Islam versus Europe

French police arrested so many illegal Tunisian immigrants in Paris on Thursday night that they ran out of handcuffs and had to use packaging tape to bind wrists, according to indignant witnesses who escaped the round-up.

Under pressure from the far right in his campaign for re-election next year, President Nicolas Sarkozy has ordered police to get rid of the refugees, part of a wave of several thousand who have fled unrest in their homeland since the start of the so-called “Arab spring”.

The crackdown will force many to look for asylum in other countries, including Britain.

“We have been mistreated here,” said 28-year-old Khalifa, one of the immigrants, in a square in northern Paris as he waited for a charity to dole out couscous. “If I can find a passage to England, I will take it.”

As the refugees milled about on Thursday evening, a man addressed them through a loud-hailer, decrying France for not living up to its reputation as a haven for refugees and a “beacon of human rights”. He urged his audience, mainly Tunisian men in their twenties and thirties, to take to the streets in protest.

They did not need much persuading: dozens poured onto a nearby avenue, waving flags and singing the Tunisian national anthem until a police van sent them scattering. Earlier, dozens had been arrested in the same square.

How ridiculous are these savages: singing their national anthem after they just deserted their own country at the very moment when it would have been possible to shape its future.

“It’s a scandal,” said Akram Trabelsi, a Tunisian resident in Paris for the past decade. “The police were tying their wrists and gagging them with packaging tape.”

Released after 24 hours, the refugees are being warned that they are banned from French territory and will be expelled if arrested again after seven days. It is an incentive to look for asylum elsewhere.

“We know that the passage to England is very difficult, that you have to hide in a lorry,” said a man who was wrapped in a sleeping bag and identified himself only as Khader. “But there is nothing for us here. I would rather go anywhere than just wait here to be arrested and expelled.”

Meanwhile deluded Greens are trying to organise human chains around the savages to prevent them from being arrested.

Source: Sunday Times (subscription)