Meme - "Paristine *Eiffel tower with huge Palestine flag and painted in Palestine colours, with street, buildings and cars on fire and men in black waving Palestine flags*"
Meme - *Free Palestine trojan horse painted with Palestine flag and wearing Keffiyeh being pushed into open gates of EU by masked men in black waving Palestine flags*
Lorna Smyth | Facebook - "France is burning and I have to say, watching some of the footage coming out of there today, the hypocrisy is absolutely staggering. Paris. Marseille. Lyon. Rennes. Toulouse. Angers. Buildings attacked, cars burning, shops smashed and looted, police and security forces attacked. Marseille City Hall built in 1653 has been stormed and vandalised, priceless artefacts smashed into pieces. A municipal police station attacked. Lyon’s tourist office set on fire. A fire outside the doors of Cathédrale Sainte-Marie-Majeure. And they are firing firework mortars at police in Paris, Marseille and Lyon. Over 270 have been arrested. Yet it’s people like me who are routinely called “far right” for having an opinion. Question immigration. Far right. Talk about borders. Far right. Raise concerns about integration. Far right. Say something the left doesn’t like. Far right. Apparently that is extremism. But cover your face, dress in black, attack police, smash up public buildings, loot shops and fire mortars at officers and suddenly everyone becomes terribly careful about labels. Well, here’s the problem. The French authorities themselves are calling out the ultra-left. Not me. France’s Interior Ministry says there has been a “very strong mobilisation” of the ultra-left and has described what is happening in parts of the country as “violent and targeted operations”. So let’s stop dancing around it. There is far-left violence on the streets of France. There are Palestinian flags throughout some of these demonstrations too. And before anyone tells me that’s something somebody has made up on X, AFP journalists are providing live video and photographic evidence that Palestinian flags are being carried by these violent thugs who are destroying their towns and cities and attacking police and security services. This doesn’t mean that everyone protesting today is far left. There are ordinary French people out protesting about the cost of living, wages, schools and public services. They have been protesting peacefully in other areas of these towns but their cause has been hijacked by the far-left. We can’t pretend this isn’t happening just because it makes for an uncomfortable picture. Then there is the chant from the far-left: “Louis XVI, Louis XVI, we beheaded him. Macron, Macron, we can do it again.” They are literally invoking the beheading of Louis XVI and saying they can do it again to the President of France. That chant isn’t new either. It has been heard at radical-left demonstrations in France before. Now tell me something. If this were the far right, would anyone be struggling to find the words? Masked far-right groups attacking police across several major cities. Far-right extremists firing mortars at officers. Buildings on fire. Shops looted. A town hall stormed. A police station attacked. And crowds chanting about doing to the President what was done to Louis XVI. It would be called far-right extremism from morning until night. Every newspaper would have it in the headline. Every television studio would be discussing radicalisation. Politicians would be lining up to condemn it. And rightly so. That’s the bit that matters. I am not asking for the far right to be excused. I’m asking why the far left should be. Because I am sick to the back teeth of watching “far right” thrown around at ordinary people who have never burned a building, never attacked a police officer, never fired anything at anybody and never threatened anyone’s life. Our words are apparently dangerous. Our concerns are apparently dangerous. Question government policy and you’re an extremist. Question immigration and somebody will eventually call you far right. But actual political extremists put masks over their faces, attack police and burn their way through cities and we’re treated to endless discussion about their “grievances”. It’s just a ‘clash’ with police, nothing more. No. You don’t get to have it both ways. If dangerous rhetoric matters, then chanting about beheading a President matters. If political violence matters, then it matters whether it comes from the right or the left. And if ideology is relevant every single time somebody on the right commits violence, don’t suddenly tell me ideology has nothing to do with it when France’s own authorities are pointing directly at the ultra-left. Then there is Macron. Yesterday, while all of this was looming, Emmanuel Macron was in Brussels appealing for “calm”. Today France is dealing with serious disorder across city after city. It appears that he still has not returned, while his country burns. Where is the leadership while this is happening? A country cannot have police being attacked with firework mortars, public buildings burning, shops being looted and its town halls being stormed and pretend this is just another Saturday of “protest”. France has a problem. And part of that problem is far-left political violence. Those aren’t even words anyone can accuse me of dreaming up. France’s own authorities are saying ultra-left. So perhaps the next time somebody feels like casually throwing “far right” at people like me because they don’t like what we’ve said, they should have another look at the streets of France today. Because if peacefully expressing an opinion makes people like me extremists, what the hell does this make them?"
