As violent upheavals seize the nation, French law enforcement and its citizenry now reckon with a grim reality. They are embroiled in a virtual war against what their police unions describe as “savage hordes.”
The riots that have morphed France into an urban war zone began following the shooting of a 17-year-old Muslim male by police during a traffic stop. Despite France’s stringent gun control laws, these ensuing clashes have illuminated a startling portrait of heavily armed individuals running rampant through French streets. At the same time, the nation’s government appears to drag its feet in reclaiming control.
Rioters fire an rocket propelled grenade at a French police station.
If this is not civil war, we don’t know what is. #FranceRiots pic.twitter.com/WbkaLhjnfK— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) July 1, 2023
A joint public statement by the unions representing roughly half of France’s police officers assails the country’s open borders policy and the violent third-world migrants they’ve permitted to infiltrate their nation.
Their statement unequivocally affirms, “Our colleagues, like the majority of citizens, can no longer bear the tyranny of these violent minorities,” adding, “All means must be put in place to restore the rule of law as quickly as possible.”
The riots, sparked by a lethal confrontation between French police and a 17-year-old identified as Nahel M., quickly spread throughout the country, reflecting the simmering rage in marginalized communities that Alan Mendoza, executive director of the Henry Jackson Society, attributes to “a failure to integrate the country’s Muslim immigrant population.”
An older French woman is pleading with police to not arrest the rioters bc it would be racist
I have never seen anything like this pic.twitter.com/MQ9rRYPG2c
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 2, 2023
French President Emmanuel Macron’s response to the crisis appears perplexingly inconsistent. Initially, he declared the shooting as “inexplicable” and “unforgivable,” yet subsequently denounced the protests and pointed fingers at social media and video games as the culprits for escalating violence.
The contradictions continue with police accounts of the incident clashing with social media video footage, fueling suspicions of a cover-up and exacerbating the anger of French citizens. Such discrepancies, combined with the implication of systemic racism within France’s law enforcement agencies, led to the initial outbreak of protests.
As the unrest proliferates, French citizens have taken matters into their own hands, arming themselves to defend their communities against rioters who’ve burnt entire city blocks, schools, libraries, and police stations. The violence has escalated so much that Secretary-General of Unite SGP Police FO union, Gregory Joron, remarked they “haven’t seen such urban violence in 18 years in so many cities around France.”
President Macron’s latest move has been to convene an emergency meeting of the National Assembly to resolve the situation, deploying 45,000 officers and armored vehicles. However, the efficacy of this response remains to be seen.
Amid the chaos, the French government finds itself on the precipice of a grave decision. As France’s Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin put it, “Quite simply, we’re not ruling out any hypothesis, and we’ll see after tonight what the president of the republic chooses.”
However, the French police have made their stance clear. The concluding sentiment of their public statement paints a dire image: “Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in resistance and the government will have to become aware of it.”
While the riots are an immediate crisis, the root cause – a country grappling with its migrant population, social disparities, and alleged systemic racism – remains a ticking time bomb. It’s high time that France reassesses its policies and actions to ensure its people’s safety and the restoration of order.
