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Thursday, January 19, 2006

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

An interesting story from France. Of course it could't happen here.
One hundred drunk and disorderly “youths” from the “sensitive neighborhoods” outside of Marseille were let loose in a train carrying revelers from Nice to Lyon via Marseille. They vandalized the train, terrorized the passengers, stole from them, sexually assaulted several young women, made convincing death threats and, when all these wicked deeds were done, pulled the emergency brake and jumped the train on the outskirts of Marseille.

It took several days for the story to break. Apparently management of the state-owned SNCF railway system and local police officials thought they could avoid bad publicity by keeping the information to themselves. Even more surprising: no local journalist scooped the story, no eyewitnesses came forward to reveal it, the media blissfully announced that New Year’s Eve had been surprisingly calm -- only 425 cars torched and 13 gendarmes injured -- that the state of emergency was lifted.

The news broke on the 4th: 600 passengers returning at dawn from Nice to Lyon were terrorized for three hours by a gang of “youths.” As the bare details filtered through several layers of protective screening, it became clear that a major clash of civilizations…in fact a head on crash of civilizations had taken place on the 1st day of the year 2006. Joyful partygoers on the star-studded Riviera were delivered into the hands of a hundred drunken marauders.

Every official involved in the incident behaved stupidly, no one communicated, no one took responsibility, and the result would be comical if it were not so ominous. The train was not hermetically sealed. The conductor’s cabin was not occupied by terrorists armed with box cutters. There are all sorts of stations between Nice and Marseille. Though the hoodlums stole cell phones, several hundred remained in the hands of their owners. And the ordeal went on for hours.

Here, as far as one can gather without having been in the train, is what happened:

Police shoved a hundred drunken rowdies into regional train N° 17430 that was carrying 600 passengers home at dawn on the 1st of January. The SNCF had been running a promotional New Year’s Eve fare of 1€20 since 2001. The idea was to save lives by discouraging people from driving after partying all night. Civilized idea, n’est-ce pas? For the rest of the voyage, imagine a 1950s French comedy on the Riviera combined with a slapstick version of a medieval jihad raid.
Interesting that it took several days for the French media to report it. You wouldn't catch our media hiding a story like this.

The term here is anarcho-tyranny - where the forces of law & order will not act against toughs (it was the police who put them on the train) but will act against law abiding people who are not going to fight back (pub owners will not let people smoke because they can be done by the police & Nick Griffin is more likely to be the victim of a lynch mob than the leader so it is all right to charge him with saying that 2nd generation moslems might do things like this or even set off bombs).

Comments:
"clear that a major clash of civilizations...., ...Police shoved a hundred drunken rowdies into regional train N° 17430"

Is there anything to suggest that these fellows were musselmen? Since the religion of peace forbids drinking, it seems very unlikely to me?
 
The linked article is clear on that though I now realise the bits I put up weren't:

But the prize for lucidity goes to a real youth, a 17 year-old from Draguignan named Habib. He was accosted by those hooligans on his way to Nice with some friends on the afternoon of the 31st. “They were Arabs. We tried to defend ourselves but they said they had 47 guys with them…. They said they were going to go on the rampage (‘hala’ in Arabic), they were going to make a massacre on New Year’s Day"

The French media, like ours, tend to downplay such matters. I tend to doubt if any monotheistic religion is a religion of peace in that they all say our group alone has the ear of the creator of the universe. The same would apply to such practitioners of Christianity as take it seriously such as Tudjman.
 
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