French Minister: "We Won't Tell You How Many Cars Get Burned Tonight"

France celebrates Bastille Day today.

Some French celebrants will honor their Fête Nationale by attending veterans parades and fireworks displays.

Others tend to pursue less noble traditions: 35,000 extra police are being mobilized throughout the country in the hopes of subduing France's notorious generation of uncivilized youth, a show of force to prevent the expected spike in the number of nightly car burnings which, sadly, now haunts the annual French holiday.

Trouble has already begun: the night of July 13th, the eve of the national holiday, the police brought charges against 306 arrested young arsonists and thugs, compared to 190 at this time the year before.

One statistic, however, will apparently escape us this year, according to Brice Hortefeux, France's Minister of the Interior: he officially declared today that there will be no official figures released on the number of cars set ablaze throughout the country on France's Bastille Day:

"[...] no numbers for burned cars will be released for the nights of July 13 and 14, in order to put an end to this unhealthy tradition which promotes, every year at this same time, these criminal acts."

"Instructions have been issued to police headquarters so that they too will not release the number of cars burned in their départements. Hereafter, only annual reports will be made public."

French commentors cynically recommend that the French government adopt this approach to reporting on unemployment statistics and health figures as well, if hiding from the truth can prove such an effective remedy for dealing with their beleaguered nation's social nightmare.

[A tip of the Phrygian cap to the French blog Le Salon Beige]

One of the more pleasant results that has come from years of blogging about this unpleasant mess in France, has been the many inspiring emails, heartening comments (and even face-to-face meetings) we have received from our French readers in France. It's easy to lose sight of the full scope of the truth that there is such a thing as a French Heartland, there are many good and decent people there deserving of support, encouragement and appreciation... deserving a respite from the incessant French-bashing that North American blogs tend to engage in.

We read that the Lord was willing to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there could be found as few as 50 good people there; well, there's a much higher number than that in France today, so why not put aside the inevitable English-French fraternal spite, and on this day more than most, continue to pray for those within this overwhelmed minority, determined to love family, honor honest labor and engage in social civility despite the surrounding amorality that attempts to seduce them from these values; to pray that they may withstand the folly of their confreres; and that their steadfastness in the face of so much adversity may one day result in a renewal of national spirit, leading to the emergence of a nation more worthy of them.

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:

France's Car Burnings: 2009 Numbers In Perspective

Back in 1999, France was rocked by the scandal brought to their attention by then-President Jacques Chirac, blasting his political rival, then-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's government in a speech delivered at a firefighters conference: a shameful 14,000 cars were burned by youthful vandals in 1998 (the previous year), with a shocking 100 vehicles burnt on New Year's Eve alone.

This week the French newspaper Le Figaro contrasts those halcyon days with more recent incendiary statistics:

1998: 14,000 cars burned
2005: 45,588 cars burned
2006: 44,157 cars burned

2007: 46,814 cars burned

2008: 40,496 cars burned

2009: the expected final number will again exceed 40,000

Fast forward to January 2010 and current Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux's patting himself on the back for a "calm" New Year's Eve: only 1,137 cars set on fire, a 0.87% decrease over the previous year. (As a sardonic French commentor points out: at this rate it would take 115 years for there to be zero cars burned on New Year's Eve... ) Le Figaro puts those numbers in perspective, citing the Ministry's own figures as their source:

2004 New Year's Eve: 324 cars burned

2005 New Year's Eve: 337 cars burned

2006 New Year's Eve: 425 cars burned

2007 New Year's Eve: 397 cars burned

2008 New Year's Eve: 878 cars burned

Two factors are cited for the slight drop this year: minimal television coverage, with French tv "sober if not silent on the subject". Next, an "exceptional police presence": 45,000 police and riot squad officers mobilized for the night of December 31 2009, and 34,000 called out for the night of July 14th (Bastille Day in France), said by police unions as operating at "near maximum capacity".

Le Figaro editorializes that "the experience of the last few years shows that arson has become a banal tool for protests, of rage but also of joy. All the important events involving youth are now at risk: New Year's Eve, but also the nights of July 13 and 14 (when 500 cars were burned), soccer games (at least 300 cars burned in France as fall-out of the Egypt-Algeria match), important elections (730 cars burned the night of Nicolas Sarkozy's electoral victory in 2007). A unique phenomenon in Europe..."

... for now.

