Emmanuel Macron blames video games for teenagers rioting - "After chairing a crisis security meeting, the French president claimed they were copying violence from games that had “intoxicated” them. He called on parents to keep troublemakers off the streets before blaming social media for the tumult and unrest since Nahel M, 17, was killed by police in Nanterre... Mr Macron told social media firms to remove content related to the rioting, which has seen a bank ransacked, barricades erected and cars set alight. Tens of thousands of police have been deployed across France... Police unions have highlighted how many of those arrested are aged just 14 or 15. “I don’t have much hope that they are going to prison,” the head of the Alliance police union, Rudy Manna, told Europe 1 radio on Friday."
When you want to pretend the problem is not as bad as it is
Meme - Destiny Is Destiny: "A Reminder: Nazi propaganda from 1932 predicted that the French people would be replaced by Africans within 100 years.
Caption: "The last non-colorful French people - the main attraction of the Paris Zoo"
Die Vernegerung Frankreichs in 100 Jahren"
Renson Seow - "Rolling eyes at the cultural enrichment now happening in France, suppressed by nearly all left wing media outlets. There's literally African rioters toting and firing automatic weapons on their streets, but nope, silence from legacy media because of the skin colour. Twitter is literally the only source of actual true news right now."
France Riots: Crazy Visuals Emerge On Social Media As France Riots Seem Like War-Zone - "Malls and showrooms have been looted. There has been vandalism and arson on the streets and rioters have reportedly looted armories and video footage of armed rioters have surfaced all over social media. NDTV cannot verify the authenticity of these videos, but most have been shared by verified social media handles... The Paris region's bus and tram lines remained "severely disrupted" on Friday, the RATP transport operator said, after a dozen vehicles were torched overnight in a depot and some routes were blocked or damaged. There was daylight looting Friday in the eastern city of Strasbourg, where rioters targeted an Apple Store and other shops."
Yasmine Mohammed 🦋 ياسمين محمد on Twitter - "Yelling Allahu Akbar as they commit violence during Eid. So peaceful. #FranceRiots"
Related: I ran into one idiot who claimed that most rioters "Were born in the Middle East and Africa, then immigrated there as "refugees"", and proceeded to cite 5 articles which didn't support his claim at all
The Roots of France’s Riots - "I spoke to dozens of young men to make sense of the past 10 days. They will be referred to only by their first names, as revealing their full identities could lead to their losing their jobs or being subjected to harassment. They come from the outskirts of Paris, the much-discussed banlieues, and the notorious northern neighborhoods of Marseille, as well as from smaller towns like Mulhouse, a former industrial powerhouse that has attracted immigrants of all backgrounds. They were all born in France and are French citizens, but express a sense of alienation"
Paris riots: Suburban mayor's wife hurt as rioters attack their home - "Attackers in France tried to set fire to the home of a suburban Paris mayor's home overnight and fired rockets at the official's fleeing wife and children. The incident has caused widespread shock and is being treated as attempted murder. Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne described it as intolerable. Mayor Vincent Jeanbrun was not at home, but his wife suffered a broken leg and a child was also hurt... The attackers used a car to ram through the gates of their home before setting the vehicle on fire so that the blaze would spread to the house"
The French Riots and the Broader European Underclass - WSJ - "A deep-rooted dynamic of disorder has set France’s police against teenagers and young men from immigrant backgrounds. The law-abiding majority now faces the consequences of the state’s long failure to enforce the law... Merzouk had no criminal convictions, but not for lack of effort. His judicial file, which happened to reach France’s Europe 1 channel, is said to contain 15 items, including driving with false license plates, driving without insurance, drug dealing and possession, “rebellion against police officers,” and several charges in juvenile courts for resisting arrest. He didn’t deserve to die. The law-abiding, hard-working majority in the outlying housing projects known as banlieues don’t deserve to live amid endemic crime and violence. Though France’s historical circumstances are unique, there is nothing uniquely French about the country’s present discontent. Western European societies were historically cohesive and “high-trust” societies. High immigration rates and a systemic failure to integrate the children of immigrants have in recent decades balkanized them into low-trust, high-crime societies, especially in the cities. An underclass culture of dependency and macho criminality contributes to high crime rates and increasingly violent interactions between youth and police. Bad blood from France’s colonial era may divide whites from the brown-skinned children and grandchildren of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. But that doesn’t explain everything. Germany never had an empire in North Africa or the Middle East, yet it too struggles to assimilate the children of immigrants. Meantime, Britain’s population of immigrant descent also largely comes from ex-British colonies, yet it population isn’t at odds with the British state. