Whether Loud Be Her Cheers or Soft Be Her Tears

The riots in France have now spread to 300 towns, and have claimed their first fatality. Gregory Djerejian offers a weary comment on the chaos:

I am not one who believes that some pan-Eurabian intifada is in the offing, or that the implications of these riots rival 9/11, or that Shamil Basayev's guerilla tactics are being adopted off la Place de la Republique–as breathless, under-informed 'commentary' has it in some quarters of the blogosphere. But we certainly have a pivot point here, one where the ruling elite's inefficacy and ineptness is being laid crudely bare for all the world to see. They have been tone-deaf and caught off guard by the depth of the alienation in their midst, and it has now caught them very much unawares and seemingly clueless on how next to respond.

Djerejian wouldn't agree, but one especially clueless response came from Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Here's Doug Ireland's description:

"Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille"—words the U.S. press, with glaring inadequacy, has translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peels away the outer skin of encrusted dirt—like pigeon-shit—even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses completely the provocative, incendiary violence of what Sarko was really saying. And "racaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers—it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless…

Meanwhile, it took President Chirac 11 days to make any public comment about the riots at all.