Pride of Lions, Part 5

As we mentioned at the end of Part 4, France is a nuclear-armed permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Consequently, when, as we mentioned at the end of Part 4, France already has a list of "sensitive urban zones" (ATLAS DES ZONES URBAINES SENSIBLES), which are essentially no-go areas for the authorities, this is significant - more so than a similar situation in Kosovo.

A Judge Warns: France Should Prepare for Civil War is reproduced here in its entirety.

A quote from the French judge, Jean de Maillard (Vice-president of the Superior Court of Orléans, and a professor at the Institute of Political Science in Paris), 28 November 2007 [here is an English translation]

When two schools, a library, a police station, a garage and several other buildings on a list already forgotten are set on fire, not to mention dozens of vehicles each day, we are used to it. It has become almost a routine.

However, the second night of Villiers-le-Bel marks an escalation that the media and the government would probably prefer to hush up, but which may be the start of a new stage: the use of firearms. In truth, the surprise is not that the rioters began to use them, but first, that they hadn't done it sooner [...] and second, that they are still confining themselves to hunting rifles and lead shot. The suburbs however have been armed for a long time with caches of quality war weapons, lethal weapons, against which the bullet-proof vests will be useless.

In other words the situation is explosive in both meanings of the word. It seems that from one riot to the next the techniques harden, the methods become more professional and the police and gendarmes will soon have to confront, if they have not already, experts in urban guerilla warfare [...]

I am convinced that up until now we have been lucky that the thugs and future murderers in the suburbs have not yet dared to use their fire power. I hope that the public authorities will become aware of the imminence of calamity and especially that they will finally seek solutions. I would not like to be in their shoes, for the margin of maneuverability, if there is one, will be very narrow. Yes, the perpetrators must be mercilessly punished. But repression, in the long term, solves nothing.

And people must stop dreaming, those on the Left and the others: neighborhood police are not a panacea either. You cannot graft an ethnic police force ["police communautaire"] on a society that is this sick and torn apart, in which the members are in open rebellion against society. Police are a means, not a solution. Educators will not be useful either: you cannot cure cancer with a placebo. To shower the caids [a type of governorship, originally found in North Africa and Moorish Spain] with subsidies to buy armed peace will be the chosen way: it will provide only a short respite. Is there another solution? I don't know, and I am very happy not to be in government.

Incredible, you think? Think again.

From France stunned by rioters' savagery, Matthew Campbell, Villiers-le-Bel, December 2, 2007:

IN retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns.

What happened next has sickened the nation. As Illy tried to reassure the gang that there would be an investigation into the deaths of two teenagers whose motorbike had just collided with a police car, he heard a voice shouting: "Somebody must pay for this. Some pigs must die tonight!"

The 43-year-old commissaire realised it was time to leave, but that was not possible: they set his car ablaze. He stood as the mob closed in on him, parrying the first few baseball bat blows with his arms. An iron bar in the face knocked him down.

"I tried to roll myself into a ball on the ground," said Illy from his hospital bed. He was breathing with difficulty because several of his ribs had been broken and one had punctured his lung.

His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week.

Not far from where Illy was lying was a policeman who lost his right eye after being hit by pellets from a shotgun. Another policeman displayed a hole the size of a 10p coin in his shoulder where a bullet had passed through his body armour.

Altogether 130 policemen were injured, dozens by shotgun pellets and shells packed with nails that were fired from a homemade bazooka. It prompted talk of urban "guerrilla warfare" being waged on French streets against the forces of law and order.

This is an everyday occurrence for Israel - but, this is not Israel, this is France.

By the end of the week an extraordinarily heavy police presence in Villiers-le-Bel, where most of the rioting took place, appeared to have halted the violence: on top of public transport strikes and student protests against his reform plans, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, could not afford a repeat of 2005, when a similar incident involving the deaths of two youths provoked the worst French urban unrest in four decades.

Things were so tense in the suburbs, however, that the riots could easily erupt again with the prospect of deaths on either side setting off a much greater explosion and, conceivably, the deployment of the army to keep peace.

"Given the weapons being used, it was lucky that nobody was killed," said a policeman. Nearby were the charred remains of the local constabulary. The nursery school was burnt down. So was the library.

Rioting two years ago was widely regarded as a protest against poor housing, racial discrimination and unemployment of up to 40% in the grim housing estates surrounding most big French cities.

But "Sarko" dismissed suggestions that nothing had been done to improve the situation, referring to the "Marshall plan" for the banlieues being drawn up by Fadela Amara, his urban development minister.

If they're talking about housing, discrimination and unemployment, they're foolishly off the mark.

They need to be looking at cultural factors, including - but not limited to - religion.

At the same time he argued that, far from reflecting difficult living conditions, the violence was a result of the "thugocracy" of the suburbs, where drug-trafficking criminals held sway.

Drugs. The Islamic mafia's drug connections are well-documented at this blog.

Now, although Islamic texts excuse just about any conduct if it is deemed to be of benefit to Islam and to Muslims, I am nonetheless not saying that these criminals perpetrating all this are "good Muslims".

IF they are like young men anywhere in the US, many of them undoubtedly do not go into any religiously-affiliated building, and are not practicing Muslims.

However, we should consider the radicalization and violence that is taught in many Western mosques - by Saudi-trained "holy men" with Saudi-funded materials.

Of course, Wahhabism is not the only extreme version of Islam; but, considering the backing it gets from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it may very well be the best-funded.

"We shouldn't try to excuse the inexcusable,” said the president in a television address to an anxious nation on Thursday, ridiculing the left’s vision of rioters as “victims of social injustice”. He pledged that those who fired at police would be tracked down, one by one, and tried on charges of attempted murder.

There's a reason why Israel sends in military units to deal with unrest in Palestinian territory.

Lawlessness in the suburbs is an awkward issue for Sarkozy because he had promised to deal with it as interior minister, when he introduced "zero tolerance" policing, only to be accused of aggravating the problem by referring to trouble-makers as "thugs" and "scum". Despite some successes, many of the suburban ghettoes remain a law unto their own and, like parts of New York in the bad old days, policemen do not like to set foot there.

I hate to refer to fellow humans "as 'thugs' and 'scum'", too, but - hey, if the shoe fits....

"It felt like they were out to kill us," said one of the officers in Villiers-le-Bel last week. "We knew that there were weapons in the suburbs, but they have never been turned against us like that. The kids were shooting at us at close range, loading and reloading their weapons. I've never seen anything like it."

If it were the US, the gun control crowd would respond by disarming law-abiding citizens.

Appropriate gun-control in this situation is that the police should take aim when they return fire on these "'thugs' and 'scum'."

Sarkozy has ordered a full judicial inquiry into the teenagers' deaths, even though all the evidence seems to support the police version that the boys were thrown from their unlicensed motorcycle when it accidentally collided with a patrol car. Friends and relatives of the victims dismiss the official account of the incident as fantasy.

As for Illy, he says he is not feeling vengeful but has identified one of his attackers from police photographs. He is certain to be able to pinpoint the rest. "Fortunately," he said, "I've got a very good memory."

Keep in mind that when hostilities began in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the lawful authorities were compelled by the international community to not intervene.

The story was repeated in Kosovo.

The precedent has been set.

Now France, a nuclear-armed permanent member of the UN Security Council... how far from civil war?

Stay tuned to Stop Islamic Conquest as Pride of Lions continues.