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Indian-descended parents emigrated from East Africa in the 1960s... The last major outbreak of rioting in France was in 2005 and was largely confined to the banlieues. This time, however, rioters looted French city centers, attacking police with shotguns, Molotov cocktails and fireworks. The unions representing more than half of France’s police officers said this week that they are fighting “savage hordes” and “vermin.” This is the language of civil war. If the police are losing a struggle for control of the streets, there will be electoral consequences across Western Europe. Nationalist French politicians Marine Le Pen or her niece Marion Maréchal will continue to narrow the gap with the centrist parties as the country approaches its 2027 presidential elections. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany party is now polling at 20%, ahead of the Social Democrats. The structural consequences will be felt in Brussels, where the European Parliament is already a repository for nationalist protest votes. An insurrection can be crushed. Democratic government can rule only by assent."
France teen's family tell BBC police use of lethal force must change - "A relative of the French teenager shot by police has told the BBC the family did not want his death to spark riots, but insisted the law around lethal force at traffic stops must change... France's penal code was changed in 2017 to allow for a broader use of firearms after police said they were facing increased levels of violence... Nahel's grandmother also called for an end to the violence and accused rioters of using Nahel's death as an excuse. "Don't destroy the schools, don't destroy the buses. It is other mothers who take these buses," Nadia, Nahel's grandmother, told BFMTV."
When did the left become pro-riot? - "France is in flames. With over two thousand arrests, more than four thousand vehicles set ablaze, hundreds of buildings ransacked and the attempted murder of a suburban mayor, the past six days of riots have been some of the most violent and destructive in decades. They have already exceeded the damage caused by the three weeks of intense rioting in Paris in 2005. The burning and looting continued throughout last night, although on a much smaller scale, with 150 arrests compared with over 700 on Saturday night... there have been some on the left who have sought to justify or excuse the destruction, to treat it as a legitimate response to police racism or deprivation – just as some American leftists responded to the BLM riots. Most notably, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the left-wing firebrand and leader of France Insoumise, hit out at the ‘guard dogs… calling for calm’. ‘We are calling for justice’, he insisted... Talking heads have described the rioters as a ‘self-organised, politically conscious social movement’, fighting against a ‘social system… maintained by racism’. The international media, including the BBC, have continually referred to those burning cars, looting shops and attacking public transport as ‘protesters’, as if these riots were marches that got out of hand. To talk of this unrest as a protest is completely inappropriate – it speaks to how clueless and detached much of the left has become. Revolution and social change are not on the lips of these rioters. The tragic killing of Nahel, in the words of his own grandmother, has become an ‘excuse’. His family are utterly dismayed at what is being done in his name... Apologists claim that the rioters are consciously attacking ‘economic targets’, emblems of the capitalist order, as they ransack everything from Nike stores to Lidl supermarkets. In truth, they are mainly setting fire to their own communities. While there have been clashes with police on Paris’s famous Champs-Élysées, the vast majority of the trouble has been concentrated in some of France’s poorest neighbourhoods. Rioters themselves have admitted to having no political aims. ‘I made a huge mistake… I was caught up in the euphoria’, one typical rioter told a judge last week. Besides, the average age of those arrested is just 17 years old, some have been as young as 13. It is absurd to call this a conscious, radical campaign. All this talk of ‘rioting for justice’ recalls those other large-scale riots in 2005. That unrest was initially sparked when two teenagers were electrocuted to death as they tried to hide from the police in an electrical substation. Three weeks of rioting followed and three civilians were killed in the chaos. ‘Like today, [the rioters of 2005] were not advancing any political project’, says philosopher Pascal Bruckner. While naive observers saw a ‘proletarian revolution’, one rioter memorably said his demand was for ‘money and girls’. In 2005, there was a palpable rejection of French institutions and the authority of the state. But this was a rejection characterised by nihilism, destruction, thrill-seeking and violence – not some