C’est Terrible
By Callimachus | Related entries in In The News, The WorldThe indispensible Praktike, along with Zenpundit and Dave Shuler and a few others have jumped on this tidbit from this weekend’s coverage of the Paris riots:
Police found a gasoline bomb-making factory in a southern suburb of the city, with more than 100 bottles, gallons of fuel and hoods for hiding rioters’ faces, a senior Justice Ministry official said Sunday.
Six youths, all aged under 18, were arrested in the raid Saturday night on a building in Evry south of Paris where the gasoline bombs were being put together, Jean-Marie Huet, the ministry’s director of criminal affairs and pardons, told The Associated Press.
The discovery, Huet said, shows that gasoline bombs being used by rioters “are not being improvised by kids in their bathrooms.�
Dave adds:
I think that Ed Morrisey is overstating the Muslim aspect of these riots. Yes, the rioters are predominantly of North African descent. And they may be Muslims. Yes, the coverage of the story in the French media is surreal in ignoring some of these obvious sides of the story. The evidence that they’re rioting to establish a Sharia enclave within the borders of France is very, very slim.
I think he’s right about that. But the Islamists are watching this, and they’re not stupid. They’ll be thinking, “if this is what a bunch of pissed-off 16-year-old dead end kids can accomplish on their own, imagine what they can do when we get a hold of them and put our chip on their shoulder.”
I also liked this, less ominous, quote from this weekend’s coverage:
The [French] Foreign Ministry said it was concerned that foreign media coverage was exaggerating the situation. “I don’t have the feeling that foreign tourists in Paris are in any way placed in danger by these events,” ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said, adding that officials were “sometimes a bit surprised” by the foreign coverage.
As someone who often reads the coverage of America in the French and German media, I know just how he feels.
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 6th, 2005 and is filed under In The News, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 6th, 2005 at 10:59 pm
This is what scares me the most too. A big blinking “Opportunity” light above France for the Islamists. Not good.
November 7th, 2005 at 11:23 am
Indeed, Captain Ed has already predicted (in a CQ blog entry already linked elsewhere on Donklephant) that al Qaeda would eventually try to harness the Paris rioters for their own ends. I see no reason to doubt that.