Class Warfare Threatens Paris?

Last week I mentioned the fact that hooded thugs attacked students marching against the unemployment law. These hoods broke store windows and were identified as being from the banlieues where North African and Subsaharan "guest workers" dwell in unmitigated barren high rises like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. Yesterday, the TimesOnLine followed up with a story on the abduction of a French Jewish boy who was tortured to death in a ritual killing by these banlieu dwellers.

Forget the French idyll portrayed in such books as A Year in Provence. France is being forced to confront her dark side as details emerge of horrific crimes in the suburbs.

Testimony from this grim underbelly, the immigrant banlieues — literally "places of banishment" — has fortified the elite’s view of young immigrants on the wrong side of the Paris ring road as “barbarians at the gate”.

For years the Parisian establishment has quaked at the prospect of angry hordes invading their affluent heartland and last week that nightmare came true as gangs of hooded youths robbed and bludgeoned white students attending anti-government demonstrations.

Disquiet about the spread of barbarism across the boulevard p?riph?rique....evoked the sadistic moral universe of A Clockwork Orange, the novel by Anthony Burgess, with a dose of anti-semitism thrown in.

France, the UK, the Dutch and other EU countries are paying dearly for their "mission civilitrice" 19th century colonial adventures, which have brought the barbarians inside their gates and infect their "social models" with a sort of cancer of the unemployment index.

Add to this the fact that France remains perhaps the most anti-Semitic country in the EU and the moral conundrum becomes even more susceptible to good French cinema verite.

I'm waiting for that movie!