Car arson spreads from Paris to Berlin, Belgium

It all began when two North African youths were electrocuted when they jumped over a fence surrounding a high-voltage transformer. Friends of the youngsters claimed they were fleeing from the police, but the police maintain that they were not being pursued. In the working-class neighborhoods, young men expressed their protests to the incident by burning cars. It is sad but in out times the car has become a main symbol of protest in two ways — by being burned by protestors or as the place to detonate bombs in crowded places.

The persons behind the series of car-burning incidents in Paris are French-born children of Arab and black African immigrants. Their main gripe is that they are being marginalized by French society. Decades ago, their parents were welcomed to France as workers, meaning doing menial jobs that most Frenchmen would not stoop doing. Now, the problem is that there are either no jobs to give or no one is willing to hire them. How burning cars can create jobs or convince anyone to hire anyone is beyond us. Last Sunday alone, 1,400 vehicles were torched. France’s biggest Muslim fundamentalist group, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, issued a fatwa (religious decree) condemning the violence, forbidding all those "who seek divine grace from taking part in any action that blindly strikes private or public property or can harm others."

The worse part about the Paris car-arson incident is that it has spread. Here is a report: "Apparent copycat attacks spread outside France for the first time, with five cars torched outside Brussels’ main train station, police in the Belgian capital said. In Germany, police were investigating the burning of five cars in Berlin. Attacks overnight Sunday to Monday were reported in 274 French towns, and police made 395 arrests. ‘This spread, with a sort of shock wave spreading across the country, shows up in the number of towns affected,’ said Gaudin, the police chief who noted that the violence appeared to be sliding away from its flash point in the Parisian suburbs and worsening elsewhere. ‘Youths firing fine-grain birdshot injured 10 police in a late-night clash in the southern Paris suburb of Grigny, national police spokesman Patrick Hamon said. Two were hospitalized, but their lives were not considered in danger. One was wounded in the neck, the other in the legs. It was the first time police had been injured by weapons’ fire.

"Churches were set ablaze in northern lens and southern Sete, he said. In Colombes in suburban Paris, youths pelted a bus with rocks, sending a 13-month-old child to the hospital with a head injury, Hamon said. All told, 4,700 cars have been burned in France since the rioting began and 1,200 suspects were detained, at least temporarily, Gaudin said. The unrest began Oct. 27 in the low-income Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois after the deaths of two teenagers who were of Mouritanian and Tunisian descent. The youth were accidentally electrocuted as they hid from police in a power substation, apparently thinking they were being chased."