When they see immigrant thugs looting and trashing cities, social media commentators sometimes mock the rioters as young professionals, doctors, architects, etc. It is intended as an irony-laden riposte to fatuous left-wing arguments that diversity makes the West stronger and mass immigration from alien cultures brings talent that grows the economy.
A similar barb, specifically about the young men rioting in French cities last weekend, asks in a tone of mock perplexity why students protesting school conditions are waving Palestinian flags, invoking Allah, calling for murder, ransacking luxury stores, and burning historic buildings to ashes.
These zingers skewer the political class for its long self-deception. The ruling and media establishment refuse to recognize that Western civilization is facing a massive racial and moral crisis. But ordinary decent people are not fooled any longer and now voice opinions they’ve been told are racist and previously concealed.
The riots pulling apart France — the rest of Europe and America aren’t far behind — are complex and allow continued self-deception by those who refuse to let the facts interrupt the multicultural fairy tale they tell themselves.
There have indeed been protests over school conditions. Students don’t know or care that France is broke. It is broke because the state already consumes 55% of the economy and, amid its resulting sclerosis, does not have a spare franc to spend. The fact that there have been student protests, however, allows the political class from President Francois Macron downward to pretend that, despite the vast scale of the unrest, it is really all about the discrete matter of education. The president laments that rival parties try to turn the mayhem to their advantage, as though such scenes are not the stuff of politics and government.
But the mayhem we’re seeing is, of course, not simply about schools. For those protests offered agitators a wonderful chance to foment extreme turbulence. More than 50 Marxists, communist, and other revolutionary socialist organizations hijacked the protests and turned them into a revolt against economic freedom and the traditional way of French life and government.
As night follows day, a third, dark, and uniquely evil presence is clear throughout the worst of the turmoil. Palestinian flags waved wherever there was violence, calls for the death of Israel, and genocide of Jews. It has been easy for Islamofascist activists to stir up disaffected Muslim immigrant youth who live on the outskirts of French cities and who have grown to young manhood in a culture of rejectionist nihilism. These feral malcontents are ever ready to maraud and pillage the civilization in which they and their parents make their homes. Jihadis helpfully direct them to attack Jewish stores while sparing Muslim ones.
Most of the rioters, though, are not ideologues or jihadis. They are hardly thoughtful enough to be that. They simply want free stuff, and don’t care where they get it or whose livelihoods they wreck in purloining it. They simply see the feckless political class incapable of responding, so they know they can get away with thievery, attacks on police, and intimidation of citizens. They are in it for the glory of violent plunder — fun and profit. There are simply too many of them — half a million last weekend — for the state to suppress them without resort to a level of violence that the government, political class, and perhaps the general public could not stomach.
The crisis has reached this scale because the establishment has done nothing serious for decades to prevent it. Happy-clappy multiculturalism long ago metastasized into a sort of cultural gangrene that has been allowed to rot untreated. A sort of pop-up rabble of uneducated, uncivilized, and unassimilable young men has been nurtured in the bosom of civilization and is keen for mayhem.
One commentator posted a wry comment on X, saying, “Apparently freeing Palestine means destroying Paris.” The irony of this hit home but, in a wider sense, the substance of the observation was straightforwardly true rather than a joke. The “Free Palestine” cause is inextricably involved in a project to wreck the West and its ancient and glorious culture. And an inflection point has been reached with the French riots. Usually, the jihadis and leftists of the green-red alliance are to be seen in activism clearly focused on Israel and Jews — for example, at the hideous celebrations marking the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacres by Hamas.
But the protests today in France are not primarily about Israel and Jews, although jihadis and their useful malignant idiots are prominently involved. The main thrust of the mayhem, however, expresses a repudiation of Western society and civilization and an intention to do damage to its foundations. It is primarily about attacking institutions, burning architectural treasures, expropriating property, spitting in the face of orderly society, and demonstrating that the “authorities” have lost control.
Usually, when the pro-Palestinian mob is doing its work, it is thought necessary to remind onlookers that Israel and the Jews are not the only targets. Israel is the little Satan, but the West, especially America, is the great Satan, the ultimate target.
THE GOP’S NOT SO GREAT COMMUNICATORS
In France last weekend, however, what we’ve seen is not primarily an antisemitic attack
with some ancillary property damage and socialist sloganeering thrown in. What we’ve
seen is, rather, an attack on Western society and the things we hold dear with
opportunistic antisemitism thrown in.
The thugs of Paris and every other major city in France are willing foot soldiers — the grunts of leftist revolution. They were agitated by cynical revolutionaries. One could think of them as cannon fodder if there was any chance of the authorities using decisive force against them. But there isn’t. With their actions and the lack of any effective response to them, the West took another step downward on a road that leads to doom. We don’t have to reach the end of that road. But we will if we don’t change direction.