Despite a heavy police presence, the suspension of the right to assemble, and a curfew for nighttime hours, the French still found a way to riot overnight. While the major event police feared did not materialize, the show of force did not deter the rioters from torching hundreds more cars:

Violence has continued in deprived city areas of France with a tally of at least 374 cars burnt out and 212 arrests despite an official ban on public meetings in an attempt to curb riots that have rocked the nation.

In a 17th night of disturbances two police officers were injured Sunday, with one hospitalized after being hit by a metal object in the Paris suburb of La Courneuve.

Incidents involving the burning of cars also spread overnight to several towns in neighbouring Belgium. ...

Police said the situation in racially-mixed suburbs throughout France had been calmer than on previous nights. But cars were reported set alight in Lyon, Toulouse and St. Etienne.

The headline for the Agence France Presse story? "Paris clampdown amid uneasy calm in French cities." Having 374 cars torched and a couple of hundred people rounded up and taken to jail only sounds "calm" to the French, I would gather -- and probably not at all to one of the 374 car owners who will take the bus to work tomorrow.

The cars don't tell the whole story, either. The BBC reports that rioters also burnt down a nursery school. In a more dangerous mode, some rioters pushed a burning car against an "old people's home", in BBC parlance, causing a panic that could have killed more than a few of them itself, even without a building fire. Fortunately, it appears that no one got seriously hurt.

The American media finally noticed that the story has continued, however. The Washington Post offered its first reporting in days on the subject, using the Lyon attack at the city center as its hook. Molly Moore finally broke the silence, at least obliquely, on the "M" word:

No incidents of violence were reported inside Paris, though unrest continued Saturday in 163 cities and towns across France, according to police. On Saturday night, the 17th night of the rioting, a policeman was injured in a Paris suburb when he was hit by a metal ball thrown from an apartment building.

In the southern town of Carpentras in the Provence region, youths burned a school Saturday night. On Friday night, a motor-scooter rider threw two gasoline bombs at a mosque during prayers, causing minor damage. Police said it was unclear whether the attack was linked to the other violence around the country. Many of the youths involved in the rioting are Muslim.

One wonders how that last sentence managed to sneak its way past the editors at the Post. The New York Times manages two articles on the story it stopped reporting days earlier. The first, by Craig Smith, focuses on police success in keeping the riots out of Paris without mentioning the 163 cities and towns where it continued or the 374 cars that went up in flames. Instead, Smith reports that the violence "held steady at a reduced level" and that the low level of deaths came from -- get ready -- gun control:

Many French attribute the low level of injuries to the tight gun control laws here. The most serious incident involving gunfire was a series of shotgun blasts fired at police officers from a distance. Ten officers were hit, but only two were hospitalized, and their injuries were not life-threatening.

Perhaps if the citizens of France could arm themselves, Islamist riots wouldn't last seventeen days and show no evidence of abating. The second article, an analysis by Marc Landler, offers a facile look at the riots by reminding readers that torching cars is practically a national pastime for the socialist-oppressed French, who commit this arson an amazing 80 times a day even without rioting.

Meanwhile, the LA Times also wakes from its slumber on France, not to report on the continuing violence but to offer its analysis after ignoring the situation. The LAT does what it does best when reporting on riots -- it blames the police:

For years, the officers said, the police had warned that France's immigrant-dominated slums were on the verge of exploding, a slow-motion riot about to fast-forward. Culture clashes and economic woes had created a lost generation of mostly Muslim youths seething with hostility toward the state. Wrong-headed ideology had caused governments to pull back from low-income housing projects, or cites, allowing parallel societies ruled by criminal and extremist networks to flourish, officers said.

And several veterans agree with critics who say that France's rigid, paramilitary policing culture aggravated tensions between youths and officers. Even before the riots, an average of 3,500 cars a month were burned nationwide. ...

On the other hand, critics say flaws in French policing were among the fuses for the explosion. The French police excel at intelligence, investigations and crowd control, say academic experts and European and U.S. investigators. But in a hierarchical system, intelligence tends to flow up the chain of command, not to other officers in the field. And experts say police here are weaker at basic beat-cop patrolling, an area vital to the dramatic reduction of crime and unrest in U.S. cities in the last decade.

It's difficult to take this analysis seriously, when Sebastian Rotella includes this whopper:

The overall violence has declined markedly from its peak, but it continued this weekend, mainly in provincial regions.

Provincial? Lyon and Toulouse are provincial? I suspect they might object to that characterization. Rotella has not seen the wire services, apparently, since Wednesday.

Maybe we were better off when the American media didn't report
on this story. Except for Molly Moore at the Post, they've been uniformly terrible at getting the story straight.

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» Forgotten France from Below The Beltway
The American media has gone back to ignoring the story, but the riots in France have continued nonetheless. [Read More]

Tracked on November 13, 2005 8:51 AM

» Day Seventeen from A Blog For All
While the rioting has largely spared Paris itself, the city of Lyon wasn't nearly as lucky. 'Teens' defied the curfew, but rioters vandalized shops and damaged vehicles. [Read More]

Tracked on November 13, 2005 9:15 AM

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It's really hard to decide whose side to take in this situation. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," right? Except when he's a Muslim thug or an arrogant Frog. Guess I'll just sit back and watch the fun a little longer. Maybe now that the Germans hav... [Read More]

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Tracked on November 13, 2005 5:37 PM

» Ten Unanswered Questions About the Violence in France from Gina Cobb
The media coverage of the violence in France leaves many unanswered questions. Here are 10 of them: 1. How do the 7,000 or so people in France whose cars have been torched in the last two weeks feel about it? Are they as shaken, furious, and depressed ... [Read More]

Tracked on November 13, 2005 5:40 PM

» Ten Unanswered Questions About the Violence in France from Gina Cobb
The media coverage of the violence in France leaves many unanswered questions. Here are 10 of them: 1. How do the 7,000 or so people in France whose cars have been torched in the last two weeks feel about it? Are they as shaken, furious, and depressed ... [Read More]

Tracked on November 13, 2005 6:15 PM

» Ten Unanswered Questions About the Violence in France (Updated) from Gina Cobb
The media coverage of the violence in France leaves many unanswered questions. Here are 10 of them: 1. How do the 7,000 or so people in France whose cars have been torched in the last two weeks feel about it? Are they as shaken, furious, and depressed ... [Read More]

Tracked on November 13, 2005 6:28 PM

» France Fries from Hard Starboard
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Tracked on November 16, 2005 12:06 PM