why is Europe burning?
On September 17th at Lycée Antoine-de-Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, a southeast suburb of Paris, a small group of high school students walked out of class to support their teachers, who had gone on strike over long-term unfilled staff positions. Now there are riots and fires all over…
The Leaning Tower of Pisa with black smoke billowing out of the building…
The historic City Hall in Limoges burned to the ground…
Rioters looting in Milan, Italy, a fire outside the Duomo…
Why?
Recognizing the value of not letting a good crisis go to waste, no longer is this the same students from the lycée. It is instead the classic creation of a “them.” If you and I can identify a “them” — or in other words, a perceived common enemy — then we have also created an “us.” “Us” can be powerful. And destructive.
Look at the political affiliations in the United States. So many people groups have bonded together against something. But the reality is that their laser focus on a shared enemy keeps them from realizing that those they fight alongside don’t want the same thing.
Take those in the LGBTQ community who have aligned with Palestinian supporters against Israel, for example. Same-sex relationships face targeted violence, arrest and severe social stigma in Palestine; the LGBTQ community and Palestinians don’t want the same thing. But as long as they rage about the “them,” each remains blind to the glaring incongruity.
The current European protests— which were massive last week, a month after their onset — are a coalition of those who have crafted a “them.” Hear from French journalist Nora Bussigny, in The Free Press…
“You might think that Saturday’s chaos was orchestrated by the same students who started the protests. But you would be wrong. The October 17 protests—and the ones planned for this coming weekend—were meticulously prepared, organized, and justified by a concerted coalition of Islamists, antifascists, and radical environmentalists. They share a precise project: the rejection of France’s democratic institutions, and a desire to destabilize those institutions and cause the Republic to topple.
This coalition may sound familiar to readers across the West. The red-green alliance—the convergence of radical leftists with political Islamists, brought together by their shared opposition to Western values and institutions—has become increasingly difficult to ignore, rearing its head from England to Germany to college campuses across the U.S. In other words, what we are seeing in France is only a symptom of a much larger problem. It must be identified and called out for what it is…
The high school protests that paved the way for the October 17 attacks were also helped by extremely well-organized pro-Palestinian collectives… First, Urgence Palestine. This radical-left collective, which marches with flags of the Iranian regime, is in the process of being dissolved by the French government… Very early in the high school protests, Urgence Palestine called for its followers to join the students at the sites where their schools were being blockaded. Leading up to October 17, it posted a message calling people to rally together to fight “against police violence, against colonial violence, against France’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine.”
The coalition behind the protests includes another reliable ally: radical environmentalists. On October 13, activist Greta Thunberg traveled to Saint-Denis, the stronghold of the high school mobilization in the suburbs, to support the students. Right afterward, in a video while wearing a keffiyeh, she called for people to join the October 17 mobilizations, urging them to show solidarity with the students and connecting the protests to efforts against climate change and social injustice. The radical environmentalist collectives answered the call… “let us continue the ongoing revolt”…
For many protesters, all of these narratives lead to an undeniable conclusion: Violence is justified. “A shop window can be repaired…Our lives can’t”… What is far harder to repair is a youth movement that took to the streets to demand teachers and classrooms worthy of the French Republic, and that found itself marching, unknowingly, alongside the radical left, the Muslim Brotherhood, and a mouthpiece of Tehran. On October 17, it wasn’t the high schoolers who won. It was those who used them.”
Europe burns because an inauthentic “them” has been created. With violence and destruction justified and fueled, we pray wiser persons would soon prevail.
Respectfully…
AR
