By Ramzy Baroud - December 25, 2009

It seems that the targeting of Muslims and Islam has become a kind of national theater in France. Unlike theater, however, the disturbing trend can...turn ugly...if the French government doesn't get a grip on reality. The world, including France...cannot be co-opted to fit national specificities determined by a group of irritable far right racists...Unfortunately, France is not alone; it merely highlights the most obvious manifestation of growing anti-Muslim sentiments throughout Europe.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 - Al Jazeera

Hundreds of migrants, including children, have been detained in a police operation to clear a makeshift camp known as the "jungle" in the French port of Calais...Some 278 people, nearly half of them minors, were held as police cleared and then bulldozed the forest camp of illegal immigrants seeking entry into the UK...

Friday, September 18, 2009 - Al Jazeera

The French government has announced it will close a camp in a wasteland district of Calais known as "the Jungle" where hundreds of migrants trying to get to Britain have set up home...But aid groups working in the area said that the closure would not stop the would be migrants congregating in Calais hoping to get across the Channel.

By Nicolas Truong - July 12, 2009

The novelty...consists in the total absence of message, leader or demand on the part of the insurgents...Since "the present has no exit," it's useless to seek empty social compromises...Most alternative movements have sought to attract the attention of newspapers, even though that risked their transformation by the media into official trouble-makers. So it's not only against all union and militant bureaucracies, but also against all coordinated movements that "reproduce so many governments in miniature"...

Sunday July 12, 2009 - Reuters

Workers at collapsed French car parts maker New Fabris threatened on Sunday to blow up their factory if they did not receive payouts by July 31 from auto groups Renault and Peugeot to compensate for their lost jobs.

By DIANA JOHNSTONE - July 6, 2009

In the early afternoon of Friday, July 3, five men, mostly masked, stormed into the “Resistances” bookstore located in a quiet residential neighborhood...in northwest Paris. To the startled women working in the shop, as well as two customers, they announc[ed] that they were from the Jewish Defense League and began ripping books off shelves and tables, dousing them heavily with cooking oil, and then smashing four computers before leaving rapidly in a waiting vehicle.

By Antoine Lerougetel and Alex Lantier - 4 July 2009

[Sarkozy's] speech was a nationalist and anti-immigrant appeal to the traditions of class-collaborationist politics in France, making demagogic promises to maintain France’s “social pact” while slashing the living conditions of the working class...He made reactionary appeals to anti-immigrant sentiment and law and order, in an attempt to rouse the most backward elements in French society and divert attention from his regressive policies.

By Alice Cannet - Friday, 26, June 2009

French riot police made 47 arrests yesterday following clashes with activists trying to lead Calais asylum seekers through the channel tunnel to Britain...As the camp prepared for marches on Saturday, where several hundreds were expected to turn up, activists chained themselves to a detention centre for UK-bound migrants.

SchNEWS - Friday 26th June 2009 | Issue 681

The No Borders Camp in Calais is now in full swing despite scare-scaremongering from both the press and the authorities who the camp have condemned for attempting to “paint the camp participants as violent criminals and (refusing) to engage in the real issues we campaign on”. Sam Davis, a UK No Borders activist commented that “The only violence we see is the daily and constant attacks on individuals by the French police. The rest comes from the vivid imagination of journalists keen to silence any debate on these issues.”

SchNEWS 676 - Friday 22nd May 2009

[The] process of ‘managed migration’ involves a network of detention centres which incarcerates refused asylum seekers and refugees, picks up people on entry to the U.K. or those who’ve overstayed their visas. These people are detained for weeks, months and even years. Some are currently being held in detention indefinitely. At any one time there are around 3,000 people detained under immigration powers in [the U.K.].

Here is a leaflet from the anarchist periodical publication Non Fides, translated from French. It was distibuted in French cities and in front of the Vincennes retention center which burned after the revolt of its prisonners. A retention center (Centre de Rétention Administrative or CRA in French) is a prison for illegal immigrants [prior to] their eviction. There has been a lot of revolts [in] past years inside these prisons, and outside. Also [there is] a lot of repression [of] some anarchist companions which are still in prison...under the anti-terrorist [laws].