[Translated from the original French source at Le Figaro; thanks to Le Salon Beige for the story, where a commentor there remarks that these official figures do not count the vehicles that end up burning by being parked next to cars set on fire. That is a statistical detail left out of most of the english media's reporting on the story. As we reported way back in our January 2008 coverage of that year's inflammatory car burning figures, France keeps two separate sets of statistics for their auto-da-fe; as far as it's known, Dec 31st's 1,347 figure only includes the cars targeted by vandals for burning, it excludes the vehicles that caught on fire due to flames spreading to adjacent automobiles.]

UPDATE: France-watcher Tiberge carries a couple of posts at her blog this week that will be of interest to readers looking for more news on the subject of France's fiery New Year's Eve: translations of reader comments from the French mainstream media's reporting of the ritualistic arson, and a review of the unprecedented security procedures put in place that were necessary to reduce the total by only ten burned cars.

Pro-Hamas Supporters Rampage In Nice, France

It's just not news anymore, is it: another European anti-Israel protest deteriorates into a winner-take-all rampage. The backdrops change, but the story doesn't.

This latest riot erupted in, of all places, the coastal city of Nice, along the French Riviera. Last Saturday, January 10th, hundreds of the participating 5,000 protestors deviated from their pre-arranged marching route through the downtown core; the result was smashed cars, broken windows, looted shops, terrified innocent bystanders and assaults on outmaneuvered police with rains of stones and other projectiles. The report in the Nice Premium calls it "virtual guerilla warfare" [my translation]:

Approximately 200 youths set upon the Casino Rulh and the McDonald's, then went over to place Masséna. What followed was two long hours of thrown stones, or other objects against [store] windows or cars that were driving by. Police responded with tear gas, affecting both rioters and passersby.
... In the middle of the chaos, merchants had no choice but to close down their doors... locking themselves in with their customers. They found themselves trapped inside for about an hour and a half.

Another newspaper, the Nice Matin, adds that several police were wounded in the assault against them, and that a baby can be included among the injured pedestrians. A baby...

(For a series of shocking photos of the pro-Hamas rampage, go here.)

The city is bracing for another anti-Israel protest this coming Saturday.

[Hat tip to Tiberge at GalliaWatch]

Violence And Vandalism At Brussels Peace Protest

Belgian member of Parliamant Richard Miller can personally attest that Sunday's high-profile pro-Hamas "peace" protest staged in Brussels degenerated into violence: he was hospitalized after being hit in the head by a piece of gravel thrown by one of his anti-Israel allies.

Translated from the Belgian news site 7sur7:

"Everything was going well during the demonstration when suddenly, there were incidents during the dispersal of the procession in front of the railway station", explained M. Miller. "That's when I was hit by the cobblestone. I was groggy and found myself bloodied", he said while waiting to be evacuated by ambulance. He participated in the protest at the request of the president of his party so as to represent the MR [Reformist Movement], he added.

It was not reported whether the parliamentarian's assailant was one of the 143 vandals arrested during the "peace" protest for destruction and mayhem caused along the Albert II boulevard, and elsewhere. Three policemen were also wounded by day's end, one with a broken foot. A dozen cars were vandalized and several store and restaurant windows smashed. Police are now wading through the surveillance footage filmed that day by security cameras, matching suspects to actions.

Organizers announced that between 50,000 and 60,000 people participated in the protest march; police give a much lower figure, of 30,000.

"I Felt Like I Was In A War": Pro-Hamas Violence Plagues France

What kind of "peace movement" is this?

There's been a series of disturbing attacks on the Synagogues of France, as vandals are no longer satisfied with scrawling vulgar anti-semitic graffitti, they are graduating now to attempted arson. Here are a trio of cases, loosely translated from French media sources. First, from Strasburg and Paris:

Molotov cocktails were thrown against a private home serving as a religious gathering place for the Jewish community in Schiltigheim, Bas-Rhin, a suburb of Strasburg.

Two molotov cocktails were also thrown against a synagogue in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. The window of a Jewish restaurant was broken and the wall damaged by the beginning of a fire.

Next, from Toulouse:

A burning car was rammed into the front of a Toulouse suburb synagogue last Monday night. A second car with three molotov cocktails inside was then rammed into the first car, but did not catch on fire.

A rabbi was conducting a class within the synagogue when the attack took place.

Neighbors gave the alarm, and investigators hypothesize that this quick-thinking action kept the would-be arsonists from completing their intended plans.

Even smaller French cities are not being spared from the violence accompanying the pro-Hamas "peace" movement. For instance, the southern coastal city of Perpignan; who would have imagined such a scenic place would ever see the kind of stone throwing and feral rage attributed more commonly to dangerous suburbs such as Seine-Saint-Denis? The local newspaper L'Indépendant chronicles the emotional as well as financial toll that the thugs' behavior takes on the civilized residents of the community..:


A store was attacked while the owner, his wife and two daughters, aged 6 and 10, were still inside, at work. The little girls are still traumatized by the fury of the assault. A translation of an interview conducted with their mother, in the aftermath of their nightmare:

"Why?... I felt like I was in a war! I didn't sleep at all last night, I worried that they would [return and] set fire to the store. They threatened us", she says while slipping her finger across her throat.

