Paris: The Katrina Of Social Disasters

From Fox News Greg Palkot:

Last Wednesday night as we drove around the outskirts of Paris, a half hour from “home,” it looked like nothing short of Baghdad — burning cars and trucks littering the sides of the road. Lines of riot police ready to do battle with insurgents ... I mean angry French mobs. The next few nights we got our noses filled with noxious fumes as the rioters shifted targets and started torching warehouses.

Then in broad daylight, as I was doing a live shot in the town of Bobigny, five miles from Paris, a courthouse 200 yards away went up in smoke. I haven’t had that kind of “real time” illustration of badness since a car bomb blew up during a live shot in Baghdad, forcing me to do an on-air gulp seen ‘round the world.

No fewer than three French newspapers have quoted my analogy of the problems now plaguing France with ANOTHER American problem from a few months back. In one live shot I dubbed the Paris riots the “Katrina of social disasters.” And I don’t think I was that far off.

French authorities (read that, FEMA) had a whole lot of advance warning of what was going to happen. Over the past 30 years a huge immigrant and descendant population of Muslims and Africans has been building in this country. France promises them equal opportunities, then dumps them in ghettos outside their glossy city centers. It offers them little chance for jobs or much-heralded integration. The French “suburbs” have been ticking time bombs for years. Is it a surprise that they are exploding now? ...

Not to speak of the damage done by this criminal “hurricane" — $10 million dollars and counting — and the lesson in what the country is all about. Just as Katrina helped some folks in the States realize that New Orleans was more than Mardi Gras and a good time, the current round of riots is reminding France that there’s more to their country than 35-hour work weeks, great food and wine, and high style. They’ve also got a big, ugly, broiling underclass that is festering and ready to engulf them.

Comments

[Andrea Harris]

Make that "the culture of the state etc. was influenced by French culture..." Oh well, you know what I mean.

[Andrea Harris]

Actually the French government is more to be compared with the state government of Louisiana and the city government of New Orleans than with FEMA. I keep saying this until I'm blue in the face: FEMA did nothing wrong, and got to the Gulf states in jig time. I should know; I've lived in Florida my whole life, and have been through every single hurricane that's hit that state in the last fifteen years except Ivan.

And strangely enough, the state of Lousiana, and New Orleans especially, was influenced by French culture. Hm.