Category Archives: Paris

goodness the paris riots have been carrying on for the last week, more violence is erupting, and now apparently there have been riots across the country. oh dear. such places highlighted in news reports include Dijon, Rouen, and around Marseille.

the bbc news articles indicate that the unrest was sparked by the ‘deaths of two teenagers of African origin’.

clearly there is a lot of trouble afoot, needless to say. the indication from news sources is that a lot of the rioters are ‘North African Muslims’ , ‘locally-born French citizens’ “who feel that poverty, sub-standard housing, high unemployment and discrimination give the lie to France’s Republican principles of liberty, equality and fraternity”. Apparently the police “hurled a tear gas canister - some believe deliberately - into the Bilal mosque in the Paris suburb of Clichy, on Sunday evening” ..and this has added to the already bubbling mix.

{ i say apparently - frankly since i’m not there and you can’t ever trust what the media says really - and especially in violent situations no-one really knows what’s been going on and who’s doing what so i keep an open mind. }

the fact that it’s eid hasn’t managed to put a stopper to the violence.

but anyway, of course there’s a big fuss from all sides. Sigh. Le Figaro newspaper quoted right-wing former interior minister Charles Pasqua as asking Chirac “to account to the nation,” and France’s anti-immigrant National Front leader, Monsieur Jean-Marie Le Pen, said “France is under attack from hordes of foreigners”.

so some things don’t change. the simmering pot explodes and everyone will blame everybody else. very sad. the right-wing anti-immigration crew who think of ‘assimilation’ as a perfectly normal concept - and then there people who think that they are being ‘othered’ -and then other people in the middle..

Sounds to me pretty similar to most of the trouble in history: You - you’re different. you must be more like us. oh im different? really? [well i shall be different then] well if you’re different, you’re not one of us . You must be like one of us. and it goes on and on and then what a surprise - someone kills someone else. Oh i said they were trouble didnt i? We must kill ‘them’. oh yes - you kill us - you are against ‘us’ . [ fine we may put up with it now - but then maybe we'll go somewhere else and repeat the aggression ..and pass it along]

any of this sound familiar to anyone?