revolutionary opposition to the status quo. The tendency to make excuses for this behaviour, or to project a political script on to it, Bruckner argues, has since gained legitimacy on the French left – thanks to the now common accusation that everything about France, from its policing to its school system to its economic model, is ‘systemically racist’. People are fond of (mis)quoting Martin Luther King, saying that ‘riots are the language of the unheard’ (MLK never actually endorsed or called for rioting). But this mantra makes little sense in the context of the past week. For one thing, mainstream politicians, from President Emmanuel Macron downwards, condemned the ‘inexplicable’ and ‘unforgivable’ killing of Nahel almost as soon as the video footage emerged. The policeman who shot him is facing charges of ‘voluntary homicide’... these riots are doing nothing for those in the banlieues. They are only adding to the difficulties experienced by those who live there. While an attack on a town hall might be dressed up as a protest against the state, vandals have also firebombed local libraries, health centres and supermarkets. Rioters are attacking the infrastructure and services that their own communities rely on. It is the poor, particularly those from migrant backgrounds, who will suffer most from these outbursts of violence. To suggest that these rioters in some way represent the five million residents of the banlieues is beyond insulting. The vast majority are as horrified by the carnage as anyone else. It’s strange that this even needs to be said but there is nothing progressive about mindless violence and criminality. Still, this isn’t the first time that sections of the left have confused riots for a revolution. We saw this during the London riots in 2010, when youths burning down their own high streets was dubbed an ‘insurrection’ against Tory austerity. We saw this with the BLM riots in the US, too, where a mix of low-life criminals and Antifa lunatics torching and looting minority-owned businesses was presented as a ‘fiery but peaceful protest’ against police brutality. In truth, they were the most costly and destructive riots in American history. Only those utterly disconnected from the lives of ordinary people could see such violence as in any way positive, let alone as the authentic voice of the downtrodden. There’s something both shameful and pathetic about these armchair radicals getting a vicarious thrill out of all the looting and burning, all from the safety of their own plush neighbourhoods. The grim rise of riot apologism speaks to the yawning distance that now exists between the left and the people it pretends to speak for."
Meme - Harry Bergeron: "There's a weird generational inversion where Boomers are like naive children with magical beliefs and their descendants shield most of the real world from them because they aren't capable of handling it. We actually interact with reality every day as the "children" play pretend"
Jack Poso @ @JackPosobiec: "An older French woman is pleading with police to not arrest the rioters bc it would be racist I have never seen anything like this"
Amy Mek on Twitter - "Islamic Rioters are Hunting Police in France; They Issued a Death Threat in a Startling New Video: 'Allahu Akbar - We Are Muslims, We Have The Right to Kill You.....It’s over for all of you, cops' The Muslims used Quranic principles as incitement to murder. This is what an actual insurrection looks like! I can not post the video on Twitter; a French journalist was already forced to delete it. France is going to extreme lengths to obfuscate the true gravity of these riots and the menacing threats from Islamic migrants. Tens of thousands of brave officers are putting their lives on the line to protect the people of France. However, instead of providing unwavering support, the government is aiding in censoring the very real threats they face. The question remains: why would they choose to obscure the dangers that law enforcement officers and citizens confront daily? Watch the video here that has been translated into English:"
The translation is accurate
The riots in France have become antisemitic - opinion - The Jerusalem Post - "If riots involve the deliberate defacement of a Holocaust memorial, and if said defacement takes the form of threatening Jews with a new Holocaust, as has happened in the Paris suburb of Nanterre last Thursday, where the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation was defaced with the slogan “On va faire une shoah“ (We are going to make a Shoah), it’s hard to see how one could argue that those riots – whatever the original cause of their ignition was – should not described as antisemitic. So what happens if you search Google News for the term “antisemitic riots”, even several days after the fact? You will find several articles about the incident in Nanterre – all of which have one thing in common. From Israeli newspapers like this publication or the Times of Israel, to The Jewish Chronicle in the UK or the Algemeiner in the US, all the results are from Jewish outlets. Only on subsequent pages do results from ABC News or USA Today pop up as well – but those aren’t related to the recent events in France at all, but months-old articles about people involved in the January 6 riots in