Visegrád 24 on X - "BREAKING: Bukele releases a statement on France: “I’ve heard it said that France is finished, that it’s too late to save her. But France remains just as beautiful, enviable even. Her greatness hasn’t vanished; it only awaits rebirth. We overcame, in a single year, a problem a hundred times more severe, without having the resources at France’s disposal. France could manage it in a week” 🇸🇻🇫🇷 "
Too bad there's too little political will and too much human rights, so this is impossible
Meme - C3 @C_3C_3: "These French students just want smaller classrooms."
*Masked boys in black clothing, mostly nondescript, with Syrian, Palestinian and Moroccan flags*
Meme - Old bearded brown man with topi (ethnic cap): "You know, I'm something of a student myself"
Meme - *With They Live CNN Sunglasses off*
*Masked black and brown men in black clothing, mostly nondescript, with molotov cocktail and smoky air*
*With They Live CNN Sunglasses on*
White teens of both sexes marching peacefully with "Better Education" and "Improve Our Schools" signs
Meme - C3 @C_3C_3: "This French student just wants new textbooks. *guy with Algerian flag bandana*"
Meme - Mark Higgie @MarkHiggie2: "High-school students in Perpignan, France, convincingly make their case for smaller classes and better arrangements for absent teachers."
*Black men jumping on top of a car with others bashing the car, while others cheer*
French teens march for decent schools despite government's pledge to act
Unsurprisingly, not just is the media lying about the riots in general, it's also pretending they're not violent and blaming the police
The French students glorifying terrorists, as they burn the country | National Post - "In a quest for better classroom conditions, students blockading their school in the north-central region Beaugency last week chanted along to M*R*H,* a song by the rapper Boro700. The title bears the initials of Mohamed Merah, the French-born terrorist of Algerian descent who in 2012 murdered three soldiers, then a teacher and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse. One of them was an eight-year-old girl he chased down and shot at point-blank range. Released this summer, the song captures the nihilism animating a significant part of what has charitably been called a movement. Students in Nice have played it too, and prosecutors are investigating both cases for glorification of terrorism. The protests began on Sept. 17 when students at Saint-Exupéry, a school in a disadvantaged Parisian suburb, blockaded their school in support of teachers striking over under-staffing and overcrowded classrooms — real problems that France seems unable to solve, despite spending well above the OECD average on secondary education. Much of that money is spent on overheads and salaries, which lag below OECD average, and little is left for structural reform. One can understand the frustration of teachers and students, some of whom find themselves without a teacher for months ahead of exams that will shape their life prospects. But the protests, 250,000 strong on Tuesday by official counts, have been punctuated by spasms of violence, spreading across France in a pattern of rudderless, memetic escalation. In Marseille, a masked man used a lighter and an aerosol to set fire to a woman’s face. Dozens of teachers have been assaulted, and schools have been closed across the country — including the Nelson Mandela high school in the western city of Nantes, after arsonists set fire to its entrance hall. According to the government, the protests have been the most violent in decades, leaving at least 700 police officers, 85 school staff and 215 teenagers injured. One teenager’s hand was blown off by a police stun grenade. Whatever France’s education shortcomings were at the outset, the riots have hardly improved matters. Yet the left, led by socialist and presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has seized on the protests to galvanize its base ahead of elections in April. “Our country is witnessing the most powerful movement of high school and college students it has seen since May 1968,” Mélenchon said, referring to the riots that forged a new settlement in France, including a raft of labour rights. Mélenchon’s embrace of a movement born in the Paris banlieues (suburbs) of Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne may prove a gift to Marine Le Pen’s populist National Rally, especially due to viral social media footage showing a preponderance of migrant-descended rioters. It appears to be a risk Mélenchon is willing to take. The protests have mobilized his base ahead of the first round of April’s presidential election, where turnout is key. Much of the mainstream coverage, meanwhile, has taken the protests more or less at face value: young people rightly angered by a dysfunctional — and increasingly heavy-handed — state. This is only part of the picture. It cannot explain the chants for a jihadi who murdered Jewish children; nor the lyrics in the same song revelling in the murder of 90 innocent people in the Bataclan massacre. It is true that many of the schools affected by shortages are in the banlieues, where ethnic minorities have long been concentrated on the edges of French cities, sprawling concrete suburbs, afflicted with crime and ennui, that have been a thorn in the side of the Fifth Republic for decades. But that fact does not illuminate the glee with which some students have embraced violence against their teachers, many of whom share their grievances. Figures from what one might call the Global Right have observed that many of these scenes, circulating on social media, have shown a disproportionate number of perpetrators hailing from migrant-descended backgrounds. