France is burning, yet many would sooner blame the Paris property market than say a word about the two ideologies behind the violence. They overlook threats from the left because they admire its admittedly noble ideals, and they deny threats from Islam because acknowledging them feels like bigotry. But survey the places in the world where Islam defines the social norms and holds political power, and name the one you would choose for your daughter. Of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Freedom House only rates Senegal as free, a place where child marriage and female genital mutilation are as common as public transportation is in America, and not one in 57 scores as high as gang-plagued Jamaica. Each is a fascist hell ruled by men who embody everything liberalism exists to defeat, each a receipt showing exactly what you get when Islam is the operating system for society.
But the problem is not simply political Islam. Look closer to home. It was not the Mormons who stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015 and murdered 12 people for drawing cartoons. It was not atheists who, on their way out, found a wounded police officer named Ahmed Merabet lying on the pavement with his hands raised, and shot him in the head. It was not Quakers who walked into a church in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray during morning Mass, forced 85-year-old Father Hamel to his knees at his own altar, and cut his throat open while filming it. Nor was it Hindus who drove a 19-ton truck down the Promenade des Anglais on Bastille Day 2016, crushing 86 people, children among them. It was not the Amish who beheaded Samuel Paty outside his school for teaching a lesson on free expression, then posted a photograph of his severed head to Twitter. It was not Buddhists who, two weeks later inside the basilica of Notre-Dame de Nice, killed three worshippers and nearly decapitated one of them. We all know who it was.
France is on fire, while the rest of us get a lecture on why the flames are misleading. These are students protesting poor school conditions, we are told. The real culprits are bad governance, the economy, and the police, we are informed. The blame lies with them, not the people holding the petrol bombs. The screams of “Allah” and “Palestine” are unrelated to religion or politics. Above all, we must understand that these young scholars, these future doctors and engineers, simply want to return to studying math. Once they’ve finished burning down the classroom.
A friend recently sent me a post by the French essayist Philippe Lemoine, in which he describes “a very high level of general dissatisfaction in France at the moment, mostly due to anemic economic growth and inflation, especially with the price of gas.” As if the price of gas is the reason 1,500 businesses have been wrecked, or as if school conditions are why you see teens smashing shop windows and looting everything inside, then filming themselves in the burning street, stealing boxes of Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and gloating, “We have plundered everything in the name of Allah.”
As comedian Rob Schneider noted this week, “France has FREE health care, paid parental leave, paid family leave, FREE child care, FREE preschool, 5 weeks paid vacation, a 35 hour work week, generous unemployment and housing benefits, and heavily subsidized higher education. Everything the left says they want AND THEY’RE STILL PROTESTING AND BURNING SHIT DOWN.”
The reason for this is already there for anyone who cares to look. At a blockade in Beaugency, students were filmed chanting a rap song glorifying the jihadists Mohamed Merah and Salah Abdeslam. In Brive-la-Gaillarde, at a march backed by France’s largest communist-rooted union, the CGT, the union’s sound system reportedly played the same song. This month, a video began circulating from outside a lycée in Mitry-Mory, northeast of Paris, showing a teenage boy who appears to gesture toward a group of police, then says, “In the name of Allah, we kill them!”
As Maya Angelou once said, “When people show you who they are, believe them, the first time.”
The real question, then, is what exactly can be done about all this given that the people who want France’s destruction are already inside the city gates, they are already citizens, and they are already in positions of political power. Take Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament for La France insoumise, who has said that Hamas’s actions are “legitimate.” Perhaps one day, she will become the leader of the party, or maybe even prime minister of France, and because she is nonwhite, her skin color will be held up as evidence that her victory is a triumph of liberal values.
But not everyone is too blind or too stupid to see. In Les territoires conquis de l’islamisme, Bernard Rougier, a Sorbonne professor of Arab studies who led a team that studied Islamism at the level of individual towns and even single apartment blocks, offers an insight right in the title of his book, “The conquered territories of Islamism,” because indeed, these areas have been conquered, and rest assured, they are probably never coming back. Even the president has rung the alarm bell. In his October 2020 speech at Les Mureaux, Macron said France’s real problem is “séparatisme islamiste,” which he defined as an ideology that sees its own laws and social norms as superior to the Republic’s. Indeed, there is an explicit refusal among many Muslims to assimilate to French society because assimilation is seen as a form of submission to the social and legal norms of infidels. Another concept worth listing is entrisme, the term for the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of working inside institutions rather than attacking them. The key scholar on this topic is the anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, author of Le frérisme et ses réseaux, who has described Brotherhood entryism as an attempt to subjugate without fighting. Still another explanatory term comes from Gilles Kepel, a scholar of the Middle East and Muslims in the West, who has coined the term “jihadisme d’atmosphère,” or ambient jihadism, meaning that today’s jihadism doesn’t run through organized networks, but is diffused through culture. Today, that atmosphere includes songs like those of Freeze Corleone or Boro700, unspoken behavioral norms taught to children by their mothers, and even emotional attitudes involving grievance and victimhood narratives pumped into their understanding of reality by social media. The young man in the Mitry-Mory video is almost certainly not a recruited jihadist, but he is breathing the air.