Washington DC. Even if you let go of that particular phrase and simply search for news about the Nanterre memorial, only one non-Jewish outlet (i24News) pops up in addition. If you rely on newspapers like the New York Times or the Guardian, or the websites of CNN or the BBC for the entirety of your information about the riots in France – even if you combine all four aforementioned sources to make sure you get a comprehensive picture – you will be completely oblivious about the incident, and anyone mentioning antisemitic riots will sound like a paranoiac to you. IT SEEMS that the defacement of a Holocaust memorial with threats of a new Holocaust counts as a niche news item, its newsworthiness restricted to those who are directly affected by it through their Jewishness; not political news, but “Jewish interest” news. In a media landscape in which an awkward encounter at a dog park can generate headlines about racism for days, this is at the very least surprising. Of course, riots are almost by definition chaotic, decentralized affairs, which can make it tricky to define any single incident as representative of the whole. But it’s hard to imagine that, for example, riots by Trump supporters or anti-vax protesters, in the course of which a Holocaust memorial was vandalized and a new Holocaust was threatened, would not be described as antisemitic by most major media outlets. And even if we abandon the notion of assigning it a defining role in the riots, and only look at it as an isolated incident, the silence surrounding it is still striking, and suggests a desire to avoid “tainting” the riots with it, in order to preserve a certain narrative. If the explanation for this curious state of affairs is not an ideological one, with all the tacit endorsement of (some kinds of) antisemitism and willful abdication of journalistic duties that entails, one would certainly like to know what it is instead."
So much for the conspiracy that Jews are coordinating everything to benefit themselves
Meme - Martyr Made @martyrmade: "With few exceptions, European colonialism raised the colonized to never-before-known levels of civilization and material standard of living. And with few exceptions, they've proven unable to maintain those things when the Europeans left, despite oceans of financial and material aid from their former colonizers. Guys like this know it better than anyone, and his sense of inferiority fires a raging hatred that Western generosity only makes worse."
Manolo De Los Santos @manolo_realengo: "No amount of fire by young protesters in France can equal the over four centuries of violence, death & destruction by France in the Third World. France would have to burn for years without end to account for it's crimes from Haiti, to Algeria & Vietnam!"
In France, Nihilistic Protest Is Becoming the Norm - The Atlantic - "In recent years, mass protest in France has trended toward ever greater violent disarray. President Emmanuel Macron’s government was effectively derailed by the “yellow vest” movement, and the ancillary unrest that it began lasted from 2018 to 2020, until the coronavirus pandemic effectively changed the subject. Earlier this year, the country was crippled by strikes and sometimes violent—and, yes, fiery—protests in response to Macron’s deeply unpopular pension reforms delaying retirement by two years. For the better part of the 21st century, the country has suffered from an ambient rage that remains partially inexplicable and knows no racial boundary. As the philosopher Pascal Bruckner told me when I called him, the sad truth is that “every type of protest now degenerates into a riot.” At the same time, rioters seem to be getting younger and appear more willing to cross previously unthinkable lines. In L’Haÿ-les-Roses, a suburban town south of Paris, several days ago, unidentified assailants smashed a car into the home of the mayor, Vincent Jeanbrun, and lit the automobile on fire in an attempt to destroy his house. Jeanbrun’s wife and children were asleep. Two of his family members sustained injuries trying to escape. Even as people in France have grown numb to excess, we sense that few limits remain. Jeanbrun correctly observed that this was an assassination attempt and that “democracy itself is under attack.” In all, 99 town halls and 250 police stations or gendarmeries have been stormed; about 3,400 people—on average, just 17 years old—have been arrested; more than 700 police officers have been injured; 5,000 vehicles have been burned; and 1,000 buildings have been damaged or looted. Yet these incredible numbers still don’t convey the intensity of the destruction or the sheer nihilism that has seized and shocked a country that is quite familiar with protests and rioting. This time, according to Le Monde, just “five nights and as many days of violence have exceeded the severity of the riots in the fall of 2005, which lasted three weeks” and have remained a kind of national high-water mark of violent insurrection. “One does not unleash violence with impunity,” Bruckner recently warned. “It is a fire that spreads with astonishing mimicry. The more we tolerate it, the more it becomes the only language of conflict.” The uprising has a purely memetic aspect—one evident in the Anglophone media’s haste to dub the current unrest “France’s