France: Chinese Clash With "French Youth" And Police In Belleville

Cries of "Stop The Violence" and "Security For All" rang through the streets of Belleville, on the outskirts of Paris France last Sunday, as over 8,000 fed up and frustrated Chinese residents, belonging to as many as 40 separate business and community organizations, marched in united protest against France's lax attitude towards its feral "french youth". The Chinese community of Belleville are tired of being preyed upon by their city's vandals and thugs, and a crowd that police estimated reached 8,500 people demanded committed and coordinated actions by authorities to bring security to their afflicted neighborhoods.

Violent crime is on the increase in the 20th arrondissement of Belleville, one of the two primarily Chinese communities in the Paris region. The ferocity of the spiraling crime wave, combined with the devaluation of the Euro and Europe's overall economic crisis, is leading the hardworking community to bankruptcy, says local business spokesman Wang Jiaqing, in a Chinese media site originating in France.

The People's Daily also reports that one individual crime proved one crime too many for the besieged Chinese community: the massive Sunday protest was the result of an attack on a Chinese wedding at the Hotel Belleville back on June 1st. A group of "youths" burst in to the hotel's restaurant, barred the doors and tried to rob those attending a marriage ceremony at the hotel. (An alternative account says that the assaults took place outside the building, on the street in front of the party) One of the guests was armed, and he shot and wounded one of the would-be robbers. When police arrived, they made one arrest: the armed guest.

While the French media is well-known for its contorted tapdancing and side-stepping around the demographics of its "french youth" generation of vandals, the protesters stared reality square in the face of French journalism's preferred shadows and fog. One example: Radio France International's interview of a young female Chinese protester on her motives for joining the march:

"There are too many people attacked by Arabs. They steal purses [off you] in the street, they break [shop] windows, we don't feel safe".

As if to underscore the whole point of the gathering, a purse snatching actually took place that day, over on the margins of the protest. The thief was seen, caught through the quick initiative of the marchers, who held him until the police came. Once he was handed over to the police, however, they promptly let the thief go!

"We're not violent, but that was too much", said a witness to the escape and the resulting battle that raged for the next two hours between the summoned riot squad and outraged Chinese protesters. As French paper Le Figaro's describes the reaction:

Kinsella's Canada: messed up

So Warren Kinsella goes around Ottawa, videoing himself and publishing (and then trying to hide) what sounds like a depressive's bad jokes about Chinese restaurants serving cat meat, all the while wearing a Che "revolution" cap, and the free speech bloggers are compelled to point out the hypocrisy of this guy who goes about saying we need Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act to control hate on the internet because, as one comment at Small Dead Animals (!) puts it:

If we don't crush WK's rights, we'll lose our freedoms. There'll be Chinese people in ovens and neo-liberal bands of skinheaded leftards wreaking havoc across the land. There'll be small children writing Liberal signs at knee height in bathrooms. Oh, the Horror!!

It's time for this insidious free speech to be crushed so that our rights are protected and our delicate sensitivities are not harmed! After all, someone's FEELINGS may be hurt!!!! What could be worse than that??

Yes it's hypocrisy, or an honest confession of what Warren needs the state to control, and there are probably many reasons Michael Ignatieff might think twice about relying on Kinsella's political instincts, or those of Denis "Hezbollah" Coderre for that matter. But then Ignatieff is what he is, and in my best guess he's not the wise scholarly gentleman some would like to think but an opportunist with a rough touch.

But, anyway, wearing a Che cap? that mass-murdering thug who lined suspected counter-revolutionaries up against the wall and shot them without even a kangaroo court? Where are our scandal priorities?

Meanwhile, some provocateur from an Ottawa Bell account is googling 'Warren Kinsella Racism' and finding months-old posts like ours to leave the press release on Kinsella's cat meat comments from the outraged Chinese Canadian Conservative Association.

Pointing out K's "hypocrisy" is one thing, though it looks like some odd case of mental-emotional confusion to me (I think he has a secret love for Kate at Small Dead Animals), but when conservatives start playing the "gotcha, racist" game, scoring points by being offended, inevitably thus tending to want to be offended, what hope is there for our country? Have we not given in to a game where we must all be victims pleasding to higher authority for points, instead of putting up with the idiocies of our fellow citizens and getting on with ruling ourselves, a top-down game where everything can be reduced to some arbitrarily-wielded code of political correctness? (If you're Chinese, joke about Cantonese peasant food all you like...) We might as well double down on Section 13 and formalize things a little if we can. Maybe, in some strangely dark and brooding way, that's the point of this bizarre Kinsella performance?(HT: Catfur)