Others shops were attacked as well, but most were closed, and a few were so well fortified against vandalism that damage tended to be minor. Many merchants in the neighborhood where the "peace" protest took place, chose to close their doors that Saturday, prefering to lose a busy day's sales rather than go through the kind of terror that the family quoted above had to endure. Some of these entrepreneurs found that they were forced to stay closed a second day, in order to repair the damage done in their absence by the anti-Israel protestors. There was apparently no police presence in the neighborhood adjacent to the "peace" protest, accounting for the scale of vandalism; the forces of law and order only arriving on scene after the attacks started taking place up and down the street. The report concludes by underscoring the stress that shopkeepers will undergo at the annoucement of any future "peace" protests downtown.

Where is this all going? Are even those who haven't forgotten their European history, being condemned to repeat it?

France's Car Burnings: More Than Just A Paris Ritual

Out of the 1,147 car burnings reported for France's fiery New Year's Eve, not all attacks were in the usual expected places, such as the internationally infamous neighborhood of Seine-Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris.

Small and medium-sized cities throughout the country had small and medium-sized waves of fiery vandalism of their own. Here's a quick round-up of accounts from smaller communties that won't get much North American media attention, courtesy of various French regional newspapers [my loose translation from the original French sources]:

In the southern department of Drôme, in the town of Pierrelate (population 11,900) a fire set in a garbage can spread to a nearby electrical connection, and the resulting flames brought a team of workers from the EDF ("French Electricity Board) to the scene:

While waiting for the electricians, Pierrelate firefighers and police were hit with a rain of projectiles coming from a group of fifteen people. One of the firefighters vehicles was hit by a projectile that damaged the hood. A drunken youth in his 20s was arrested. Placed in the drunk tank, he was released yesterday morning. ...

In Avignon (population 90,000) the police and firefighters were kept busy all night long, starting with the first car being set aflame at 5:17 PM, the ninth and last call coming at 9:47 the following morning. (A Peugeot 207 was torched at exactly the stroke of midnight, in a sad display of misdirected exuberance.) Five garbage containers were also set on fire throughout the night.

In Orange (population 29,000) two cars were burned in exactly the same parking lot, two hours apart. No arrests were made...

Orange is within the département of Vaucluse; François-Xavier Lauch, the police commissioner for this southeast French region, reports that overall 15 cars were burned that night, compared to only ten cars the previous year.

"It's one of the nights that worries us the most but thankfully the damages were limited... [We] had a maximum of 90 police officers, 50 detectives, 40 riot police and 400 firefighters on the ground, positioned all over the Vaucluse. The objective is to have a presence over all public streets, not just in the so-called sensitive neighborhoods or big cities.

The Journal de Saône-et-Loire offers a dry summary of their département's tally of torched automobiles; four cars in Chalon-sur-Saône (population 191,000), one car in Autun (population 16,400), two cars in Mâcon (population 36,000), two cars in Montceau-les-Mines (population 20,600)...

Some of the commentors at the media site, however, are less sanguine about the ritualized violence taking place in their communities:

"As if it New Year's Eve was the only night when our urban "youths" set fire to cars... It happens every night that they burn in Chalon and that firefighters and police are attacke! And how does our new city council handle it? With a brand new library, which will cost a fortune for the residents, to calm the thugs down! ... If they [the authorities] would finally take some radical measures, that would start to change things."

In Carpentras (population 26,000) in Southern France, the first call came unexpectedly early, at 9:30 PM:

... On the scene, they went through all the trouble in the world in order to intervene, suffering thrown firecrackers and stones. There were ten men in place, four vans, soon joined by police. All through the night, they put out five car fires, and two others which were partially demolished, the last [...] around 3 in the morning.

In a rare gesture of sympathy, the French media gives a voice to the victims of the rampaging youth:

Yesterday morning, residents in the neighborhood expressed their bitterness. "Now it happens almost every night", said the father of a family. "I don't want to live here anymore." And one of the unfortunate owners of a burned out car despaired, impotently: "I came here three years ago with my wife and three kids. At this moment I have no job, my insurance will not cover me. This is a catastrophe. They have to arrest these youths, why is this happening?"

Sadly, they probably know why it happens; we all know by now, don't we. The real question is, what "radical measures" are they prepared to take to reduce it...

