One of the features of the drama in France is the way in which that unfortunate nation’s degenerate establishment has continued, like the court of Louis XVI, to play its games even as the tocsin, or should that be the muezzin, sounds. Writing in the Brussels Journal, Paul Belien takes up the story:

“If Nicolas Sarkozy had been allowed to have his way, he could have saved France. Last Summer the outspoken minister of the Interior was France’s most popular politician with his promise to restore the law of the Republic in the various virtually self-ruling immigrant areas surrounding the major French cities…The French establishment led by the corrupt President Jacques Chirac and his Prime Minister, the aristocrat Dominique de Villepin, an appointee who has never held an elected office, begrudged Sarkozy his popularity. The minister was distrusted. He was an outsider, a self-made man who had made it to the top without the support of relations and cronies, by hard work and his no-nonsense approach…Sarkozy’s decision to send the police back to the suburbs which had been abandoned by previous governments was resented by the “youths” who now rule there. That this would lead to riots was inevitable. Sarkozy knew it, and so did Chirac, Villepin and the others. Sarkozy intended to crack down hard on the rioters. If the French government had sent in the army last week, it would have been responding to the thugs in a language they understand: force. And the riots would long have ceased.

“What happened instead was that Sarkozy’s “colleagues” in government used the riots as an excuse to turn on the “immigrant” in their own midst. Paris is well worth a mass, King Henri IV of France once said. Bringing down Nicolas Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa is well worth a riot, King Chirac must have thought. Contrary to the normal French policy in dealing with trouble makers, the authorities decided to use a soft approach. Chirac and his designated crown prince Villepin blamed Sarkozy’s “disrespectful rhetoric” – such as calling thugs thugs – for having detonated the explosive situation in the suburbs. Dominique de Villepin stepped in and took over the task of restoring calm from Sarkozy. While the latter was told to shut up and keep a low profile, Villepin began a “dialogue” with the rioters. As a result the riots have spilled over from Paris to other French cities….”

While Belien (whose A Throne in Brussels is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the direction that the EU is taking) is way too starry-eyed about Sarkozy, a politician uncomfortably reminiscent of the young Jacques Chirac, and some of his comments about France’s immigrant communities teeter off into hyperbole, he is dead right about the way in which the interior minister has been treated.

In particular, Sarkozy got into trouble for referring to the rioters as ‘racaille’ (rabble), a description that was accurate and thus unpardonable. His more serious mistake, however, lay in not using that word to describe the gangster government in which he finds himself a part.

It’s time for him to quit.

UPDATE

The invaluable (if sometimes rather over-excitable) No Pasaran notes this:

“It appears that Nicolas Sarkozy was deliberately demonized in the TV reports of him using his strong language earlier in the week. In fact, there was footage available showing Sarkozy using the word “racaille” (riff-raff) while speaking to an inhabitant of Clichy-sous-Bois who herself had just used the word while expressing how fed up she was with local crime. Sarko answered her using her own words. In politics, that’s a way of communicating empathy. Her words were edited out and never shown in the insuing days. His weren’t. Arrêt sur Images showed the whole exchange today. Mr. Sarkozy was filmed quietly and calmly speaking to youths from Clichy who were apparently very deferential toward him (calling him Monsieur), eager to talk to him and seemed impressed that he was willing to leave himself unprotected by bodyguards in order to spend some time with them. In a what amounts to a ghetto that’s a sincere display of trust. That footage didn’t make the news programs…”