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!” Like sympathetic mainstream accounts, the U.S. president is only partly correct. After the 2005 banlieue riots, experts explained away the violence with the usual alibis of poverty and discrimination. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut rejected this interpretation. Instead, he observed a nihilistic spasm from the “wretched of the earth,” a reference to the title of a book by the French-Martinician writer Frantz Fanon. There was ultimately no programme or ideology, apart from white-hot hostility towards the dominant culture and all it represents. While the protesters have legitimate grievances, the unrest has been gripped by something deeper that has proved markedly stubborn to reason."
It's no surprise that the left embraces destructive nihilism, since that is their underlying motivator
Adam Pankratz: France's pro-riot left is defending 'legitimate violence' | National Post - "French students are up to their old tricks again. By this, of course, I mean rioting and burning buildings. When you get right down to it, what else is an education really good for anyways? This time around the alleged cause are proposed cuts to education funding as part of wider budget cuts by President Emmanuel Macron’s government to rein in France’s out of control public expenditures. In 2025, the government deficit was over €128 billion (C$204.6 billion), or 5.1 per cent of GDP. Projected to rise to 5.4 per cent of GDP in 2026, the €43 billion ($68.7 billion) in proposed cuts for 2027 are designed to reduce the deficit to five per cent of GDP next year. For context, the Canadian government general deficit stands at around 2.5 per cent of GDP. All this is to say that France has a spending problem it must control, and the proposed budget is a first step down that road... The numbers are staggering by any measure: 1,027 buildings vandalized, 1,949 young people arrested. Images of burning dumpsters and schools in flames are dominating media coverage. The Minister of National Education said on X that the violence committed was “of an extremely serious nature,” and called on those responsible to be prosecuted. He further added that “Everyone needed to consider their responsibility in calling for this mobilisation” in what was surely a thinly veiled reference to French leftists who have distributed guides on how to blockade universities and schools, as well as the socialist France Unbowed party, who have been accused of fueling the violence. The minister ended by saying that “violence will not stop the fundamental right our students have to education.”... On the right, presidential candidate Marine Le Pen of the National Rally was swift to condemn the rioting, saying that when violence becomes a political tool, “everyone’s liberty is threatened.” Her message and movement seem to be resonating with a French public fed up with what they view as a society out of control. Prior to the rioting, Le Pen was widening her lead in early presidential polls. Clearly, however, not everyone agrees with Le Pen. Her possible presidential opponent from the left, firebrand Jean-Luc Mélanchon of France Unbowed — who has never seen a protest or riot he didn’t want to join — has come down on the side of the student vandals, who he believes were “provoked” by the government. On X he spoke of his concern for the “police violence” against “young people” as though the police had randomly attacked students out for a stroll. Not content with simply supporting the burning of French schools in the name of his imagined democracy, Mélanchon went further, accusing Le Pen of causing the problem and getting her “friends in the police” to beat up the students. The France Unbowed mayor of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, Bally Bagayoko, echoed the Mélanchon’s general sentiment and expressed his sympathy for the student protesters’ “legitimate violence.” Le Pen, for her part, has shot back, accusing Mélanchon and other members of France Unbowed of fomenting and organizing the violence. If you think the United States has divisive and fiery rhetoric, you ain’t seen nothin’ compared to Mélanchon and his band of communists wannabes... In France, on top of the debt, economic growth is nearly non-existent, projected to be only 0.4 per cent in 2026. Voters want something, anything, different. Right now, that is manifesting in voters breaking either right to Marine Le Pen or left to Jean-Luc Mélanchon. That highly polarized and volatile scenario will define the 2027 presidential race. Expect more political fireworks as well as fires in the streets of France as election day nears."
