I've heard of Arizona, but have you heard of Paris?
bassie
11,710 Posts
EDIT - I found this really difficult to watch, you may as well.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/aug/02/france
Telegraph
By Peter Allen
The footage ??? which shows the officers trying to get rid of African squatters from a Paris housing estate ??? shows at least one woman fainting and young children screaming.
All were being targeted by officers from the elite CRS riot squad, who were armed and wearing body armour.
No female police were involved, and there was no medical assistance on hand.
The emergence of the video, filmed on July 21st, comes at the worst possible time for French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
He is currently trying to get rid of thousands of unwanted immigrants to his country, including gipsies and foreign criminals.
Mr Sarkozy has always been a firm believer in tough policing.
It shows police in La Corneuve, in the notorious Seine-Saint-Denis district north of Paris, manhandling a screaming woman with a baby wrapped on her back.
She had joined some 200 others staging a sit down protest after being evicted from a 15 storey building called the Balzac, which was about to be demolished.
There is also a graphic image of a pregnant woman lying on her back in the road.
According to a spokesman for Droit au Logement (Right to Housing), most of the protesters were legal migrants from the Ivory Coast, and had been in France for more than a decade.
???They were subjected to disgusting police brutality,??? he said. ???When mothers and babies are being attacked in this way, immigrants do not stand a chance.???
Last week Mr Sarkozy vowed to strip immigrants of their passports if they attack police or public officials.
He also sanctioned the tearing down of illegal Gipsy camps and promised a review of all welfare payments to migrants.
A spokesman for Seine-Saint-Denis police said: ???No police brutality took place during the break up of an illegal demonstration.???
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2010/aug/02/france
Telegraph
By Peter Allen
The footage ??? which shows the officers trying to get rid of African squatters from a Paris housing estate ??? shows at least one woman fainting and young children screaming.
All were being targeted by officers from the elite CRS riot squad, who were armed and wearing body armour.
No female police were involved, and there was no medical assistance on hand.
The emergence of the video, filmed on July 21st, comes at the worst possible time for French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
He is currently trying to get rid of thousands of unwanted immigrants to his country, including gipsies and foreign criminals.
Mr Sarkozy has always been a firm believer in tough policing.
It shows police in La Corneuve, in the notorious Seine-Saint-Denis district north of Paris, manhandling a screaming woman with a baby wrapped on her back.
She had joined some 200 others staging a sit down protest after being evicted from a 15 storey building called the Balzac, which was about to be demolished.
There is also a graphic image of a pregnant woman lying on her back in the road.
According to a spokesman for Droit au Logement (Right to Housing), most of the protesters were legal migrants from the Ivory Coast, and had been in France for more than a decade.
???They were subjected to disgusting police brutality,??? he said. ???When mothers and babies are being attacked in this way, immigrants do not stand a chance.???
Last week Mr Sarkozy vowed to strip immigrants of their passports if they attack police or public officials.
He also sanctioned the tearing down of illegal Gipsy camps and promised a review of all welfare payments to migrants.
A spokesman for Seine-Saint-Denis police said: ???No police brutality took place during the break up of an illegal demonstration.???
Comments
Ha f@cking ha.
Women and children, i hope those cops are real proud of themselves.
If by "a while" you mean all of recorded European history, totally.
Well ,yeah, sure. My point was that it seems, to me at least, that in the last two or three years or so there's been a noticeable upsurge in this kind of government approved discrimination along with the rise of more outspokenly nationalistic political parties.
I wish Nina Simone were around for many reasons, but to hear her speak on the present climate of her chosen home is one of them.
Well, I for one am looking forward to a good-old European ground war against fascist nationalist regimes. This whole mucking about in Iraq and Afghanistan is getting tiresome.
I'm there day one just so I can tell kids in the future that I fought a war for their ungrateful asses.
Plus having put many hours in Modern Warfare 2 I'm pretty confident I can take down a whole troop by myself as long as Stopping Power is on and I get a good respawn point.
It will be a ground war of words.....fought mostly in places like Mass, NY and Cali.
The tactical insertion's only good if you can drop it in Paris.
Gangrene
Vous ??tes sorti sain et sauf des basses
calomnies, vous avey conquis les coeurs.
Zola, J'accuse
One was kicked in the stomach
until he vomited, then
made to put back
into his mouth what they had
brought forth; when he tried to drown
in his own stew
he was recovered. "You are
worse than a nigger or Jew,"
the helmeted one said. "You
are an intellectal.
I hate your brown
skin; it makes me sick." The tall
intense one, his penis wired,
was shocked out of
his senses in three seconds.
Weakened, he watched them install
another battery in
the crude electric device.
The genitals
of a third were beaten with
a short wooden ruler: "Reach
for your black balls.
I'll show you how to make love."
When two of the beaten passed
in the hall they did not know
each other. "His face had turned
into a wound:
the nose was gone, the eyes ground
so far back into the face
they too seemed gone,
the lips, puffed pieces of cracked
blood." None of them was asked
anything. The clerks, the police,
the booted ones, seemed content
to inflict pain,
to make, they said, each instant
memorable and exquisite,
reform the brain
through the senses. "Kiss my boot
and learn the taste of French shit."
Reader, does the heart demand
that you bend to the live wound
as you would bend
to the familiar body
of your beloved, to kiss
the green flower
which blooms always from the ground
human and ripe with terror,
to face with love what we have
made of hatred? We must live
with what we are,
you say, is enough. I
taste death. I am among you
and I accuse
you where, secretly thrilled by
the circus of excrement,
you study my strophes or
yawn into the evening air,
tired, not amused.
Remember what you have said
when from your pacific dream
you awaken
at last, deafened by the scream
of your own stench. You are dead.
This is exactly what it's all about. For three weeks every headline was about the Woerth-Bettencourt scandal (illegal tax breaks given to, and illegal campaign contributions made by the richest woman in France to Sarkozy's party). Now the papers have dropped that story and are repeating this BS. Worked beautifully: the conversation has been changed, and the bitter poor xenophobic voter can say to himself "Maybe the ruling party is too tight with the supperich, but they care about my problems." Disgusting though unsurprising.