-gas grenades and, on occasions, blank shots in the air. Sometimes the youths fire back — with real bullets.
These scenes are not from the West Bank but from 20 French cities, mostly close to Paris, that have been plunged into a European version of the intifada that at the time of writing appears beyond control.
Agence France-Presse reports that police are overwhelmed and powerless to stop the escalating violence which has destroyed over 1,000 vehicles:
As the violence has progressed, it has taken on an increasingly dangerous tone, with widespread fire-bombings, occasional shots fired at riot squads -- and prosecutors revealing that a handicapped woman was deliberately set on fire.
If the situation in France isn't bad enough, according to Strategy Page similar riots have been taking place in Denmark and British Moslem migrants have been fighting police, and other migrants in the streets.
France's Muslims live mostly in areas rampant with crime, poverty, and unemployment. France's failure to assimilate or integrate its immigrant Muslim community is widely blamed for the discontent and rioting. France must do whatever is required to restore order. Only then can the problem be diagnosed and proposed solutions debated.
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