Two boys killed while fleeing police sparked France’s 2005 three-week banlieue uprising

Evidence

Ibtissam remembered the outbreak well. It was Tuesday, November 1, 2005, when the fires burned bright near her building in Bondy. Cars were torched, and the smell of gas seized every corner of the banlieue. Then fleets of police rushed in, and seemingly beat and battered every African and Amazigh and Arab youth they crossed paths with on the streets. Many of them resembled the two Muslim boys, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traore, who were killed while hiding from Paris police. The French, particularly Muslims, Blacks, and North Africans residing on the fringes of French society, deep within the banlieues, know these names well. … Benna and Traore, seventeen and fifteen years old respectively, were instantly immortalized as martyrs. And in death, inspired a resistance to French racism and Islamophobia that raged for three weeks. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 698

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s global-synthesis project: resonant with what Beydoun and Iftikhar cover on state violence against minorities, and with French republican universalism masking racial hierarchy documented elsewhere.