George Floyd moment,” and in some French activists’ adoption of the American framework of structural racism to explain and at times even justify wanton violence and devastation. In his first remarks on the recent riots, Macron controversially observed the power of social media at play. “We’ve seen violent gatherings organized on several [social-media platforms]—but also a kind of mimicry of violence,” he said, according to Politico, adding that such networked contagion distances young people from reality. What no one can dispute is that this uprising is not reducible to a single killing. “The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities,” Camus wrote in The Rebel. “The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.” Almost nowhere in the West is the equality among citizens articulated more forthrightly or consistently than in France; the United States may be the only exception. This might explain why even though France’s social safety net is far more generous than in Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, and other wealthy, diversifying European nations, malaise and overt fury—the indiscriminate violence that is always ready to erupt even as society becomes measurably less discriminatory—remain far more persistent here. Nor can the gap between beautiful philosophical promises and the granular disappointments of empirical reality be discounted entirely in any consideration of the spate of homegrown terrorism that marred the mid-2010s, when more citizens of France than any other Western nation went off to fight for the Islamic State, and the group’s sympathizers carried out a series of horrific massacres within France itself."
Clearly the solution is even more welfare
Meme - "France.. "Please don't break my other windows. I need them to pay for your mother's welfare benefits"
"Ne casse pas mes autres vitrines s'il te plaît. J'en ai besoin pour payer le RSA de ta mère"
Meme - "17 is a child, he was a poor kid!"
"Ah yes, when a girl reaches puberty she is a woman ready for marriage yes"
Meme - Shaniqua Posting Delusions @DeIudedShaniqwa: "I love when they admit that the presence of immigrants is a punishment to the host nation"
Khaled Beydoun @KhaledBeydoun: "#NahelM
If France doesn't want "immigrants," it shouldn't have colonized Algeria for 132 years."
Weird how countries that barely or didn't colonise, like Germany and Sweden, have so many immigrants
The real refugee problem? Bigotry - "How, then, could a migration of millions of Muslim men (in the main) from not only the Middle East but sub-Saharan Africa, have any negative effect on Jews? The first aspect is obvious: among those populations there will be many who bring the hatreds and suspicions of Jews that are inculcated in their homelands and faith. In time, this will lead to more attacks like that on the Jewish school in Toulouse (2012), the Jewish Museum in Brussels (2014) or the Jewish food-market in Paris (2015). But here, wider public sympathy will go to the victims of these attacks rather than their perpetrators. Yet another theme has bubbled up which it genuinely shocks me to discover. For many Jewish groups and Jewish leaders have been taking a conspicuous lead in welcoming refugees . Some initiatives – such as that to save Christian children in the Middle East who are being ''cleansed'' from the region – are hugely admirable and widely appreciated. But it is specific and needed. Other initiatives and statements from Jewish leaders and groups appear to be welcoming any and all refugees and equating the plight of 1930s Jews with all 21st-century migrants. This is not just a misreading of history but an incorrect application of history. It also sets up a dangerous linkage between Jews who are already in Europe and an increasingly unpopular, current European migration policy... Soros confirmed that, yes, whereas Orban thought migrants the problem and borders the solution, Soros did indeed think borders the problem and migrants the solution. In reporting this exchange, the same theme emerged. ''It's all very well for the Jews. They have Israel where only Jews can go and all the time they're destroying our own religious and racial identity in Europe.'' And another theme started to come up which I never thought I'd hear in my lifetime: ''Ah - the rootless, cosmopolitan Jew.'' Searching online I find that this is indeed becoming a theme. A video watched hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube excerpts an interview with a Jewish academic in Sweden who explains that Europe ''has not yet learned how to be multicultural.'' She goes on: ''Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies that they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the centre of that. It's a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode, and Jews will be resented because of our leading role.''... the open-heartedness of so many Jews must also be countered by more vocal and visible even-headedness. In particular, this constitutes a careful warning that it could yet be a problem for European Jews if their leaders and visible figures get ahead of (and are seen to be the progenitors of) a mass movement of peoples that looks likely in the near future to go unimaginably sour, thus bearing out my pessimistic Jewish friend's worst fears."
