According to Daniel Pipes, France has surrendered 751 French neighboorhoods to Islamists. They are listed here. And in keeping with cultural sensitivity, these areas are not called "territory ceded to the terrorists" nor are they called "lawless areas". No, they are Sensitive Urban Zones: Zones Urbaines Sensibles to be precise.
What happens when cops go into the Sensitive Urban Zones to attempt impose the law of the land on the residents? I'll tell you what:
Stoned, beaten and insulted, their vehicles torched by crowds of hostile youths, French police say they face an urban guerrilla war when they enter the run-down neighborhoods that ring the major cities.
"Our role is to guarantee the safety of people and property but the great difficulty today is that police are having problems ensuring their own safety," said Jerome Hanarte of the Alliance-Police Nationale union.
Bedside television interviews with officers hospitalized after beatings in "les banlieues," or suburbs, support statistics showing a 6.7 percent jump in violent crime in the 12 months to August.
Fourteen officers are hurt every day in the line of duty, unions estimate, and law and order is sure to feature prominently in next year's presidential election.
The head of the French crime statistics body told Reuters the rise in attacks on police was partly due to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy's 2002 decision to order police back into tough areas, to disrupt the black economy that fuels crime.
Cut! Cut! Stop the film. I gotta say something here.
The crime statistics guy is blaming the Interior Minister for attempting to impose French law which, he claims so upsets the criminals that it creates even more crime, and, by the way, gets police hurt...
To the tune of fourteen a day sent to the hospital!
Is this guy serious?
And of course the criminals are more than willing to echo these sentiments
Some residents complain the move spawned constant police harassment which has only exacerbated tensions with local youths, many of whom come from ethnic minorities.
"You can see discrimination in ID controls," complained Kader Latreche, 36, an Algerian with his own photo equipment repair shop in the La Courneuve suburb.
"Why is it always people from the Maghreb or black people who are being stopped and checked? If it happens over and over again, it gets to you. People are frustrated, that's obvious."
Riiiiight.
How much those frustrations are driving the violent reaction to police is hard to gauge but Nicolas Comte, general secretary of the Syndicat General de la Police (SGP), said officers now face guerrilla warfare in the suburbs.
So even the presence of a cop in a Black (read: Algerian Islamist) neighborhood is discriminatory
"The simple presence of men in uniforms in some areas is no longer a provocation but a declaration of war in the minds of some louts," he told a recent police union rally.
As Daniel Pipes said
Things have reached a pretty sad state when the police have to demonstrate in the streets against the criminals.
If we are not careful, that will be us in a few years...
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