For god sakes! It`s not the muslims, it`s not the immigrants, it`s not the blacks! IT`S THE POOR! Get that into your thick media skull and act professional!
If I hear this “Islam is rising in Europe!” crap one more time, I`ll stop believing into the good of humanity!
This rebellion has nothing to do with race, color or/and religion! It has everything to do with this bullshit capitalism and this bullshit of trading agreements. Change that and everything will follow.
How stupid can you be? Fo` real??
Unfortuntely not everyone has your genius insight and your ability to see right to the root of the problem, which is JUST THAT SIMPLE.
Wow! You’re just totally right! How stupid of all the politicians that this has anything to do with Islam. They just happen to be there, right? Man it would appear you got all the answers! Maybe you should run for president of EU.
Unlike the two previous commenters, I mostly agree with cookie about this. I do think that poverty is by far the main reason for these riots. However, an additional reason is that these people, due to their religion and their racial origin, were treated even worse by mainstream French society than other poor people were, which gave them an extra incentive to begin rioting, and perhaps made them more susceptible to listen to a handful of religious fundamentalists who were perhaps encouraging them in this. However, if these people had not been Muslims, they might still begin rioting just the same, only that they would have to have been mobilized by some demagogue working on the basis of something else than religion.
On the brighter side of things: (1) rioting on the streets is surely the time-honoured French way of addressing social tensions, which just goes to prove how well integrated into French society these rioters are; (2) “Apparently the rioters in France are about to form a union and will soon be limited to wreaking mayhem 32 hours per week.”
Ill Advised: ofcourse it has to do with poverty, no one can dispute that! I just don’t think multidimensional problems should be oversimplified so. It’s just so, SO cheap to place the blame simply on “bullshit capitalism” OR relligion for that matter.
I disagree with what you say about rioters being so well integrated into French society that they choose this method of protest: such riots are usualy the last resort of those who can not make themselves heard otherwise – the post Rodney King riots in the US were simmilar and I wouldn’s say those rioters had been well integrated into the “dominant” – i.e. white – society either. Not to mention that America has not such cultural tradition of public protests.
They are not that poor. They are not homeless. They are just a bunch of people that lost their grasp on reality.
And (also) because of this bullshit capitalsm, you can have your own blog right here and right now. Capitalism is far from perfect, but it’s a lot less bullshit than well few other *isms that we tried. 🙂
Admittedly I wasn’t quite serious in my second paragraph, including the comment that the riots show that the rioters are well integrated into French society. The post I was linking to was meant as a kind of joke along the lines of “the French are well-known for protesting in the streets, and these 2nd-generation immigrants show that they learned well from the natives”.
I also agree that we shouldn’t oversimplify multidimensional problems, but in this particular situation I think that poverty is vastly more important as a cause than religion is. I guess I am a naive and shallow materialist (no, scratch that — I *know* that I am a naive and shallow materialist) but I can’t help thinking that if people were provided with decent and pleasant living conditions, they wouldn’t feel like rioting in the streets (nor would they be inclined to espouse fundamentalist religious opinions). If, on the other hand, they are expected to live in slums and nobody offers them a decent job, then it isn’t surprising that they eventually grow mad.
I admit that I personally do think that capitalism should shoulder most of the blame for these riots. These people haven’t got much to offer the free market, and consequently the free market hasn’t got much to offer them. This is why the are miserable and eventually turn to rioting. That’s why I personally have always been in favour of replacing the market economy with a plan-based economy where such problems can be addressed explicitly, but I do of course realize that such proposals don’t tend to find many supporters nowadays… 🙂