How ‘Palestine’ conquered France

I’m old enough to remember when we called it ‘conquest’ when a mob of masked men stormed a town hall or a parliament building to raise the flag of a foreign nation. I can recall a time when the violent invasion of a nation’s high seats of civic power by a faceless swarm draped in the standard of a distant land was considered an act of brazen, treasonous hostility. So why do so many insist on referring to the thuggish usurping of the streets of Paris and beyond by gangs flying the Palestine flag as a ‘protest’?

The scenes from France on Saturday were apocalyptic. Even in a nation famous for its street-fighting, the scale of destruction was wild. Across the capital, entire boulevards were reduced to smouldering, ash-choked wastelands of incinerated vehicles, blown-out storefronts and acrid clouds of tear gas. There were running battles between the thugs and the cops, the former armed with jagged chunks of pavement, the latter with truncheons and gas. Even the city’s leftie custodians were forced to break script and admit the truth. Socialist mayor Emmanuel Grégoire said vast swathes of Paris had been ‘devastated’. His deputy, Lamia El Aaraje, said it was destruction of the like we’ve ‘never seen before’.

It was the sight of the beautiful town hall of Limoges being devoured by fire that really shook France, and the world. A palatial citadel of public life, it was built in 1883 and made a protected monument in 1975. On Saturday, a mob set fire to a cop car outside the town hall, then smashed the hall’s windows, clambered in, and set fires with cruel abandon. The flames licked upwards and engulfed the roof, causing it to cave in. The bell tower came crashing down. As many have pointed out, it survived two world wars but it could not survive the unleashed juvenile rage of ‘the New France’.

For me, even more disturbing than the mob’s desecrations in Limoges was their brutish shoving aside of Marianne in Marseille. Masked gangs stormed into the city hall there. They cried ‘It’s the revolution!’ before hurling a bust of Marianne to the cold, stone floor. Marianne, of course, is the female personification of the French Republic, the proud-busted woman who embodies liberty, equality, fraternity and the rule of reason. It was less violent than the architectural nihilism in Limoges but more telling: we are witnessing nothing short of a mob jihad against the French Republic.

One thing united the Marianne desecrators of Marseille and fire-starters of Limoges and the monument-climbers of Paris – many were proudly draped in the Palestine colours. Young men sported the flag across their backs as they watched that bell tower fall to their fiery, fatuous wrath. It was hung in pride of place in Marseille city hall once Marianne had been unceremoniously dispensed with. It was waved everywhere in Paris. At Place de la Bastille, and at Place de la République, where vast Pally flags fluttered solemnly at the feet of the great monument to Marianne as flumes of grey smoke rose into the autumn air.

Can everyone just stop it with the ‘school protests’ shit now? Or the drivel about this being a protest over the ‘cost of living’? It should be clear to all that we are watching the violent undoing of the French Republic itself. A great society coming apart at the seams. Tragically, the fuse for this anti-republican savagery was lit by the republic itself – by its leaders’ wilful throwing open of France’s borders to half the world, their supine abandonment of the ideals of assimilation, and their suicidal indulgence of the intifada frenzy that swept France in the wake of the Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023. The mob might be starting the fires, but the elites gave them the matches.

This is why the omnipresence of the Palestine flag matters – it confirms France is being consumed by the flames of anti-Westernism, by a nihilistic disdain for the very virtues of our civilisation. For that is what the so-called Palestine cause now embodies – not concern for the Palestinian people but contempt for ‘the West’. Not a desire for a ceasefire in the Middle East but a longing for fire here at home.

Some of us have argued for a while that the Islamo-left’s hysterical, disproportionate, bigoted and at times demented loathing for the Jewish State is proof that Israel has been made into the whipping boy of modernity, into the scapegoat, the sin-eater, of the West and all its supposed crimes. That the birthplace of the Enlightenment is now being burnt down by mobs draped in the Palestine flag proves this beyond doubt.

As one commentator notes, the ‘Palestinian cause’ seems to have become ‘a symbol of protest against Western institutions, national identities and political establishments’, even in situations that ‘have nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians’. It’s the great, mad omnicause – a raging engine of grievance that absorbs every local resentment and every anti-Western pathology into a single, holy crusade. The actual geopolitics of the Levant are irrelevant to the Palestinianism that has swept the West, except, of course, that many of these people long for the annihilation of the Jewish State as a proxy for Western sin. What Palestinianism really adds up to is a cult of self-loathing. The keffiyeh is the mask the death of the Enlightenment wears.

This is the intifada coming home. The West’s craven failure to hold the moral line after 7 October, its indulgence of the Islamo-left mobs who hailed Hamas and libelled Israel, has started a fire of anti-civilisational hysteria that it will be incredibly difficult to put out. The nation that erodes its borders, tells newcomers their culture is just as valid as ours, fails to assimilate its foreign-origin youths and coaches its own young to feel shame over their national history is a nation that has signed its own death warrant.

Gavin Mortimer at the Spectator made a striking observation. The far-left agitators in France are mostly white, while the looters and cop-fighters ‘appear to be of immigrant background’. ‘The people seen on television forcing their way into the city halls of Marseille and Lille were mainly white’, he said, where the store invaders of Paris and Bordeaux were non-white. This is the New France. The New Europe, in fact. A place where there are youths who have no real roots in society, and youths whose roots have been violently torn up by institutions that have incited them into national self-loathing. Youths who are unassimilated, and youths who are from here but are constantly taught to hate ‘here’.

Entitled whites, young Muslim irritants, foreign-born louts, Islamist troublemakers, post-Enlightenment leftists and sanctimonious pricks who hide their hatred for the West behind a love of Palestine – that’s France now. Who’s next? Germany? Britain? We have so much work to do.