A red-green warning from France

Rioters in France who have been burning schools, vandalizing storefronts, and assaulting teachers for over two weeks do not carry that country’s tricolor flag but the flags of Algeria, Morocco, and Palestine. But when President Donald Trump said what is obviously true and blamed the mayhem on mass migration, France’s leaders reacted by pretending that this latest display of unassimilated alien violence was about spending cuts.Ignoring the growing strength of the red-green — left-Islamist — alliance is foolhardy. Its growing strength must be faced rather than glossed over with facile falsehoods. The same alliance is gathering strength here in America, where it is just as extreme but has not yet reached the levels of violence on hideous display in Europe this month.The latest violence in France began about a week after teachers went on strike on Sept. 17 to protest what they claim is understaffing at a high school in the Paris suburbs. Students joined the protests, and by Sept. 24, the protests had turned violent, with students assaulting the teachers they were supposedly supporting and burning the schools at which they supposedly wished to be educated. Violence has spread to 40 cities, 7,000 rioters have been arrested, 891 schools have been shut down for at least one day, more than 700 police officers have been injured, more than 100 teachers have been assaulted, and 24 schools have been burned or vandalized. Two teachers were splashed with gasoline. One rioter attacked a passerby with a makeshift flamethrower when she tried to stop the vandalism of a bus shelter.Nevertheless, leaders of France’s socialist party, La France Insoumise, sided with the rioters. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party’s leader and founder, blamed the attacks on police and racist oppression. Bally Bagayoko, the ethnic Malian Muslim mayor of the Paris suburb where the violence started, stoked further unrest by commenting that “violence can sometimes be legitimate.”In the United States, some people ignore the link between Muslim mass migration and the chaos unfolding on the streets of France. One supposedly conservative outlet penned an entire editorial about the riots without mentioning Islam or immigration.It is true that France’s bloated welfare state is relevant to these events, for France spends nearly three-fifths of its budget on welfare, pensions, and healthcare, compared to 10% on education. This profligate spending has pushed France’s debt-to-GDP ratio to 120%, and its budget deficit is about 5.4% of GDP. French 10-year bond yields are close to 24-year highs.But this is not the first time France’s streets have burned under the banner of foreign flags. Three years ago, in another suburb of Paris, after a 17-year-old of Algerian descent was killed during a routine traffic stop, the resultant riots caused nearly €1 billion in damage and led to over 4,000 arrests, 1,000 injuries, and two deaths.At the height of the rioting, a masked young man trying to burn a French flag was filmed shouting, “Wallah, nique la France,” which translates to “I swear to God, f*** France.” It is safe to say he was not protesting soaring yields on French 10-year bonds.The alliance between the radical left and Muslim political activists is spreading across the West. In Britain, Muslim Vote has backed Green and Workers Party candidates. In the Netherlands, Rotterdam’s Socialist Party signed a joint electoral manifesto with the Islam-inspired NIDA party in 2018 and stood by the agreement even after other left-wing partners withdrew after NIDA compared Israel to the Islamic State.The ideological overlap between the red socialists and the green Islamists is straightforward. Both hate the West, the heir of Christendom, with its successful market economies. They are working for its downfall, though there is less agreement on what should replace it.LATIN AMERICA TURNS RIGHT AS DEMOCRATS TURN LEFTUnfortunately, this red-green alliance is here in America, too. France and Britain have Mélenchon, Bagayoko, and Zarah Sultana, but the United States has Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el Sayed (D).France’s burning schools should be a warning to Americans. An alliance built on shared hostility to the West can gain power even when its partners disagree about the ideal policies they would impose.