France

Zemmour said, “If we continue in this direction, due to demography and democracy, France could one day become an Islamic republic.”

In a wide-ranging interview, the first he has given to the foreign press since the French race riots erupted late last month, Éric Zemmour—the former journalist who now leads the national Right party Reconquête—answered questions relating to Islam in France, the future of the country, the nature of the civil insurrection, its source, who is to blame, and what measures must be taken to prevent subsequent catastrophes.

The interview, conducted by Jose Maria Ballester Esquivias for the Spanish digital newspaper El Debate, gave Zemmour ample opportunities to speak his mind on the perilous issues facing France, and as usual, speak his mind he did.

Just over a week since riots erupted in dozens of places across France, things have calmed down in Montmorency, an affluent Parisian suburb not far from the banlieue of Nanterre, where a French police officer fatally shot 17-year-old Nahel M, of north African descent, during a traffic stop on 27 June.

Beatrice, 37, who is on maternity leave, says the first two nights after the killing were calm in her neighbourhood, though constant sirens and bangs from fireworks could be heard.

Reasonably balanced for the Guardian.

… The French nation is deeply divided. But does it still exist? The various political forces have virtually no control over the current phenomenon. The far Left, through the left-wing coalition of the NUPES, and more particularly La France Insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, have played the very dangerous game of fanning the flames by justifying the violence of the rioters in a lamentable exercise in revolutionary one-upmanship of which the French Left, since 1789, has participated. That said, their mobilisation came to a serious halt, forcing them to recognise the limits of their rhetoric of universal fraternisation of the oppressed. In Brest, rioters attacked the Happy Café, an LGBT bar identified on social media as a “fag bar” by the angry rioters. The bar had to close its doors … and the local far-Left had to admit that the fantasy of a convergence of struggles was nothing but a sham.

… France has welcomed millions of people to its shores but has been careful not to teach them to love their country. Today, the seeds of hatred have been sown among the displaced young people, the French nationals, who loathe the country in which they grew up, aided and abetted by a national education system that has taken great care over the years to instil in them the ‘right to be different’ and ‘respect’ for their cultures of origin. Further harm is then inflicted by a new phenomenon, since 2005, of the assumed Islamisation of the rioters’ discourse, as researcher Florence Bergeaud-Blackler points out: some rioters are allegedly responding to the supposed ‘Islamophobia’ of those in power. 

Lots of interesting tid bits in this article.

The riots that recently swept across France were a result of “failures of migration policy” according to six in ten in the country, despite attempts by the political establishment to gloss over the role of mass migration in the social breakdown in France.

Years of bad immigration policy are finally seeing their comeuppance.

The inflammable cocktail of immigration, crime, real or alleged racism, hard-handed police tactics, and fiery left-wing politicians is again exploding in France’s face. Never before, however, has the c-word — “civil war” — been bandied about so openly.

‘Dealers told the rioters to stop the violence so that they could resume drug dealing’

It wasn’t President Macron who brought six days of rioting in France to an end, nor the brave bands of mothers who called for calm in some of the inner-city estates. It wasn’t even the presence of 45,000 police and gendarmes on the streets that persuaded the rioters, arsonists, vandals and looters to stand down. Instead, it seems that it was the drug gangs who decided enough is enough. Having so many boys in blue patrolling the streets was bad for business and so gang leaders exerted their influence and ordered the young hoodlums back to their bedrooms.

I have wondered at the sudden de-escalation.

Following the killing of a 17-year-old boy, France is once again the scene of riots that reflect the gulf between traditional France and the suburbs — the result of immigration over the last 40 years.

Nahel Merzouk was killed by police. He was being chased in Nanterre, near Paris, by two policemen on a motorcycle for traffic violations and refusal to stop the car he was driving. After Merzouk was forced to stop the car due to traffic congestion, the policemen approached his car and drew their weapons. Merzouk then drove off, at which point one of the policemen fired his weapon at the car, fatally wounding Merzouk. If Merzouk had followed the orders of the police, he would not have died.

Last week we learned that a woman in a park in Skegness was dragged into the bushes and raped by a 33-year-old male. The man had arrived in the UK illegally on a small boat just 40 days earlier.

Strangely, I can find little anger about this. The story was reported in a couple of papers but there were no fulminating editorials or emergency questions in the House. Jess Phillips hasn’t found room to grandstand about it. Nor have Yvette Cooper, Stella Creasy or any of those other Labour MPs who like to shake their heads in disgust as the Home Secretary explains that the British taxpayers can’t forever foot the hotel bills of illegal migrants.

Radical youth movements are mobilising across the nation

While France’s week of violent riots at first seems a retread of the banlieue uprising of 2005, in one respect it has displayed a new development, under-discussed in Anglophone media, which was absent a generation ago. Namely, the first evidence of a Right-wing counter-mobilisation against the rioters. In provincial cities like Lyon, Angers and Chambéry, groups of masked and hooded youths have appeared, dressed in black and armed with batons and pepper spray, to confront the rioters and the Left-wing demonstrators supporting them.

I saw a couple of videos purporting to show such activity but was unable to vet them. The military has launched an investigation after “rumours” began to circulate that soldiers from a nearby base masked up and delivered bound rioters to the police in Lorient – Riots: the army opens an investigation into the supposed help of marine commandos to the police in Lorient

In six nights, the rioters have already caused over €1 billion worth of damage.

After a week of race riots the likes of which haven’t been seen in France for decades, the urban violence that engulfed more than 220 towns and cities across the country has exacted a colossal human and material cost, leaving thousands of cars, buses, and trams torched, hundreds of buildings destroyed, and hundreds of law enforcement officers injured.

In a report published on Monday, June 3rd, by the Ministry of the Interior that quantified the extent of the material damage and the number of arrests that occurred in the previous six nights, it was revealed that more than 5,600 vehicles were set ablaze, some 1,300 buildings were damaged or destroyed, and more than 3,300 arrests were made across the country. 

The riots that have ravaged France in recent days have given Éric Zemmour a second wind. The leader of the right wing Reconquest Party has been on the airwaves and in the newspapers, saying, with a touch of schadenfreude, “I told you so.”

🇫🇷 Marine Le Pen: "At a time when our country has just been ransacked and pillaged, I would like to ask you the question that all French people are asking: what have you done with France?"#Emeutes #Nahel #FranceOnFire #FranceBurning #FranceRiots pic.twitter.com/7IMai3FLNk

— European Insider (@Europa_Insider) July 4, 2023