France is burning

For nearly seven weeks, demonstrations in France have continued – “mostly peaceful,” we’re told, but punctuated by arson and looting. Do you feel sorry for the high school students who, having endured crowded classrooms and teacher shortages, are out on the streets protesting and, in many cases, rioting? I’m sorry, but I don’t. Their complaints may well be legitimate. But more than 100 schools have been damaged in what France’s prime minister calls the most violent student unrest in decades. Shouldn’t even the least educated protesters grasp that smashing windows is not an effective way to upgrade the public school system? As a reporter in Africa years ago, I visited schools built of bare cinderblocks and certainly without air conditioning. I never saw students set anything on fire. Yet, across France, in video after video I’ve been watching, angry students have been joined in the rioting by angry immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, along with the angry children of immigrants. Many commentators look at this alliance and assert that France has failed to assimilate its immigrants. I think that’s a flawed analysis. Assimilation has been happening – just not to traditional French culture and the values of le modèle républicain. Instead, the protesters, immigrant-origin and others, have joined the hard multicultural left, which embraces a neo-Marxist oppressor/oppressed binary, treats grievance as virtue, and excuses violence in pursuit of “social justice.” No one embodies this ideology better than Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the founder of La France Insoumise. The party’s name is usually translated as “France Unbowed.” More literally, it is “Unsubmissive France.” There’s an awkward irony in that, given what some in France call islamo-gauchisme, the alignment of factions of the French left with Islamists whose goal is to make the French do the exact opposite: submit. A brief but hopefully instructive digression: Soumission (Submission) is the title of Michel Houellebecq’s brilliant novel imagining France electing an Islamist government. When the book came out on Jan. 7, 2015, newsstands in Paris were displaying the latest issue of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. On its cover was an unflattering caricature of Mr. Houellebecq, accompanied by the mocking headline: “In 2015, I lose my teeth. In 2022, I observe Ramadan.” That very same day, terrorists avenging the magazine’s earlier caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad stormed its offices, slaughtering 12 people. The bloodbath forever linked Mr. Houellebecq’s warning of submission with the use of violence to restrict the free speech of unbelievers. The attack was carried out by Cherif and Said Kouachi – French-born citizens, the sons of Algerian immigrants, operating on behalf of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The brothers hadn’t failed to assimilate. They had assimilated into the culture of jihad against the West. Two days after their attack, they were killed in a shootout with French police. During the protests and riots of recent days, French national symbols have been vandalized. In Marseille, rioters stormed city hall and knocked over a bust of Marianne, the personification of the French Republic. The 143-year-old city hall in Limoges was largely destroyed. Marseille’s archdiocese says churches were broken into. A fire damaged the entrance hall of a Nantes lycée named for Nelson Mandela. Some demonstrators wore keffiyehs and waved Palestinian flags. In Lyon, some masked protestors burned Israeli and American flags. The connection with crowded classrooms is not obvious. And I question whether Gazans, still suffering from the war Hamas started by invading Israel and carrying out a bloody pogrom, are comforted to learn they have supporters stealing chic merchandise from Louis Vuitton and Hermès stores. Mr. Mélenchon condemned the looting, but he has also written that “traditional France is a diminished France” and that he wants a “New France” that accommodates the beliefs and addresses the grievances of immigrants. In late September he accused the government of repressing “harmless” students, with an “obvious racist aftertaste.” After an Oct. 8 Paris demonstration that ended in clashes with police, he posted: “The Bastille has been retaken,” praising young people for pressing their demands “in the most beautiful way possible.” To him, asking immigrants to assimilate into historic French norms is imperialist arrogance. And France’s elites, perpetually penitent for the sins of long-gone European empires, cannot insist immigrants adopt a French identity they’ve spent decades apologizing for. So they offer something else: the identity of the victim. What’s happening in France isn’t staying in France. One example: In Germany last Saturday, rioters attacked police and looted stores. As for America, many commentators assert that we’re okay because we do a better job of assimilating immigrants. In the past, I think that’s been true. Now, I’m not so sure. Imagine you’re a newcomer to America and you read The New York Times’ “1619 Project” arguing that slavery and racism are the central, defining elements of American history. Next, you might take a class at Columbia taught by Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and father of New York City’s current mayor, who wrote in a 2004 book that suicide bombers should be recognized as “a category of soldier” and not “stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.” And then perhaps a friend directs you to the popular political commentator and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who said that “America deserved 9/11” – yes I know he apologized for that remark, he’s so very sorry – and who, asked whether America is worse than al-Qaeda, answered “pound for pound… yes.” He hasn’t apologized for that. Given such introductions to America’s rising culture of grievance and violence, how likely is it that you’ll become a proud American waving the Stars and Stripes on the Fourth of July? Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a columnist for The Washington Times, and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.