Then there’s the leftist part of the problem. In my recent essay on the French riots, I explained the roots of this problem, how communist and socialist teacher and student unions have helped drum this chaos up in the name of antiracism and anti-colonialism. The original complaints about teacher shortages and deteriorating schools were real, but left-wing student unions, teachers’ unions, and political activists quickly became involved. The Union Syndicale Lycéenne, which describes itself as antifascist, feminist, environmentalist, and collectivist, called for nationwide school blockades. So we’re not simply talking about students demanding better classrooms. We’re talking about Marxist organizations using the protests to mobilize young people for revolution. In that essay, I also spent time retreading the path of French barbarism in Algeria, unpacking why Algerians in France have such animosity toward the country that has welcomed them in and given them a home. But if modern French people are supposed to watch this “reckoning” play out, if they and their society are to be held responsible for the sins of their colonial ancestors, then my god, imagine the Muslims and leftists doling out such “justice,” and the sins they would have to pay in the name of their communities.
To his credit, Lemoine does acknowledge the role of hard leftist unions in all this. He adds about the current riots, “What set them apart from traditional French social movements is how violent they were.” This is an important fact, because a common talking point I hear these days is that violent protesting is as French as beurre on a baguette. Here’s Cathy Young with that sentiment:
But in 2023, after a full week of rioting, France reported 808 officers injured. In 2005, over three weeks, France deployed 11,700 police and gendarmes at the peak and reported 224 injured. Compare that to the current riots, in which 997 officers were injured in a single day. I’ve heard people reference the yellow vest movement, as if it proves this sort of violence has happened before. Wrong again. On the worst day of those protests, Dec. 8, 2018, 1,723 people were arrested nationwide. A few days ago, on Oct. 17, about 2,400 were arrested. That’s about 40% more. The targets are also different. The yellow vests vandalized the Arc de Triomphe and looted shops near the Champs-Élysées. They set fire to one prefecture. The current rioters burned the town hall in Limoges, broke into the town halls in Marseille and Lille, ransacked the prefect’s residence in Bordeaux, burned a Lyon tourist office, and vandalized at least 300 Paris businesses. They are not profiting from such destruction, the way looters do, nor gaining position in any political endgame, as activists seek. Rather, this is opposition to French civilization itself.
The violence is so bad that Laurent Nuñez, France’s interior minister, the cabinet member over the national police and gendarmerie, acknowledged that in some cities, police have truly “lost control.” Indeed, it’s so bad that Nuñez offered to resign, but President Macron declined, saying he needs Nuñez to keep the chain of command intact, otherwise they might really lose control.
“I keep seeing a lot of people who are depicting those kids as ‘Islamists’ and ideologically motivated actors,” writes Lemoine, “but I think it’s a complete misreading of the situation in my opinion. This isn’t an ‘Islamist uprising’ or whatever nonsense people are talking about. Their actions are opportunistic and driven by a nihilistic culture that is very similar to what you see in Black ghettos in the U.S., where anti-social behavior is totally normalized, with an added Islamic veneer due to their family background. This nihilism and their family background makes them susceptible to Islamist indoctrination, which is why terrorists were almost always delinquent before they turned to religion, but most of them aren’t ideologues and those who are don’t loot stores.”
He’s half right. Banlieue nihilism is real, and most of these kids couldn’t explain Islamist doctrine if you asked them. But the better explanation is that four distinct forces have found each other in France: inherited postcolonial grievance against the French state, an Islamist media ecosystem that’s radicalizing young people, a radical left that channels youth anger toward revolutionary ends, and yes, the ordinary opportunism Lemoine describes. But he misses the rest. Just consider the broader information environment shaping the attitudes and behavioral norms of these young rioters. On TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Telegram, influential voices portray France as hostile to Muslims, secularism as discrimination, and assimilation as a demand to abandon their religious identity. Elias d’Imzalène, for example, predicted the abaya ban would fail because the riots after Nahel’s death had shown a Muslim youth who no longer want to “remain silent and bow down.” The following year, he asked a Paris rally whether they were ready to “lead the intifada in Paris.”