The Washington Post on X - "Student protests are sweeping France, with hundreds of schools and colleges shut as students protest crowded classrooms, understaffing and inequalities in education. The demonstrations come amid anger over spending cuts, rising prices and record debt."
Megan Basham on X - "Nobody sets buildings on fire and violently attacks first responders over class sizes. It’s insulting the legacy media is asking you to believe this."
Flopping Aces on X - "France is burning, and the political and media establishments want you to believe the mobs stealing sneakers, torching fire trucks, and attacking police are simply upset about school funding. In Marseille, rioters reportedly attacked firefighters, stole their truck, and burned it. In Orléans, they looted a JD Sports store. Apparently, the latest breakthrough in French education involves stealing athletic shoes and destroying emergency vehicles. Who knew? And the media keep pushing the school-funding excuse with a straight fucking face. Michael Shellenberger points out that France spends between TWO AND 200 TIMES more per student than the countries its migrants come from. French schools have more money than ever. So where's the educational emergency that requires turning entire neighborhoods into war zones? Which classroom gets a new computer when a fire truck goes up in flames? How many teachers can you hire with stolen sneakers? This is the level of breathtaking bullshit the public is expected to swallow. Shellenberger identifies a decades-old Left-Islamist political alliance behind the unrest, with sympathetic media outlets laundering ideological violence into a heartwarming struggle for better schools. And then there's Emmanuel Macron. While his country burns, this pompous jackass is watching naval missile launches and lecturing Americans about free speech. According to Macron, freedom requires an acceptable relationship with "truth." Whose fucking truth, Emmanuel? The same establishment's truth that transforms arson into educational advocacy and looting into a desperate cry for classroom supplies? France has a president who apparently considers himself qualified to explain freedom to America while struggling to maintain order in his own streets. The arrogance would be hilarious if the consequences weren't so catastrophic. A country is being torn apart, its leaders are busy policing the vocabulary used to describe the destruction, and the media are standing beside them insisting the flames are actually a fucking funding request. (article below)"
Eric Daugherty on X - "🚨 BREAKING: MASSIVE RIOTS and PALESTINE FLAGS are waving in Paris, riot police are STRUGGLING, foreigners are everywhere and leftists are going berserk
THIS IS AMERICA IF THE LEFTISTS WIN. The Islamists are waving the Palestinian flag everywhere...FRANCE IS FALLING
TEAR GAS is now being deployed. Hamas movements are "ACTIVELY INVOLVED" in the riots. Rioters are being chased everywhere, but I want to see more MASS ARRESTS. This is a total free for all! IT LOOKS LIKE A 3RD WORLD NATION."