1,147 Cars Torched In France On New Year's Eve

Welcome to 2009: Over a thousand cars were set ablaze by French urban "youth" this past New Year's Eve, a 30% increase over last year's fiery festival.

France's President Nicholas Sarkozy vows that, in the near future, such vandalism will result in the perpetrators losing their right to a driver's license, at least not until the victim of their vandalism has been compensated for the loss of their automobile, through insurance or otherwise.

Over 30,000 police and 50,000 firefighters were deployed on New Year's Eve; 288 arrests were made, compared to 259 the previous year; four "lightly wounded" police and fire officials, which repeats the same number of injuries from last year; fights with police were said to be "sporadic" and "rare".

Minister of the Interior Michèle Alliot-Marie congratulated her troops' professionalism, which allowed for a "calm [evening] without notable incidents." [my translation]

Tell that to the team of police investigating a routine traffic accident in the violence-plagued banlieu of Seine-Saint-Denis; at 2:00 AM a car being driven by three young thugs deliberately tried to run over the helpless police officers. The kids said later that they assumed the police were in fact manning a checkpoint. A rare detail: the police took out their guns in self-defense and opened fire on the car as it tried to hit them. The three youths, aged 15-16, were pursued and eventually caught.

UPDATE: More details on France's New Year's evil here.

350 French Police Seal Off Seine-Saint-Denis In Raid

Another excursion into enemy territory for the French forces of law and order this week, as 350 French police descended on the sensitive zone of Saine-Saint-Denis to smash a ring of drug dealers.

This follows similar raids last month, in comparable company-strength.

The story was carried by several French media sources, with little variation in the details provided. I've translated this account from Yahoo France:

A vast police operation was conducted Wednesday night in the neighborhood of Beaudottes a Sevran (Seine-Saint-Denis) against drug traffickers, leading to the arrest of four people.
Three hundred and fifty police officers were deployed to seal off this neighborhood considered, according to a report from General Intelligence, as a hub for drug trafficking, especially cannabis.

François Molins, the district attorney for the Republique de Bobigny, specified on France Info that house searches had taken place "in 12 apartments that were squatted in for the last several weeks, if not months, and were targeted as possible stockpiling areas for drugs."

"The result, is four persons arrested for infractions related to drugs", he said. The scale of the operation justified itself notably "from the need to exploit information that was in our possession from various court proceedings", he underlined, observing that no "regrettable" incidents took place during the arrests.

The size of the police forces enlisted for the raid no longer seems to raise gallic eyebrows, considering the wartime conditions under which the police operate. There have been sufficient precedents, such as the incidents in Courcouronne and Grande-Borne, to warrant taking extra precautions when organizing their raid; for all the police knew, they would have needed every single one of those troops, in order for all of them to escape with their lives.

The attacks on police are no longer as newsworthy as they used to be; like vandalism and petty theft, the youths' war on police is relegated to ho-hum backpage filler. Like this short piece from Monday's Le Figaro newspaper:

Two police from the anti-criminality Brigade (BAC) were wounded from blows from iron bars and a third by a hail of stones, in the sensitive neighborhood of Toulouse, it was learned from police sources.
The police and fire-fighter unions regularly reveal an increase in the force of the violence which they meet during their interventions in several Toulousian suburbs.

A car struck a pedestrian crossing the street, a cat got stuck up a tree, police were attacked by thugs wielding iron bars... it's shocking to see such horror reduced to the mere banal. But then...

C'est La Guerre....

[Thanks to one of my favorite French blogs, the inspiring Le Salon Beige, for the Figaro story]

French School Violence: Mother Assaults Teacher

You know it's a tough neighborhood when the students' mothers come to school and start beating up on the teachers.


My translation of the story as it appeared in the online version of the French paper Le Dauphine:

Assault in Gironde: hit by student's mother

Originally, [the teacher] wanted to explain to the mother that her child had insulted her. As things turned out, this female teacher from Georges-Leygues, in Pessac (Gironde) was assaulted by the mom.

The incident took place Tuesday after the end of classes. The teacher had first invited the student's parent to enter [the school], but the mother stopped in the courtyard. "She started to insult her, then physically attacked her" with her fists, according to the principal. The result: a broken rib. In a state of shock, she was held for observation until Wednesday, the beginning of the holidays. The Republic's prosecutor explained yesterday that "the suspect admitted her involvement but gave a different version than that of the accuser."

The instructor, in her forties, pressed charges. The principal added that she herself had already brought compaints [against the parent] for violence, threats and insults from encounters with the mother a year ago.