Fair's Fair, Now

The attacks by the casseurs on French demonstrators are being covered by the BBC.

They're just not being given the kind of prominence they would be if the attackers were natives and the victims not.

During a recent protest "thugs hit the shop windows on their way up the avenue, and hit the demonstrators on their way down".

Who are they? Ask any shopkeeper, and they will tell you that they are the same youths of immigrant origin who rioted across France's impoverished suburbs in November.

This report manages to tell the truth and ignore it simultaneously. Can you imagine the BBC's coverage if the casseurs were white 'right-wingers' ?

"The festival atmosphere quickly darkened as a small group of troublemakers began to target trade union stewards trying to keep order on the march.

Those youths smashed the windows of a cafe and soon took on the trade unions' security men in random brawls, as the peaceful protesters - young and old - continued on their route across the River Seine and on to Place de la Republique"

"But once they reached their destination in the eastern city centre, most student demonstrators - and the workers who came out in support of them - quickly left as more youths descended on the square, with the sole aim of picking a fight with the riot police.

These youngsters - aged between 15 and 25 - were wearing hooded tops that obscured their features. Many wore masks, so they could not be identified."

"The irony is that the government's new job contracts were brought in hurriedly to help youngsters in France's troubled suburbs - where last November's rioting brought severe social and racial problems into sharp focus."

An irony not lost on the great Dalrymple.

"Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the youth of the banlieues — who recently so amused the world for an entire fortnight with their arsonist antics — exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed. For unless the French labour market is liberalised, they will never find employment and therefore integration into French society. You have only to speak to a few small businessmen or artisans in France — the petits bourgeois so vehemently despised by the snobbish intellectuals — to find out why this should be so. The French labour regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them."

UPDATE - via the comments, France-Echos with photos of the kind of thing the BBC prefer to ignore. Not sure if I follow his politics, but the snaps are pretty eloquent.





UPDATE 2 - More Dalrymple.

"The French do not go to the banlieues, but what they fear is that the banlieues will come to them. Perhaps it is starting to happen. My nephew and a friend of his were walking through the Bois de Vincennes, overlooked by elegant Parisian bourgeois apartment blocks, when they were set upon by two Africans and three Arabs. They were not badly injured, but at the hospital their mothers were told by the staff that such attacks, carried out not for gain but for the sheer pleasure of revenge upon the hated comfortable French, were now commonplace."