Lozzy B 🇦🇺𝕏 on X - "🔥 Translated from Anonymous FRENCH FIRE FIGHTER: “I’m a firefighter, and what I saw yesterday in the streets of Paris broke my heart. We responded around 10 p.m., after the call for a dumpster fire that was escalating. We thought it was just a simple evening incident. We arrived on the scene, and it was hell. Paris, my city, the one where I grew up, where I did my first shifts, had become a war zone. Black smoke everywhere, screams, explosions from mortars. Groups of young people, often from immigrant backgrounds, hooded, organized, charging at law enforcement like on a battlefield. I saw fellow police officers getting lynched with iron bars. I saw a police car pelted with stones as we were just stepping out to put out a fire that was threatening families. We were set upon by rioters who screamed at us, calling us “dogs.” We were just trying to save lives, and we became targets. I picked up a 14-year-old kid, face covered in blood, who was crying as he said he’d followed “the big guys” just “for fun.” I saw a mother, shutters closed, begging us to protect her children while everything downstairs was being smashed. Shattered storefronts, looted shops, burning cars… all of it under the pretext of “celebrating” something. Celebrating isn’t breaking things. Is this France in 2026? A country where you can’t go out at night without risking your life? A country where entire neighborhoods are handed over to clans that respect neither our laws, nor our history, nor our firefighters, nor our police? Where we watch helplessly as our capital, a symbol of light and culture, is turned into a playground for barbarians who spit on the hand that feeds them? That night, coming home at 6 a.m., still covered in soot and sweat, I cried like a child. Not from exhaustion. From rage and sadness. For my children. For my injured colleagues. For this country I love and that’s letting itself die. Wake up. Please. Before there’s nothing left to save”"
French riots about Islamism, not education - "The riots consuming France have caused considerable confusion. We are told the violence is a protest over poor conditions in the nation’s schools, but you do not burn down a school to get a better education... The protesters are carrying Islamic and communist flags. They are being encouraged by Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party, one of the three major parties vying for power in the April 2027 presidential election. As you would expect, Mr. Melenchon supports mass migration. So far, 900 schools have closed because of the riots. At last count, 715 law enforcement officers have been injured by the chaos caused by young scholars seeking a better education by setting fires, throwing rocks and assaulting police with other projectiles... France does need better schools. Many are far too old and dilapidated. Still, the problem cannot be addressed while the nation is in the midst of a long-running budget crisis. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio now stands at a staggering nearly 120%. It is projecting a deficit of about 5.4% of gross domestic product. French citizens are already taxed to the limit. Still, the force behind the current riots is not fiscal but ideological. France needs a government committed to securing its borders, fiscal discipline and the rule of law."
Saggezza Eterna on X - "On France, France is currently reaping the putrid harvest of a fifty-year progressive experiment in civilizational self-hatred. What is unfolding across the streets of Paris, Marseille, and Nantes is the logical endpoint of the leftist managerial consensus. Decades of open borders, cultural surrender, and reckless socialist economics have converted a proud European nation into a fractured, smoldering colony of its own imported underclass scum. They imported masses of useless extremely dumb and hateful people from places so disgusting you would vomit just looking at a map of them, let alone breathing the same air as the diseases they carry. You would need a hazmat suit to walk the streets they came from, yet they expect us to welcome this barbarism into your neighborhoods. The excuse peddled by left-wing commentators is an insult to basic human intelligence. The credentialed press demands the public believe that five thousand arrested teenagers, armed with axes, Molotov cocktails, and mortar fireworks, were radicalized by broken radiators and delayed mathematics tutors. The idea that throwing concentrated hydrochloric acid into the faces of police officers stems from poor classroom ventilation is therapeutic delusion at its most pathetic. In Marseille, thugs splashed teachers with petrol. In Belfort, a mob chased a gendarme, stomped him into the pavement, and beat him within inches of his life. In Nantes, they reduced Lycée Nelson Mandela to ashes. These are acts of pure, feral nihilism carried out by an unassimilated youth "culture" that views the host nation