Make New York Post a Preferred Source Riot police face protesters after a demonstration against under-resourced schools, in Paris, France Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026. AP Photo/Teresa Suarez A firefighter engulfed in flames as a youthful mob watches and laughs.
A teacher doused in gasoline by guffawing thugs as his beloved school burns to the ground.
A woman’s face set alight by a masked goon with a makeshift flamethrower.
Two dozen schools burned and ransacked; cars flipped upside down; buses and fire engines savagely smashed.
It sounds like a montage from a dystopian horror movie — but it’s happening right now in France.
What started late last month as a protest about underfunded public schools has morphed into an orgy of Islamo-leftist violence.
Paris and other cities are now awash with foreign flags as throngs of unassimilated youths scream their hatred for France itself.
“In the name of Allah, we can kill them all,” barked one masked thug, to the mob’s demented glee.
We are witnessing something extraordinary: an intifada in the heart of Europe.
Surely no one can now deny the lethal error of throwing open a nation’s borders to the world, while sacrificing the ideals of integration at the altar of multiculturalism.
The speed with which scattered school protests turned into an Islamist-infused uprising was truly frightening.
It all kicked off less than two weeks ago, when thousands of students played hooky to shout at the government.
They called themselves the “disenchanted generation” and called for education improvements.
The crowds began burning schools down — more than 20 across France have been set alight.
At one of them, Nelson Mandela School in Nantes in western France, the torch-wielding mob caused $3.4 million worth of damage.
Teachers have been horribly assaulted, 78 injured so far.
Why would protesters for “better education” reduce schools to blackened ruins, and whack teachers with iron bars?
Clearly these riots no longer have anything to do with schooling.
Rather, student protests have been hijacked by sinister political elements whose aim is nothing less than to heap fiery contempt on France, on Europe and on Western civilization itself.
Towns across France resemble war zones, littered with the smoking wreckage of battered cars and burnt-out buses.
The foreignness of the protests feels especially chilling, as vandals wrap themselves in the flags of Algeria and Morocco.
In Marseille, gangs of North African-heritage youths rode through the city center on motorbikes, waving the Palestine flag.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump drew widespread scorn for calling out the obvious: The riots, he said, are the inevitable result of “out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country!”
Anyone who refers to Europe’s immigration crisis as an “invasion” — as Trump has previously done — is instantly denounced as racist.
Yet what other word can we use when mobs of foreign-descended youths raise the flags of Africa and the Middle East as they destroy French schools?
Shady political actors have helped to whip the mob into a scorching frenzy.
La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), the party of the extreme left and now an unholy alliance of nutty Islamists and cranky socialists, has played an especially dark role.
Bally Bagayako, the LFI’s Muslim mayor of Saint-Denis in Paris, told the throng, “Violence can sometimes be legitimate.”
Another LFI-linked activist was arrested after telling a crowd in Paris to “set the Elysee Palace on fire” —the office of the president.
The events in France are hard proof of the most dangerous tactic of the modern left: its use of disgruntled, often foreign-descended kids as a kind of grunt army against Western values.
After all, the Islamists and the far left are as one in their violent loathing of the Western way of life.
Of course France is no stranger to political tumult; strikes and protests are commonplace there.
It feels like a knife plunged into the heart of France, by youths who have not only failed to assimilate but who harbor a deep contempt for the country in which they live.
When you open your doors to half the world, then tell the newcomers their culture is just as valid as yours, you sign your own death warrant.
You cause your nation to fracture, to split, to descend into ugly tribal conflict.
Every nation that wants to avoid its own internal intifada must police its borders, defend its sovereignty and loudly assert its values.
Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked.
