I pulled this story off of CNN

Safe Travels Folks

Wow ! Thanks for helping tpunks travel safe ! :clap:

Surprised its just now hitting CNN, i mean, I read about it in different forums a couple days ago.

Yea I heard about this last week or so. I was actually really surprised it hadn't turned up on tpunk yet.

Ah but who likes french people anyway. Right esther? :kisscheek:

wie wie :surrender:

All the rioting is in the banlieux (suburbs) so most travelers won't be affected, other than the tension in the city, which might be kinda crappy... The worst of it is in Aulny, I believe, which is pretty far from where anyone would want to be.

I was a bit freaked out because when it started, the news kept reporting it as sparking up in Clichy, where my head office is.. Turns out it's in Clichy-Sous-Bois, which is a different 'burb altogether.

More relevant to travelers, though: the RER B train that runs between CDG and the city center was attacked yesterday, with a couple people injured by broken glass. So if you're going to Paris and taking the train from the airport, please be extra careful!

And all because a couple of kids got electrocuted by climbing into a power station while running from the police. Something aint right in France

I'm so busy I don't have time to read the papers or watch the news (or maybe I should stop coming here instead...), so I wasn't aware at all of what was going on there. This seems to be pretty bad, isn't it ? I have a friend from France coming to visit tomorrow, I'll ask him, he should know better than the medias. They often tend to make it sound worse than it is.

Ah Jacques, Jacques, Jacques... :friends: But I'm not French, I just speak french. Our culture in Quebec is very different from France. French travellers are always surprised (or maybe disappointed, but they're too polite to say). North Americans with latin blood...

happend in redfern (near sydney australia last year.... a aboriginal kid was apparently gettin chased by cops on his bike.. anyway he crashed inbedded him self on a fence and died
then there was riots for awhile but not as bad as paris

you have got that right, the area where the majority of the rioting is happening suffers from extreme poverty because it is an area of mass immigrants from Africa and Arab countries that are basically living in a segregated area where the immigrants suffer from mass unemployment, poor housing and extreme racial depravation and segregation. So throw this in with police brutality ( which french police3 are well known for in demonstrations etc) and we have a whole lotta problems going on in france.

Follwup post guys: It's hit central paris.

Link Is Here

Again. Safe Travels

Crazy stuff always happens soon after I leave Paris. The first time, I flew out of Charles de Gaul airport the day before that Concord jet took off then crashed a minute later into a hotel from the same airport. Now, the rioting has apparently spread to central Paris and I heard from somewhere (I think the CBC website) that several explosions or fires occurred at Place de la Republique, which is about a five to ten minute walk from the budget hotel I stayed in two months ago.

Yes, in some places the Muslim European diaspora is more depressed and angry, etc than the Palestinians... Read in my Suicide Terror class about a poll conducted a while back which measured levels of sympathy with terrorism, individual terrorists, and organizations like Al-Qaeda. European groups were far far more overwhelmingly sympathetic than other arab groups, most notably the palestinians. Very interesting says I. And pretty amazing this sort of thing hasnt broken out on a large scale previously..

One of the results of this mass immigration without integration!

You add the fact that the country is a basically socialist welfare state, with 22% unemployment, you really have the makings of a disaster there.

The moslem suburbs are literally a country within a country, with their own language, religion, mores, laws and the like... It's no surprise that it happened, and with the problem spreading throughout Europe, it looks like it's gonna become a pretty big wake-up call.

Oddly enough, in evil America, we don't seem to have quite the same problem, our Moslem community is pretty well fully integrated with the rest of the country, and though there are little pockets of subversives, we don't seem to have the widespread problems that are plaguing other (more "enlightened") nations...

:dry:

Beergal I am sorry but that is BS.
Their excuses are running out.
Europe needs to wake up.

Beergal what i meant was that is no excuse to burn churches and schools and beat old men into a coma.

I daresay she wasnt offering excuses or attempting to defend them; violence is an inexcusable action. Those are merely the reasons leading to the violence, and she's right. One group cannot expect to repress another group without eventually feeling some sort of retaliation. Thats just how humans function. To categorically write off one's enemies as "wrong", or "crazy" is to deny the responsibility of understanding the motivations, and how to correct the problems in order to prevent further clashes. No one side in any conflict is ever completely blameless.

One of my professors, interestingly enough, was lecturing on this a few weeks ago. As many of you have undoubtedly noticed in your travels, America is much less xenophobic on the whole than other western nations, particularly those of western europe. I know I myself was aghast at some of the flagrantly racist things printed (especially against the arab population) in the Times leading up to the elections in London last spring. In the United States, if a person is a citizen, they are an american. Sure they might style themselves as a "Lebanese-American" or an "Arab-American" or some other hyphenated status, but Americans on the whole are very inclusive. We still very much suscribe to the inscription "Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." This is hardly the case in the Uk and europe in general, from what I've seen and read. Faced with low European birth rates coupled with high immigration, people fear that their traditional ethnic group may lose power to the immigrant class. Im speaking in broad terms here, Bri or anyone else jump in with specifics. I do know I read "Britanistan" thrown around quite a bit in the media, generally in a semi-hysterical tone. I also knew several second generation immigrants from Kuwait- their fathers had british citizenship, and so did they, they'd never been back to Kuwait but still considered themselves Kuwaiti rather than british citizens. Because that is how they are treated and percieved- as outsiders; second class citizens. I havent spent much time studying the French diaspora specifically, but I understand they are much worse to their immigrant population. Again, violence is very repulsive to me personally, and inexcusable, and I am not advocating what is happening but you can understand at least why they're pissed off and have a collective hair-trigger temper. None of this should happen in the first place, and you're exactly right, Briley. This should serve as a wake up call. Perhaps its too late.

gah, sorry to rant. This just touches a bit of an intellectual nerve with me.

I was surprised, but not really when I read about the riots. I was surprised I hadn't heard anything of it till a few days ago, and I was surprised at the rampant spread across the country. I wasn't surprised that it happened. While Europe is the 'liberal' or 'enlightened' place that many people escape to to have a good time, it is still in many ways the same it has been for thousands of years.

When France began taking steps to limit the religous freedoms of arabs I took note and figured that such repression would lead to trouble. At least here in the evil U.S. we give people such freedoms to practice as they please. France and much of Europe needs to learn to open themselves to immigrants. While they can still hold on to their culture and history, there needs to be a mesh of people. There was obviously a reason Arabs went to France in the first place (5 million strong), so why does France continue to turn their back on them? Perhaps this is why terrorist attacks and such are so rare in the U.S. When was the last widespread rioting in the U.S.? 60's? Besides the slight flair up in 93 after Rodney King.

Best of luck to the citizens of Europe. Can't we all just get along?

I think it depends on what specific group you're from, really. I know that I was treated better during my travels there as an Asian-American, than I have been here in America - where Asians are still often reduced to 1-dimensional caricatures. Travelling abroad thru Asia and the EU was actually a liberating experience for me. People in general seemed far more open to strangers and less cliquish. And I don't think it was merely due to me being an American tourist either - as the locals seemed that way with each other as well.

Of course, if I was a poor Arab Muslim, perhaps I might have had a different experience, tho...

startin to look like it might explode all over europe :hunter: