We should not have to endure the French experience before we wake up to the West’s peril.
We should not have to endure the French experience before we wake up to the West’s peril.
T hey called them disaffected students — mere schoolchildren who wanted nothing more than livable conditions in their schools. It was a refrain that wore thinner as the weeks of violence in France persisted, as those so-called “students” festooned themselves with revolutionary accouterments and tore at the fabric of French society.
All the while, the French political class internalized a critique of themselves that the rioters were not making. What is wrong with us, they seemed to ask, that these young people would take a hatchet to their own heritage? Are the efforts by French police to subdue the violence only inspiring more of it? Are they really just angry over fuel prices?
The scale of the rioting this weekend seems to have disabused some in France of their affection for political street violence as a formative youthful experience. Police made thousands of arrests as over half a million people took to French streets across the country over the weekend. Almost 1,000 police were reportedly injured in the violence, the evidence of which is sobering.
French streets are littered with broken glass and debris in what were once posh shopping districts. The ancient spires that graced France’s charming provincial skylines collapsed in on themselves as they burned. The rioters attacked tourism offices, city halls, and statues that embody the French Republic. Shopkeepers were assaulted by balaclava- and keffiyeh-clad assailants. Some pleaded tearfully with their tormentors, lecturing them on how their actions betray the “cause,” only to be pushed to the side so they might watch the destruction of their life’s work.
Perhaps the rioters understand their “cause” perfectly well.
The devastation was so widespread, the suffering so acute, that French authorities have shed some of their conspicuous tolerance for the weeks-long campaign of violence. Their reluctance to blur the distinctions between peaceful protesters and violent looters persists, but those with whom New York Times reporters spoke now note the degree to which the violent hordes take refuge within and lash out from those supposedly peaceful swarms.
Deservedly so. Within their ranks, the protesters have incubated a civilizational cancer.
“They came prepared,” said the French journalist Paul Amar. “They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners.” His account has circulated widely, though it has not yet been independently confirmed. Yet Amar’s sense of things aligns with the conclusions that other observers drew.
The rioters ransacked a synagogue in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, scattering holy books across the floor, overturning tables, and opening the Torah ark — defiling its contents. “It can’t be a coincidence that they chose to target a Jewish place of worship,” said one of its congregants. “They must have thought that since they are Jewish, there must be money there.” Likewise, Jewish shops in places like Paris and Marseille were pillaged.
Who could have seen it coming? Anyone who was paying attention to the rioters’ actions. They burned down their schools while insisting that all they sought were better ones. They scrawled “Al Aqsa Flood” and “Free Palestine” on building facades and monuments. They attacked civilians, police officers, and firefighters. Their vanguards dragged Palestinian, Algerian, and Soviet flags with them to the front lines of their fight with police. “Kill that b****!” they screamed, “By Allah kill her!” as they descended on their victims.
These are only the most violent expressions of a familiar sort of vicious radicalism that those who understand its contours have warned was back in vogue. An outbreak of anti-Jewish violence across Europe in the years since the October 7 massacre has been particularly acute in France and Belgium. There, the visibly Jewish are stabbed and assaulted. Those with funny-sounding Jewish names are mocked by figures as prominent as far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The French Jews who weren’t ordered by authorities to remove the mezuzahs from their doors have done so as a prophylactic.
France’s Jews have gotten the message. The emigration of French Jews to Israel declined over the last decade, but it is now on the rise again. “It peaked at around 8,000 between 2012 and 2015, fell to about 1,000 in 2023, climbed back above 2,000 in 2024 and reached 3,500 in 2025,” Le Diplomate reported. “The Jewish Agency expects some 4,000 departures in 2026.”
“The desecration of the synagogue in Paris is a clear warning sign: What begins against Jews never stops there,” said the Combat Antisemitism Movement’s Sacha Roytman. Today, the political class in France is awakening — albeit lazily and in protest — to the horrors that have metastasized on their watch. In a televised address to the French people, French President Emmanuel Macron couldn’t help but fawn over the noble protester and his abstracted “anguish and concern.” And yet, that rhetorical genuflection was hard to hear over Macron’s threat to suspend some civil liberties if the rioting continues.
Yet, if France’s politicians are finally getting the message, America’s aren’t.
“From the high schools of France to the streets of Madrid to the universities of Tirana, young people are telling their governments the same thing: in an age of massive wealth inequality, they want a future they can believe in,” California Representative Ro Khanna wrote Sunday. “In America, let us listen to our young. We need an economic and political transformation.”
The “transformation” that the Black Bloc agitators on France’s streets are attempting to engineer could not be more obvious or less desirable.
This summer, the Brussels-based rabbi Menachem Margolin warned Americans that what had already come to Europe was slouching toward America. “In Europe, antisemitism did not come back wearing a swastika,” he wrote. “It came back wrapped in slogans. It marched under the banner of justice. It called itself activism, and it dared anyone to object.”
In America, too, Jews are attacked in the streets. Their synagogues are the site of menacing and sometimes violent protests. They are excluded from civic events because of their suspected loyalty. They disguise their identities on America’s college campuses. Together, they spend north of $1 billion per year on their own security.
All this happened while America slept. We should not have to endure the French experience before we wake up to the West’s peril.
Seeing what has become of Europe, “knowing the guards, the fortress synagogues, the families who have already packed and gone,” Margolin asked Americans, “how could you possibly choose to let it happen” to you?
“Choose” is the right word. Europe chose to import and cater to the violent paranoia that has for so long typified the tribal dynamics in the Middle East. America can make a different choice. Indeed, it must.