Or look at Hassan Iquioussen, a preacher whose YouTube sermons drew tens of millions of views, and who was expelled in 2022 over what the Interior Ministry called virulent antisemitic speech. He’s gone, but his legacy gives you a feel for the social-media diet of these kids, and why Lemoine is out of touch. Then there are the videos of police confrontations and the content celebrating defiance, celebrating the burning of cities, celebrating the destruction, particularly on Snapchat, which Macron blamed for fueling the 2023 riots. Of course, criticizing discrimination isn’t the same thing as encouraging violence. Some groups, like Action Droits des Musulmans and Les Hijabeuses, have fought clothing restrictions through the courts, and I agree with those efforts. But there’s a difference between objecting to particular French policies and embracing a worldview in which French society itself is the enemy.
Another friend recently asked me, “Watching what’s happening in France really makes you think about how a country isn’t really tested until some part of it is on fire. That’s when you find out who and what you’re actually surrounded by. If war broke out and your country was invaded, how many people around you would pick up a rifle to defend it, and how many would smile and even help the enemy because their allegiance lies elsewhere?”
What a delightfully depressing question. Are we watching France utterly fail to defend itself against an actual invasion? Are French collaborators once again holding the door open, as leftists have repeatedly done for Islamists in country after country? I think it’s genuinely difficult to tell, but I did have this to say to my friend:
France has answered this question before. Many times. French collaborators helped the Spanish Catholics in the 1590s, foreign anti-revolutionaries in the 1790s, and the Nazis in the 1940s. It’s actually their famous snobbery that makes them such spineless bitches. They’re ideologues, always have been, and that makes them doctrinaire absolutists. Russia and Germany have it too, but less. It makes ideological loyalty stronger than loyalty to a shared community, which can lead to foreign domination being rationalized as the price one has to pay for defeating “evil” people domestically. You also see this on the American left, which is very influenced by French thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Sartre, Bourdieu, Althusser, and Fanon. But Americans also inherited Rousseau from the French, and with it, a powerful tradition of revolutionary universalism. However, it was the British skepticism of grand theories, empiricism, and gradual reform, best embodied in the father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, that inoculated us against such quisling tendencies. Another way the American left reflects the French while the right reflects the English is that the French ideal is to be cultivé — cultured, intellectually sophisticated, in the know, fluent in the “right” terminology, whereas the English ideal is to be sensible — practical, measured, and possessed of sound judgment rather than approved vocabulary.
Lemoine has a point. Plenty of the people rioting in France are opportunists. But that’s hardly the whole story. A woman running off with stolen dresses may have no political convictions, but this only tells us why she joined the riot. It tells us nothing about why the riots began. Look beyond the looters and you find unions and activists screaming about critical social justice, for whom France is less a nation than a structure of oppression, who mobilized the protests, and Islamist networks using social media, music, and mosques to cultivate hostility toward the Republic. A stolen television is one thing. A burned town hall, a torched school, or an attacked police station is another. These are institutions through which France governs itself and passes its civic inheritance to the next generation. Their destruction raises a question that cannot be answered by pointing to a few opportunistic thieves. Ironically, every burning car and ransacked public building may strengthen the hand of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s National Rally, whose promises of order, immigration control, and national cohesion become more attractive by the hour. The radicals may discover that, in trying to bring down the French Republic, they’ve only helped their enemies.
Lemoine is right about something else too. He ends his post with this: “It would take years to solve the problem even if we started now, which we won’t because our politics is completely broken, because it would require getting our budget in order, implementing reasonable economic policies, fixing our immigration and justice system, etc. We are cooked to be honest.”
Still, I remember a stretch of pavement on the boulevard Richard-Lenoir in January 2015, where two men who had just massacred a newsroom in the name of their god stood over a wounded police officer and shot him in the head. You might read this as further proof of all the reasons I just finished listing to be outraged and depressed, but I see a flicker of hope in that bloody scene. Merabet, a Muslim, died defending the Republic. France is an idea as much as anything else, and as young men stand in burning streets invoking the same god against the same police, others are picking up that idea, some for the first time.
The issue is never the issue. The issue always The Revolution. Reds and Greens are a match made in hades who'll turn on each other after the rest of the world has been torched beyond recognition.
I must take strong issue with the phrase in the opening paragraph: “admittedly noble ideals”.
Leftism will never deserve such flattery.
When the Left isn’t lying about its objectives, it’s claiming a monopoly on goodness itself. Such claims are only backhanded insults against the Left’s critics, and to parrot these claims is to participate in the insult.
For example, Leftists will claim that being left-wing means “caring about poor people”. Not only are Leftists typically more interested in their own Messiah complexes than in actual poor people (they’re too misanthropic to want to touch actual poor people), but they compare poorly with the efforts and results that the Right delivers to the poor. The Left wants you to think that the Right hates the poor; the reverse is more true.
This article is otherwise very good, but we need to stop reflexively complimenting the world’s worst people. They don’t deserve it, and audiences are worse off for the psychological conditioning.