Enrichment of Culture in Paris.

18th March 2005

 

White French students protesting in Paris, against their government’s planned overhaul of the were given extensive security protection in an attempt to prevent the violence and muggings that marred a similar march a week earlier.

In a lesson which British trade unions could well do with learning, several unions provided an escort of several hundred stewards, armed with riot shields and batons to control the protest and prevent the protesters being attacked by gangs of Black and Arab thugs.

On March 8th when White French students protesting in Paris, against their government’s planned overhaul of the education system through the French capital there were harrowing scenes as hundreds of Black and Arab youths attacked the students, throwing boys and girls to the ground and stealing mobile phones, cameras, wallets and jewellery.

Scared away

Le Monde newspaper carried disturbing interviews with attackers and victims in the  trouble—both sides agreeing that the violence was exclusively carried out on white boys and girls by black and Arab teenagers.

“Sitting ducks”

Heikel, a b lack youth who attends a secondary school in the area, told Le Monde that the mainly white Parisian students who took part in the march—known in street parlance as “bolos”—were seen as spoilt and privileged, and therefore fair game.

The attacks upon the predominantly white students carried out by those they may have ludicrously believed as being their “brothers and sisters” may be a wake up call to the reality of the 21st clash which is not about money, wealth or “class”. It is a clash of two worlds, two cultures and two civilisations. One is viewed by the other as privileged, wealthy, weak and vulnerable; one is viewed by the other as perhaps “a bit rough” and brutish but which needs love, appeasement and cash handouts. On the streets of Paris, just as on the streets of Bristol, Bradford or Bournemouth, only one of those disparate worlds will survive.