{ um, help? }

[delga]

You know, generally, Ilisten to the news everyday, and start my day's internetting by heading to BBC news. That being said, I've been out of the loop this weekend because of going to London etc. So, even though I've heard about rioting in France, I have no idea what started it or why it's happening: can anyone fill me in?

From what I can tell, it has to do with racial tensions in the country but that's all the BBC website can tell me. I'm waiting for my laundry cycles to finish so in the meanwhile I'm going to go to The Independent's website and see if I can access archives but until then, anyone on the flist know what's what?

Comments

[noorie.livejournal.com]

oh i actually read a huge article about this on saturday. the specific wave of rioting started because 2 young men/boy were electrocuted to death while fleeing from a police car. and later on some ASSHAT threw something (i forget, possibly a grenade or something smoking or explosive) into a muslim place of prayer during the ramadan (or right after, i'm so senile!!). those were the excuses that lit the fuse, but they didn't create the bomb. there's been a lot of tension in france for a long while now, and i think the above comment talks about that (although i don't know that i agree with the notion that people are made to live in ghettos, it's hardly medieval europe, it's rather that they can ill afford to live anywhere else in the city and since immigrants tend to be low income, they gravitate there). uh, what else. i don't suppose the french people like foreign immigrants any more than most nations. and i don't suppose the immigrants like being hated and treated like shit. then there's the whole religion thing. france prides itself on being a secular state (unlike the U.S., for example). it's a really big thing for them that state-related issues are kept religion-free, and that's part of the (official) reason kids going to public schools aren't allowed to wear a religious headdress, etc. obviously it upsets religious sentiments. also, i think a lot of the french people are feeling threatened by how the nature and culture of france are changing as a result of multi-culturalism and the immigrants' culture. they were going nuts over the american influence, so you can imagine what this does to them. *sigh* normally i'd think religious leaders of the immigrants are behind the rioting (they say it seems all too organized) but in this case i heard a lot of them actually tried to make things better and stop and talk to people and helped a lot at least in one of the neighbourhoods (the neighbourhood of the 2 boys). i'm probably not being correct but that's the gist of what i got from the situation. oh and the french heads of goverment are sort of hoping it'll all go away if they ignore it, while their minister of internal affairs thinks that if he can't fix it with a little force, he can fix it with a LOT of force. *rolls eyes*

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok; that's what I was wondering: the actual, short term trigger. I don't want this to become too much of a political debate but yeah, this has been waiting to happen for some time.

Thanks for the info; it's helped to make sense of a lot of what's been happening.