"Allahu akbar!" in Paris... again...

The policewoman thoughtfully picking her nose [Just scratching, maybe? Ed.] is on the scene of what French prosecutors now call a "terror-related" knife attack yesterday, in the Paris suburb of Villejuif. (Translates as "Jewville" or "Jewtown".) The assailant killed one man and seriously wounded two other people in Hautes-Bruyères park before being shot by the flics.

At first the authorities tried the same spin that was used so effectively in the Toronto Danforth "incident" over a year ago, claiming that the attacker, whom they would not identify, was mentally deranged, and that his motive was unknown. Today, however, Inspector Clouseau said investigations over the past few hours revealed that the assailant had been "radicalized" and had prepared the attack as part of a "terrorist undertaking".

Notice that they refused to utter such words as "Muslim" or "Islamic". They didn't have to. The jig was up, so to speak, when local prosecutor Laure Beccuau said the 22-year-old man shouted "Allahu akbar!" -- "God is great!" in Arabic -- not once but several times during the attack.

In a completely unrelated story, official statistics released this week showed that Seine-Saint-Denis, to the north of Paris, is the third biggest département (a regional administrative division) of France, by population. It is also the poorest. And the site of one of the worst ghettos anywhere in the country.

Historically, Seine-Saint-Denis was not always so poor, and its largest city, Saint-Denis, used to be the place where Kings were crowned. That was a long time ago. Since then, it has been hit by mass immigration, economic crisis and a succession of Communist local governments. The flood of immigrants, mostly from the Muslim countries of north and central Africa, led to the building of "cités" -- cheap and large building complexes meant to house poor workers, and, later, severely impoverished populations outside of Paris. Cultural integration issues and economic crisis brought more poverty, and with it crime.

Police and firemen don't enter these cités any more, because it's too dangerous for them. Gangsters operate drug traffic there, using young men as their eyes and ears, sellers and henchmen. Those guys are uneducated, violent and will throw rocks or other projectiles at police and fire dpt vehicles if they breach territory. Media types with pale complexions enter the cités only to report the nasty news: rival gangs fighting, the occasional shooting, gang rape, and, of course, acts of Islamic terrorism.