Those Pesky Youths...

Says the Associated Press, last night:

ROMANS-SUR-ISERE, France (AP) - A French police officer was shot and wounded during clashes with youths that broke out after a teenager died while fleeing police, authorities said Tuesday.

The officer appeared to have been shot in the leg with a hunting rifle, said the police prefecture in Romans-sur-Isere, a southeastern town located 60 miles from Lyon in the Rhone Valley on the edge of the Alps. The officer's life was not in danger. Dents from bullets and buckshot were also found in police vehicles nearby.

Police used tear gas and rubber pellets to push back some 50 youths during clashes late Monday and early Tuesday. Several cars were burned and about 15 shop windows were smashed.

After nightfall Tuesday, some 300 riot police officers and gendarmes took up positions around the center of town to prevent a second night of clashes. Some teams of officers were brought in from neighboring regions.

Most Americans remain blissfully unaware that France has been suffering through over three years of violent nightly rioting. That's right, every single night. According to several of my friends in Europe, most Europeans are also unaware of the rioting, or at least the magnitude of it – both because of careful reporting and general apathy. The primary reported feature of this rioting is cars being burned – sometimes only a few dozen in a night, sometimes hundreds.

Yesterday a policeman was shot. This level of violence is relatively rare, happening only a few times in the entire period.

Here's the really disturbing part about these reports, whether they come from the Associated Press or Reuters (a French company!): because of self-imposed rules supporting multi-culturalism, they refuse to report a rather obviously salient fact. No matter how many of these reports I read (and I've read hundreds), the two mainsteam reporting agencies never tell you that the “youths” who are rioting are, in fact, radicalized Muslims – primarily young, jobless men from the ghettoized slums of France's cities. You'll only find that out from independent reporters, local bloggers, and the like.

The reality, which appears when you get your news outside the mainstream: for more than 1,000 nights now, one or more cities in France has seen rioting by radical Muslim youths. The overall level of rioting, if one can grasp such a concept, rises and falls according to recent events. The mobs' favorite targets are cars – those obvious symbols of wealth that the rioters, by and large, do not possess. A distant second on their list of targets are the shops, another symbol of wealth and prosperity. That would be the wealth and prosperity of those non-Muslims, of course.