France's downwards spiral: Intifada

After yet another night of mayhem in the suburbs of Paris, we are starting to see coherence. The muslim protesters want: the head of the Interior Ministry Nicolas Sarkozy. This is the guy that called the rioters "scum" and they didn't like it. There no word on his pending (or non-pending) resignation in this piece from the BBC, but as has been relayed in these pages before, the French Government is done for. The protesters will first demand one minister, then another, then they'll want a coalition. To that end, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has started meeting with these "youths". From the BBC:

Mr de Villepin is trying to launch an action plan for the affected Paris suburbs, which are poor, largely immigrant communities with high levels of unemployment.

He held a conference with youths from urban areas hit by the unrest on Friday.

But all is not happiness. Indeed, some local officials can already see beyond the horizon and that offering "plans to violent protester is bad idea:

But [M. de Villepin] came under fire from a group of around 30 mayors and other elected officials from the affected areas, who said this was no time for a plan.

"All we need is one death and things will get out of control," said Jean-Christophe Lagarde, mayor of Drancy.

Last night's tally: 900 cars torched, two nurseries and a school. Nice people.

Nice

From the AP:

A woman on crutches was doused in flammable liquid and set on fire earlier this week as she tried to get off a bus in a Paris suburb, a judicial official said Friday. She suffered severe burns.

Paris is in trouble. And so is Chirac....

More on the "French riot organization" meme

From Yahoo via the AFP:

...for the first time since the troubles first erupted on Thursday of last week, there were sporadic signs of copycat rampages elsewhere in France. Police said several cars in the eastern city of Dijon were set alight.

The rioting was a direct challenge to the authority of the French government and to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin in particular.

Villepin on Thursday vowed before parliament that authorities "will not give in" to the violence and would make restoring order their "absolute top priority".

"I will not allow organised gangs to make the law in the suburbs," he declared.

Staying out of Iraq purchased the French Government a few years of peace from their Muslim minorities and the near eternal hatred of Americans. But that's changing and I don't think they have the mettle to handle this.

Cheese eating surrender monkeys? M. Chirac's government will fall.

VD Hanson, righ as usual

Power graf:

...when the American public is still bickering over WMDs rather than relieved that the culprit for the first World Trade Center bombing can no longer find official welcome in Baghdad; or when our pundits seem more worried about Halliburton than the changes in nuclear attitudes in Libya and Pakistan; or when the media mostly ignores a greater percentage of voters turning out for a free national election in the heart of the ancient caliphate than during most election years in the United States — something has gone terribly, tragically wrong here at home.

Read it all here.

Yet another night of trouble in Paris

Unrest flared for an eighth straight night Thursday, though scaled down from previous says. Young men fire buckshot at riot police vehicles in Neuilly-sur-Marne, while a group of 30 to 40 harassed police near a synagogue further east in Stains, said the top official of Seine-Saint-Denis, Prefect Jean-Francois Cordet.

Read it here.

I still reject the notion that this is, how to say it, the raving of the poor and disaffected; that this is somehow the fruits of racism and France's unwillingness to "assimilate" North Africans. I content that Iran is using al-Qaida operatives to arm and foment organized violence directed at soft targets like car dealerships (wouldn't poor people steal the cars rather than set them on fire?) and French Government assets like policemen, firefighters and commuter trains. The MSM, as usual, highlights "roots causes" always using language like this to frame the behavior:

Beyond the poverty and despair of life in the shoddy immigrant communities ringing the shining French capital, local Muslims say, there is no one left with any sway over the rioting youths. [ital. mine].

That fits into their cosmology. It's because we haven't done enough.

I don't think so. When you have a guy like Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying things like "Israel should be wiped from the map", and standing in front of a large image showing national symbol falling through an hour glass as if their time is over, you have to believe that he's capable of anything.

So French officials are seeing what I suspected

Via Drudge:

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that the riots in several Paris suburbs over the previous night were "not spontaneous" but rather "well organized."

"What we saw in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis overnight was not spontaneous, it was perfectly organized. We are looking into by whom and how," Sarkozy told French news channel i-tele.

