Hadley Freeman on the French riots, Rooney, and Palestine Action:
In one clip, shot just by Place de la République, a young mother tells the left-wing and pro-Palestine activist Bettina Zourli that looters threatened to rape her while she was with her baby. Zourli shrugs: “It’s collateral damage … Revolution isn’t peaceful. It doesn’t stay within the bounds.”
That the women are standing beneath the famous statue of Egalité, which the rioters had covered in graffiti so as to make it appear blinded, is an irony that almost tips the scene into bleak farce.
In another, a blond teenager, with requisite keffiyeh around his neck, tells a reporter that while it’s true the riots have been extremely violent, “The ends justify the means.” Later he was embraced by Mélenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed party.
The old omelettes and eggs line. The eggs keep getting broken, but the omelette somehow never appears.
Her supporters claim Rooney’s books have been banned “because of her Palestine support”, as a headline from The Cut put it. But it’s not about that, or free speech, or even literary censorship. No, it’s about her support for Palestine Action, which has been designated a terrorist organisation.
Many disagree with that designation, but, equally, there are plenty of Palestine charities that don’t use Gaza as an excuse to sledgehammer a policewoman’s back, or to smash up Jewish businesses in north London. Rooney chose to fund the one that does.
Richard Barnard, Palestine Action’s co-founder, said the day after October 7: “When we hear the resistance, the al-Aqsa flood, we must turn that flood into a tsunami.” Al-Aqsa is Hamas’s name for October 7.
Do the creatives who support Rooney think it’s right that she funds a group that calls for a global October 7? Would fracturing two policewomen’s spines be too much for them? Three? Or is it all for the greater good?
Ever since October 7 the Palestine flag and keffiyeh have been used as a free pass to destroy with impunity. How can you complain about a “smashed window” of a Gail’s Bakery when Palestine is being destroyed, as a Guardian column put it in the spring? That column was later changed after objections, but it reflects the mentality of the progressive left, and no longer just in relation to Gaza.
Anti-Israel activism has taught them to view not just Israel but the West as uniquely evil, to trash its people, its buildings, even the entrepreneurial immigrants who are trying to build lives here.
There are good reasons for young people to feel desperate today, but that is not what is being expressed in the Paris riots, or by groups like Palestine Action. This is just the mindless thuggery of anti-West nihilists and overprivileged activists.
Given that’s exactly who the Green Party’s demographics now are, it is no surprise it has encouraged those “inspired by the protests in France” to join this week’s march against austerity. Anyone who is inspired by France, or any validation of violence, has no interest in the greater good. They just want to burn it all.
Sometimes the thought occurs that, well, this is youth. We were the same. Now we’re old and, oh dear, we’re just like our parents were. These riots are simply a repeat of the 1968 riots.
There may be a smidgeon of truth buried away somewhere there – and yes, we can’t see now if our current malaise is a temporary blip or a sign of permanent decline – but we were protesting about civil rights, Vietnam, Gay Lib. Causes that still stand up. Of course it was silly at times – often dangerously so, with violent hard-left offshoots like the Weathermen and the Red Brigade, and people waving their Maoist Little Red Books – but the liberal west survived and prospered. Somehow these young people now have taken a horrible wrong turn, in step with the horrible wrong turn taken by much of the left as a whole. Islamism is taken as somehow progressive and part of the anti-colonialist struggle – could there be a more perfect example than Queers for Palestine? – while Jews are demonised. It seems more like the Thirties than the Sixties and Seventies. They may persuade themselves that they’re progressive, but it looks more like a descent into brutality and anti-liberalism to me.
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