The historic city hall in Limoges is in flames.
Paris is burning. So is the rest of France. Now Northern Italy, too. Shops looted, public buildings destroyed. People watch their livelihoods, their very lives, reduced to rubble, weeping and pleading with the two-legged brutes responsible.
In vain.
These images raise a question Europe systematically refuses to face: how much longer will it treat its own destruction as a social grievance that was merely expressed a bit clumsily?
How much longer must we swallow the fairy tale about protests that were one miracle short of canonization until extremists hijacked them?
Or the objection that “that’s what Trump says”?
Yes, Trump says it too. For his own reasons. Does that change anything?
The cost-of-living crisis is real. So are people’s fears about the future. So is corruption. None of that explains why a historic building has to be burned down.
A shortage of teachers is no justification for looting a shop.
The shopkeeper is not “the system.” He is a person who works, pays his taxes, and is then expected, the very next day, to foot the bill for his own ruin. Any of these “aggrieved” little darlings who cannot grasp that isn’t worth a damn.
As for the luxury boutiques — they didn’t leave a single one untouched — I still haven’t figured out who cleaned them out: the “revolutionaries,” the “Free Palestine” crowd and Allah’s other foot soldiers, or the rest of the mob.
I suppose a stolen “Louis Vuitton” is an essential accessory for the “Palestinian struggle,” the proletarian revolution, and those virgins with their plates of pilaf.
The prettiest virgin presumably wins the bag.
And really, what sense does it make to be a “refugee” from Syria, live off benefits funded by the very people whose property you are burning, and still protest? What sense does it make to arrive in a boat from Africa and show no respect for a country that chooses not to send you straight back where you came from?
How much nerve does it take for a second- or third-generation Algerian or Moroccan to demand that everyone else submit to the darkness of Islam — the very darkness their parents and grandparents supposedly left behind in North Africa?
Oh, poverty, is it? Get a job.
Don’t like your standard of living in Paris or Lyon? Go to Algiers and ask for welfare payments. See where and how you would live. Then compare.
If you prefer it there, off you go. If you prefer it in Europe, you will learn to live by Europe’s rules. Or you will lose your citizenship and be forced to leave. Nobody misses parasites.
Over the past three years, particularly since October 7, we have also witnessed a deeper political bankruptcy: the willingness of sections of the far left to provide an ideological alibi for Islamism.
France offers a particularly revealing example: the far left’s refusal to call Hamas a terrorist organization.
What is unfolding across Europe is a full-blown hybrid war, and the extremes’ collaboration makes that plain.
Faced with the massacre of civilians, people with a denunciation ready for everything suddenly struggled with the wording.
I would very much like to hear what the left in the West has actually built or contributed, beyond perpetual protest about everything, undermining the system, destruction, and parasitism.
One convenient bond unites the mob: hostility to the West.
For certain self-styled progressives, anyone who turns against the West acquires “revolutionary” credentials almost automatically. Even if they serve a deranged theocratic ideology that denies women equal rights, persecutes gay people, and criminalizes free thought.
Rights become negotiable the moment the person trampling on them turns up with the right anti-Western slogan.
In this bargain, “Palestine” serves as a moral passport.
“Defending the Palestinians” has become fashionable antisemitism. And when a European Jew is expected to answer for the government of another country, we have already crossed the Rubicon.
Anyone who lives in a European democracy and demands its freedoms for themselves while threatening those of others is attacking the very foundations of democratic life. Religion, an immigrant background, social hardship, ideology — bankrupt or otherwise — none of it places anyone above the law.
A state that hesitates to enforce it abandons the law-abiding first.
And the extremes have more in common than they care to admit. In Germany, the far-right AfD and the far-left BSW put forward a joint motion to end military support for Ukraine. In the end, the invader gets a helping hand, and the victim is told to back down.
Putler is rubbing his hands with glee.
That is the danger facing Europe. When democratic parties leave security, law enforcement, and the defense of a shared civilization exclusively to the far right, they hand it the most powerful electoral argument of all.
Democracy needs police who can protect people, a justice system that delivers promptly, and governments that hold offenders accountable.
It also needs political leaders who are not corrupt.
It also needs a press that does its job, rather than surrendering to its ideological obsessions and playing courtesan to the extremes for likes.
These days, even to the mullahs masquerading as “liberators.”
Europe must defend its freedoms with the seriousness the task demands. And with firmness. Otherwise, it will leave the arsonists to prepare the ground and the would-be authoritarian saviors to cash in on the despair. And then it will wonder, once again, how it happened.
History repeats itself. Does anyone actually read it?
