You’ve just got to love the AP

In a lengthy article about increasingly aggressive rioting in the Paris suburbs, the AP manages only reference to “Muslim” and that with an oblique reference to France’s failure to give Muslim’s economic opportunities. The article carefully refrains from identifying by religion the current crop of gun-wielding, bus-burning “youths.”  If you can read code, though, you’ll learn that some participants in a memorial march for the two “youths” whose deaths sparked last years riots read prayers in Arabic (probably not the Lord’s prayer, if you get the AP’s oh-so-subtle drift). The following is just a bit of the “news” report (’cause it’s not really news if you leave out the main point) :

Police deployed 4,000 reinforcements as marauding youths torched at least two public buses Friday, the anniversary of the deaths of two teenagers that ignited weeks of riots in largely immigrant housing projects across France.

After the buses were burned, Paris’ transport authority curtailed bus service in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of the capital, which is home to thousands of immigrants and their French-born children.

Thierre Ange, a 19-year-old witness, said four men attacked the bus, “made everyone get off, then they hit a woman and dragged out the bus driver by his tie” and torched the bus with a gasoline bomb in a bottle. The blackened carcass of another bus that was burned earlier stood across town in Le Blanc Mesnil.

Flaming cars became a symbol of the rioting last year, which jolted France into recognizing a failure to give equal opportunities to many minorities – especially those of Arab and black African origin – and the country’s 5 million-strong Muslim population.

***

Last year’s outburst of anger at the accidental deaths of the two teens – who were electrocuted in a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois, northeast of Paris, while hiding from police on Oct. 27, 2005 – grew into a broader challenge of the French state.

Several hundred people marched silently Friday through Clichy-sous-Bois in honor of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore. Benna, 17, was buried in his father’s native Tunisia. Traore, 15, was of Mauritanian descent.Adolescent boys in hooded sweat shirts made up a large part of the mixed-race crowd, their heads bent as prayers were read in Arabic and French.  (Emphasis mine.)

I also like the way the article conveniently ignores the fact that the two boys electrocuted last year were electrocuted, if I remember correctly, as they ran from the police in an attempt to avoid arrest.