This incident occurred a week ago, the night of 27-28 July, in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis.
Around 1 AM on the 28th, a group of about 15 young men massed in the street to force a city bus to come to a stop. They demanded that the five passengers and the driver exit the bus, and then threw flammable liquid on it and ignited it with Molotov cocktails. Reportedly, they shouted “Allahu akbar” during this attack. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and firefighters were able to put out the blaze.
A video shot by someone in the area (apparently on an upper floor of a nearby building) is now going viral.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbdgDKZD7Og
Saint-Denis, on the northeast outskirts of Paris, is located in the French département of Seine-Saint-Denis (similar in some ways to a U.S. congressional district), which has the highest proportion of immigrants of any département in France. About 33% of the population of Seine-Saint-Denis is Muslim; in 2005, approximately 38% of the population under 18 was of African origin.
The interesting thing about this event is that it does not bear the hallmarks of ISIS or another global jihadist group. The perpetrators apparently sought only to destroy the bus, ordering the passengers and driver out before they firebombed it. There has been no reported claim of responsibility from a jihadist group in the week since the attack. The attackers were probably not recent immigrants from Arab or South Asian nations; it’s hard to tell, but they look African, in the video, and statistically, they are likely to be.
Meanwhile, independent media and bloggers are speculating — in spite of the close-lipped stance of national officials that seems to be increasingly routine — that the attack was launched because of unrest over the death in police custody of a 24-year-old black Frenchman named Adama Traoré. Traoré, from the neighboring town of Beaumont-sur-Oise, was arrested on 19 July for interfering in the arrest of his brother, and died shortly after “fainting” during the ride to the police station.
Police and the medical examiner say Traoré died of a preexisting infection. But the Traoré family disputes that, and the days since Adama Traoré’s death have seen a mounting series of public demonstrations, some of which have become violent:
On Tuesday night [19 July], five members of the paramilitary police were injured in clashes, and nine cars set on fire, and several public buildings were damaged. One person was arrested.
The unrest continued on Wednesday night [20 July] in a series of villages situated near each other, about 30 kilometres (18 miles) north of Paris, where 15 cars were set ablaze and protesters tried to set a mayor’s office and a preschool on fire.
France doesn’t need to copy the U.S. when it comes to racial divisions and race-based violent outbursts; the country has its own history in that regard. The outlines of the Adama Traoré story are reminiscent of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, but French allusions are to an incident in 2005, when incendiary riots ensued after the electrocution deaths of two immigrant teenagers (one named Traoré, in fact) during a police chase in Clichy-sous-Bois, also northeast of Paris near Saint-Denis.
Mort d'Adama Traoré : le procureur ayant menti par omission, un juge indépendant doit être désigné @mediapart https://t.co/cvdWHPcRXM
— Edwy Plenel (@edwyplenel) August 2, 2016
That said, the Bustle link above indicates that the tropes of the BLM movement are present and being invoked in the rioting over Adama Traoré in July. (And in the left-wing commentary coverage as well. This post says, “Infinitely more than Daesh [ISIS]. the death of Adama Traoré bears witness to French [social] divisions.”)
The demonstrations have spread well beyond the local suburbs:
Mort d'#AdamaTraoré : rassemblement à Strasbourg https://t.co/T9JATKimJ6
— Parti des Indigènes (@PartiIndigenes) July 25, 2016
Mort d’Adama Traoré : Manifestation de Black lives matter à Paris pour réclamer justice ! – https://t.co/DqQVtedLiU pic.twitter.com/pEN0uiVLDa
— malinet (@malinet223) July 25, 2016
…and clearly, there is an element in the organization that wants to internationalize the conflict under the BLM banner.
That’s not surprising, of course. Black Lives Matter is active in the UK and held a protests in London in early July. There have been BLM protests in Berlin and Amsterdam as well, mounted just after the deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile near St. Paul. Given the origin of BLM in well-funded, highly organized groups linked to the George Soros Radicals’ ATM-N-Quik-Mart, we should expect to see it appear in the cities of Europe as well as the United States.
And the firebomb attackers in Saint-Denis are certainly likely to be Muslims of African descent, and to holler “Allahu akbar” while torching a bus, for that if for no other reason. But the connections of radical Islamists with the BLM movement per se are also well-documented, including a special affinity between BLM and anti-Israel “Palestinian” groups (see here and here as well).
The whole set of circumstances makes clear that Europe is coming under concentrated fire now, not only from ISIS and other Salafi terror groups, but from highly — centrally — organized radical-left groups with their roots planted firmly in the West.
