The Redhunter

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. To which Synergie's Deputy Leader Patrice Ribeiro adds: “Tension is rising very dramatically. There is the will to kill.” Action Police, a hardline union, says: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.” And Joaquin Masanet, Secretary General of the national police syndicate UNSA: "These guys came to kill. They wore balaclavas, and had baseball bats and iron bars."

There's an intifada going on over there.

Fox News has a short story on the violence

National police reported 2,458 cases of violence against officers in the first six months of the year, on pace to top the 4,246 cases recorded for all of 2005 and the 3,842 in 2004. Firefighters and rescue workers have also been targeted — and some now receive police escorts in such areas.

On Sunday, a band of about 30 youths, some wearing masks, forced passengers out of a bus in a southern Paris suburb in broad daylight Sunday, set it on fire, then stoned firefighters who came to the rescue, police said. No one was injured. Two people were arrested, one of them a 13-year-old, according to LCI television.
...

Michel Thooris, head of the small Action Police union, claims that the new violence is taking on an Islamic fundamentalist tinge.

"Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of 'Allah Akbar' (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned," he said in an interview.

Larger, more mainstream police unions sharply disagree that the suburban unrest has any religious basis. However, they do say that some youth gangs no longer seem content to throw stones or torch cars and instead appear determined to hurt police officers — or worse.

"First, it was a rock here or there. Then it was rocks by the dozen. Now, they're leading operations of an almost military sort to trap us," said Loic Lecouplier, a police union official in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris. "These are acts of war."

My option on all this hasn't changed any from my last post on the intifada in France, so I'll just quote myself

Now I realize there's a big debate as to the nature of these riots, both the ones going on now and the ones last year. Some say that the Muslim youths are acting out of frustration from high unemployment and racism, others say that they are more motivated by jihad.

Call this a cop-out, but I think it's a little of both. There is high unemployment in general thoughout Europe, with it being particularly acute in poor communities such as those where the Muslim Algerians live. France brought them, or their parents and grandparents, actually, to France to serve as cheap labor. France did not want to integrate them, but by the same token the Muslims did not wish to be integrated.

So now you have these Muslim "youths", frustrated by their poverty, and as with so many Muslims have bought into the "victim culture". They have bought into the notion that their religion, which they barely understand, is under assault by the West. They've heard about the wonderful Jihad being fought against the "Crusaders" and "Zionists", and wish to join in.

CNN has an AP story on the unrest, but it doesn't add much.

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The Intifada in France II
The Intifada in France

Michael at DownEastBlog has the perspective from Belgium, and it's not pretty.