The intoxicating cocktail of anti-Zionism and revolutionary socialism robs the young and idealistic of their inhibitions and greases the skids for violence.
As the rioting in France approaches its third week, and seven days after French authorities stopped pretending to sympathize with the vandals and started calling it what it is — “urban violence” — the global left has turned its attention to the real problem: police’s response to the rioting.
“This is state violence, and it’s horrible seeing police allowed to target children,” one 17-year-old student said of the “deliberate” and “institutionalized” brutality meted out to students demonstrating, ostensibly, for better conditions in schools. “Everyone hates the police,” the children chanted.
When the sun is out, at least, the protesters attempt to leverage what they regard as a morally polarizing power imbalance. “A state that gasses high school students is a weak state,” read one protest banner. “Gas rapists, not children,” another declared. The children have the trade unions and human rights groups on their side, including Amnesty International, which accused the French state of “disproportionate police repression.”
Guardian columnist Helen Massy-Beresford toured the barricades for herself. There, she was alarmed to find demonstrators as young as eleven (“My parents support me being on the barricades and at the protests,” said one teenage protester, “but they said they’d come and get me from the police station if I was arrested”). But she nevertheless oozed sympathy for their cause. “I see what’s happening here in Paris,” the headline on her latest item read, “reasonable student demands met with awful violence.”
Massy-Beresford agonized over the injuries sustained by minors, and there have been many. But of the 215 students and 85 school staff who had reportedly been injured in the demonstrations as of Tuesday morning, most wounds are trivial (to say nothing of the over 300 police officers hurt in the fighting). The serious stuff, however, seems entirely consistent with patterns of behavior that any reasonable person should expect would result in injury.
The most serious and scandalizing cases include a 15-year-old whose “hand was blown off as protesters battled riot police in northern France,” a 16-year-old who “lost the use of his right eye after he was seriously injured in the head,” and “a 14-year-old lost most of his teeth on Monday when a police officer appeared to fire a grenade at him at close range during a protest north-west of Paris.”
The passive description of these injuries might lead the reader to conclude that these things just happened to the poor students who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. These injuries are consistent with active participation in a riot. The teenager who lost his hand may have ill-advisedly handled a live piece of crowd control ordnance. The teens who suffered injuries to the face might have been maliciously targeted by police, but they also were likely on the front lines of a lawless scene they should have avoided.
At the risk of offending the students’ delicate sensibilities or those of the elders goading them into combat with the state, we shouldn’t rob these students or their licentious parents of agency. They chose to put themselves in danger, and they encountered the consequences of their actions.
If you open the aperture on images of these protests, you’d find the scene on the other side of the street far more placid than the boiling riot in the frame. These students were not caught unawares. They set out to find and contribute to the ongoing disorder.
What’s more, to conclude that what we’re witnessing in France is only an appeal for more state funding for schools is laughable. What the world sees in video after video of the rioters is balaclava-clad vandals attacking the symbols of French governmental authority, monuments to Western cultural heritage, and civilians.
The New York Post’s Brendan O’Neill tabulates just some of the violence for which the rioters are responsible: a firefighter set ablaze as “a youthful mob watches and laughs”; a teacher “doused in gasoline” as a band of thugs incinerates his school; a “woman’s face set alight by a masked goon with a makeshift flamethrower”; dozens of educational institutions, commercial enterprises, and vehicles put to the torch.
It’s hardly a surprise that “the Palestinian flag is always flown proudly” at so many of these protests, said one filmmaker on the ground. “Alongside it was the red flag of communism.” The intoxicating cocktail of anti-Zionism and revolutionary socialism robs the young and idealistic of their inhibitions and greases the skids for violence. Irrespective of how police performed in each specific episode of violence, the conditions in the streets are dangerous enough that anyone who wants to avoid injury would do well to steer clear of them.
The children cannot conceive of their own best interests. The adults in their orbits can, but they instead regard their wards as little more than cannon fodder to be deployed against their political adversaries. It’s a tragic set of circumstances, but everyone played a role in contributing to them. In that sense, the anger that’s raining down on French police today is misdirected.