When you want to incite anti-Semitism, besides importing it
The "leading role" quote is from Barbara Lerner Spectre
Immigration Backlashes Spread Around the World - WSJ - "Record immigration to affluent countries is sparking bigger backlashes across the world, boosting populist parties and putting pressure on governments to tighten policies to stem the migration wave. Many places, including Canada and parts of Europe and Asia, have been encouraging more migrants to come to help alleviate labor shortages and offset demographic declines. But the jump in arrivals, along with increases in illegal immigration to the U.S. and Europe, is making more voters uneasy. The influx since the end of the pandemic is altering societies, with many people blaming immigrants for increases in crime and higher housing costs. The Dutch government collapsed on Friday after parties failed to agree on new measures to restrict immigration that has soared to record levels, triggering new elections in the fall. Anti-immigrant parties recently took power in Italy and Finland, and have started backing a minority government in Sweden. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party is leading national polls... Polls across affluent countries show a jump in opposition to immigration, including in places that have been most welcoming to newcomers. Roughly half of Canadians think the government’s new target of about a half-million immigrants a year is too many in a country of 40 million, while three-quarters worry the plan will result in excessive demand for housing and health and social services, according to a poll by Léger, a Montreal-based research company. In the U.K., which has eased rules to attract more college graduates from abroad to fill skills shortages, nearly half of people think legal migration is too high... In the U.S., where a large percentage of the population has long opposed immigration, attitudes have hardened over the past year: Americans’ satisfaction with the level of immigration into the U.S. declined to 28% in February, the lowest reading in a decade, from 34% a year earlier, according to Gallup polls. And in France, which has been convulsed by violent protests after police shot and killed a teenager of North African origin, recent polls suggest that French far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who favors tighter rules on immigration, could win the country’s next presidential election... In Europe especially, “you definitely have a strong mismatch between the kind of people our labor markets need and the kind of people actually coming in,” said Roland Freudenstein, Brussels-based vice president of the independent think tank Globsec. Many immigrants to Europe are motivated by generous social-welfare systems in places such as Sweden and Germany, Freudenstein said. That differs from the U.S., where immigrants are more motivated by work, in part because social benefits are less generous... Despite Germany receiving millions of refugees from Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine in recent years, businesses there complain that they still need more skilled migrants because refugees are hard to train and integrate. Only around 100,000 of the roughly one million Ukrainians in Germany have a job... U.S. research suggests that an immigration inflow equal to 1% of a city’s population is associated with increases in average rents and housing prices of about 1%. Some 60% of Australians support a cap on migration to reduce housing costs... The backlashes repeat a long cycle in immigration policy, experts say. Businesses constantly lobby for more-liberal immigration laws because that reduces their labor costs and boosts profits. They draw support from pro-business politicians on the right and pro-integration leaders on the left, leading to immigration policies that are more liberal than the average voter wants. That leads to a populist buildup and outburst, Manning said. Populist politicians subsequently stifle immigration, reducing voters’ anxieties, and the cycle begins again."