with visceral, unadulterated contempt. Their culture is a cesspool of decay, a festering wound of incompetence and hatred that they have exported to every nation foolish enough to let them in. It is a culture where honor is a lie, where women are property, and where the only thing they produce is violence and misery. Look at the lands they come from: burned-out wastelands of corruption, where the streets are filled with trash because their minds are filled with garbage. They bring nothing but their "culture of vomit," a sickening mix of entitlement and barbarism that they expect us to swallow while they spit on our laws. The epicenter tells the entire story. Seine-Saint-Denis, Department 93, is the crown jewel of progressive social engineering. With an immigrant population exceeding thirty percent and an overwhelming majority tracing their origins to North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, this enclave has absorbed billions in state subsidies. The return on that investment is a lawless wasteland of parallel societies, crumbling republican authority, and complete demographic estrangement. Look at the banners hoisted above the barricades. Palestinian and Algerian flags fly proudly over torched French public property. These rioters feel zero loyalty to the nation that clothes, feeds, and educates them. They occupy the land as a hostile domestic force, encouraged by the very state apparatus tasked with assimilating them. Their "traditions" are just excuses for oppression. Their "religion" is a shield for cruelty. Their "community" is a gang mentality that thrives on intimidation. They celebrate a history of conquest and slaughter, yet they cry victim when confronted with the truth of their own brutality. They claim to be victims of oppression while they oppress everyone around them. The true guilt lies with the political arsonists of the parliamentary left. French intelligence services confirmed the reality that every honest citizen already knew: this nationwide chaos is an orchestrated operation directed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his operatives in La France Insoumise. LFI functions as the political wing of the street mob, grooming an unassimilated suburban underclass to serve as shock troops for the 2027 presidential election. Radical deputies like Bally Bagayoko parade around burning barricades, declaring on camera that political violence can be legitimate. When the state attempts to enforce the rule of law, Mélenchon immediately takes to the airwaves, labeling violent felons harmless students while smearing law enforcement with charges of systemic racism. The modern Left operates like an infectious parasite, actively cultivating the decay of the host civilization to secure its own grip on institutional power. The financial bankruptcy of the French state mirrors its moral collapse. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu now scrambles to extract 54 billion euros in emergency austerity savings from a ruined treasury. The debt-service payments to global bondholders now exceed the entire national education budget. The French state has spent decades funding bloated socialist bureaucracies, welfare subsidies for foreign nationals, and internationalist vanity projects, leaving its actual high schools plagued by vermin, failing roofs, and zero discipline. French taxpayers pay punitive, confiscatory tax rates only to watch their public finances evaporate, their schools decay, and their streets descend into medieval gang warfare. The communists engineered this catastrophe. They imported a permanent grievance machine, disarmed the police, surrendered the classroom to radical unions, and now feign astonishment when the barbarians they nurtured inside the gates set fire to the architecture. The French working class, who built the nation and dutifully pay the bills, are left to navigate the wreckage while limousine leftists sip wine in protected central arrondissements and applaud the burning of the country. This is the definitive legacy of modern liberalism: bankruptcy, burning cities, acid-scarred police, and total civilizational degradation. Send them all back to the sh!t-hole they came from. The very sh!t-hole they created and brought to the West."
Global Dissident on X - "🚨🇫🇷 Former French intelligence chief Alain Chouet claims 1,514 neighborhoods across 859 cities are off-limits to police, emergency and medical services. 4 MILLION people live there. French cities are ticking TIME BOMBS. How much worse will it get?"
Lara Logan on X - "These are parallel societies that have been created within French borders. The French are paying the price for allowing this to happen. Remember when Fox News reported there were no-go zones surrounding Paris & they were accused of racism? And false reporting? It was true then & it’s worse now because the media & the political establishment provided cover for this threat to grow."