The interior minister also said the government would not allow "troublemakers, a bunch of hoodlums, think they can do whatever they want" in the country.

A force of 1,000 police were assigned late Thursday to Seine-Saint-Denis, following the previous night of violence which affected about half of the 40 towns in the department, mostly communities of immigrants from Africa, officials said.

We can drill in ANWR

This ought to cause the greedheads in the Oil futures market to seize up -- even though actual production is years away. The Senate finally does the right thing after years of being held back by environmentalist wackos....

Few people know this, but the continental US has three times the oil than Saudi Arabia has and it's locked up in the oil sand in Wyoming (more on that here.) The main reason oil producers have not tapped into this is cost -- it's a whole lot cheaper pull the crude out in liquid form, then tanker it across the world than it is to turn oil sands in distillate. However, with crude futures hovering at the $60 a barrel level, this could make this form of oil cost effective. What does that mean? The US become a net producer of oil again. And all our oil-rich enemies (read "Iran") can no longer corner the market...

I want to go on the record now...

Iran is backing and assisting the riots in France. And it's whole lot worse than the MSM is letting on, with card dealerships being burned down and commuter trains being stopped and pelted with rocks. What's odd is that MSM is mentioning the ethnicity of the rioter -- Muslim -- in most of their stories until much later. Get this from the International Herald-Tribune. While they do mention that the neighborhoods that these riots are occurring in are "fertile terrain for Islamic extremists", they do not identify the rioter heritage until paragraph 13. And they are shooting at police. Where do you think they got those guns in a society and structured as modern France (an oxymoron, I know).

So, what do you want to bet that the riots in Paris are now being funded and orchestrated by Iran? Think about it -- what started as spantaneous convulions of anger could have been seized upon by a theocratic and west-hating Iran as the chance to open up a new front in their war on the modern, decadent west. Fortune is opportunity and means... For them, this was both

But let's get real, the MSM and their fellow travelers don't want to face the hard reality that Iran is out to destroy US, Israel and every western democracy. Their head of government has said as much. Nor does the MSM and their fellow travelers want to face the reality that the "insurgents" in Iraq and funded and financed by Iran. Nor does the MSM and their fellow travelers want to acknowledge that British forces are already engaging Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iraq.

What's going on in Iraq right now is a proxy war with the Iranians. The sooner it turns in a real shooting war, the sooner our troubles in the mid east will abate.

Faster, please.

Democrats and Bigotry

I have long maintained that the modern Democratic Party in America is more similar to the Nazis of Adolf Hitler's Germany than the Republican Party. Whether you look at race-based preferences overruling meritocracy (affirmative action) or eugenics (pro-choice politics that disproportionally affects black and those with Down's Syndrome) or intolerance of opposing viewpoints (political correctness), the Democratic Party is far more Nazi-like than the Republican Party (with it's stance on individual as opposed to group rights).

This is perfectly illustrative of what I see as a cancer on the soul of America. In an article in the Washington Times, Maryland Lt. Governor Michael S. Steele (R) was pelted by Democratic activists with Oreo cookies.

Now if Republicans pulled a stunt like that, the MSM would be aflame (as well they should). Here, nothing. Indeed, the sense of identity politics is strong that that black Democrats are attacking him because Mr. Steele's policy positions don't advance "the black community". Get this:

Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat, said Mr. Steele invites comparisons to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black.
"Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community," she said. "His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people." [ital. mine]
During the 2002 campaign, Democratic supporters pelted Mr. Steele with Oreo cookies during a gubernatorial debate at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
In 2001, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. called Mr. Steele an "Uncle Tom," when Mr. Steele headed the state Republican Party. Mr. Miller, Prince George's County Democrat, later apologized for the remark.

So, if Mr. Steele expresses any view other that the Democratic Party Line ("you do what you white masters at the DNC tell you, now"), you're and "Uncle Tom".

And they wonder why they lose elections.

Prediction: Mr. Steele will win a narrow victory, despite lots of ugliness from the left in general and the Democratic Party in particular.

Oil under $60 a barrell

Read it an weep.