Friday, November 11, 2005
Leftwing Dimwit: The Riots in France are "Not So Bad"
Leave it to the left to defend France as it does battle with Islamic terrorists in their own country: now, a dumbshit from "The Village Voice" (the voice of Greenwich Village in New York, where Bernard Sanders is considered a right-winger) says that, contrary to those images we all see on television, the riots in France are not really bad, and that the French government of Jacques "Shithead" Chirac did a fine job of reacting to them. At the same time, the world media should just stop covering them because Hurricane Katrina was far worse.
Only from the left - we present complete and total madness.
CNN Got It Wrong: The Paris riots weren't that bad—and the French government handled it well
This is why America is as bad as it is: because the liberal media tells us that Bush is bad, Saddam was good, Islamic terrorism is not a big threat, and France's riots are not that bad.
In other words, pure horseshit.
Leave it to the left to defend France as it does battle with Islamic terrorists in their own country: now, a dumbshit from "The Village Voice" (the voice of Greenwich Village in New York, where Bernard Sanders is considered a right-winger) says that, contrary to those images we all see on television, the riots in France are not really bad, and that the French government of Jacques "Shithead" Chirac did a fine job of reacting to them. At the same time, the world media should just stop covering them because Hurricane Katrina was far worse.
Only from the left - we present complete and total madness.
CNN Got It Wrong: The Paris riots weren't that bad—and the French government handled it well
On Monday, two French colleagues and I were talking at a chi-chi café in Paris when we saw a group of police officers in battle regalia boarding a bus just outside our window. "I think we can guess where they're going," one of my friends remarked. Sharp inhalations all around, followed by raised eyebrows.
Our awkward and nervous reaction to those policemen initially struck me as somewhat pitiful—a stinging example of the French bourgeoisie's intellectual detachment from the riots in the city suburbs. Why were we sitting in this café? Why didn't we march to Clichy-Sous-Bois, or La Courneuve, or Aulnay-Sous-Bois, where some of the most violent protests were taking place?
But now, with the riots finally winding down, the café culture's reluctance to engage the riots—its choice of distance (or what the French call recul) seems the right response to the events of the past two weeks. As the cars stop burning and some semblance of order returns to the most troubled areas (albeit with the help of draconian curfew measures), now is as good a time as any to ask: Just what the hell happened? (And how did the American media paint such a distorted picture?)
To answer these questions, we have to first figure out what didn't happen. Contrary to the breathless dispatches from the American press, Paris was most certainly not burning. Those of us ensconced in the central part of the city could hardly tell anything was going on. ("This is not exactly the second French Revolution," another journalist colleague told me.) American media hyperbole served to heighten the distancing effect. Expounding on French social inequalities from their suites at the George V, the dashing reporters of CNN et al., their infographics a-blazin', created a sensationalized image of an entire country under siege.
Another thing the French riots were not: New Orleans on the Seine. It'd be easy to draw parallels between our countries' race-related woes (and indeed there are many), but to do so would belittle both tragedies. The New Orleans death toll was close to 1,000; the French riots produced fewer than ten. New Orleans was a localized event; the French riots touched many major metropolitan areas, including the suburbs of Nice, Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, and Rennes, in addition to spreading to Belgium and Germany.
Ultimately, New Orleans took the U.S. government by surprise; the French riots, meanwhile, were the not-totally-unexpected culmination of a contentious year between banlieue residents and hard-line right-wing Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who called project youths "scum" (racaille) just days before the riots began.
There is also the question of the French government's response to the rioting, which, unlike Bush's response to New Orleans, doesn't qualify as totally incompetent. "The government can't totally crack down on the rioters because it would be accused of being too harsh," a friend told me. "At the same time, it can't be too lenient. It has to show that it's doing something but it can't go too far either way." Give credit where it's due: The French government has minimized casualties and bloodshed. It has also restored state subsidies to impoverished neighborhoods and has lowered the apprenticeship age to 14 to help combat unemployment (which stands at almost 30 percent in certain cites).
This is why America is as bad as it is: because the liberal media tells us that Bush is bad, Saddam was good, Islamic terrorism is not a big threat, and France's riots are not that bad.
In other words, pure horseshit.