Sweeenie on X - "People will sit there with a straight face and tell you that we need open borders, or that we need to begin granting a “pathway to citizenship” for those who’ve illegally crossed ours - which, of course, just creates a huge incentive for MORE crossings (just come on in! Hell, a few years, we’ll make you a voting citizen!) - and then shoulder shrug away images like this. This was yesterday. Near Lycée Montaigne in Bordeaux, France, where left wing agitators, who are PREDOMINANTLY comprised of second and third generation migrants, have been tearing the country limb from limb, well, because they can. Because no one is there to stop them. How did we get here? I want you to ask yourself that question today. How the HELL did we get here? To the point where we would ever let a single person into our country who doesn’t cherish it? To let people in who would turn around and begin breaking our laws and spitting on our institutions? To let people in who are not endlessly grateful for the opportunities and standards of living that western countries have worked for centuries to create and provide? To let people into our homes who would terrorize our streets while waving foreign flags and sit there laughing and live streaming as a hard working, law abiding, French firefighter who was probably just a few years away from his pension and doing nothing more than dutifully performing his job so he could make enough money to put his French daughter through school, rush to put out a fire THEY started and quickly become engulfed in excruciating flames. Why is no one rushing to help this fucking man? Why is no one trying to save him? They’re laughing. Cheering. Smiling and propelling utter anarchy and lawlessness. What a joke. And the worse part will be his family having to realize that the taxes he pays will CONTINUE going to the politicians who not only created the conditions that allowed this to happen, but wanted it to. Mayhem is their currency. Disorder is their milieu. And until the lion of Western Man decides he is sick of getting bitten by fleas and ticks and finally rises in fury, these nations will continue to crumble into chaos and degeneracy. It’s time to wake up."
🇫🇷 LouiseFrance75 🇫🇷 🕎🇮🇱✝️ on X - "Le drapeau du hamas hissé sur un lycée Coucou les petits français vous comprenez ou toujours pas ? Je dénonce la palestinisation arabo musulmane de la France depuis longtemps....nous y voilà"
Sofia Afonso Ferreira on X - "How did Europe become so weak and blind? Europe did not become weak overnight. Decades of low birth rates, elite consensus against cultural assertion, and a habit of treating mass immigration as a moral good rather than a demographic and political fact left large parts of the continent unable to enforce basic order. The result is visible this week in France. The student unrest that began in late September over school conditions—overcrowding, missing teachers, decaying buildings—has turned into street violence concentrated in the banlieues. More than a thousand lycées have been affected, roughly 220 blockaded on the peak day, and about 400 secondary schools closed on Friday. Interior Ministry figures put arrests near or above 2,000 since the escalation, the large majority teenagers. Hundreds of police officers have been injured (305 reported on Thursday alone in some counts), education staff injuries include dozens of headteachers. Officials now call it urban violence rather than a school protest, and have pointed to far-left agitation, including France Unbowed, as a factor that widened the disorder. The worst incidents of the last few days include several fires in schools, staff at Victor Hugo high school in Marseille reportedly splashed with petrol, videos of teachers being attacked by students, mortar-style fireworks fired at police lines, fencing torn down, shops looted in places, and public-transport disruptions in Marseille and Strasbourg after vandalism and threats. Seine-Saint-Denis has been a centre of the blockades and clashes. That department’s demographics are not a secret, large North African and sub-Saharan populations, high concentrations of Muslim residents, and a long record of riots when order frays. The immediate grievances cited by many pupils are real—leaking ceilings, absent teachers, overcrowded classes. The methods (arson against schools, attacks on staff, fireworks used as weapons) match patterns seen in earlier French urban violence more than they match ordinary student politics. The comparison with Iran in 1979 is inevitable. In Iran, leftist and Islamist factions cooperated against the Shah. Once the clerics took power, many of these leftists were imprisoned or executed. In Western Europe, the existing parallel is political in nature — sectors of the radical left treated Islamic or communitarian networks as allies against the liberal state, policing the discourse on integration while simultaneously downplaying the patterns of criminality, parallel norms, and antisemitic incidents associated with these same groups. It is likely that the pact will end the same way, witnessing the hell that is unfolding on the streets of France now. The left wanted its own private army to command. It will be devoured by the force it created.
Photo from @visegrad24 — Students film a French firefighter after setting him on fire during the school protests in Bordeaux"
