The riots in France are not as simple as just 'immigrants against France'. It's much worse than that. Watch any of the clips going viral on X. It's just not the Algerians and Moroccans indulging in the violence, looting, and destruction of common property, though of course they are. It's also people who appear visibly to be native French people of all ages. What they share in common is an ideology and worldview, what the French often call 'Islamo-gauschisme'. They have a single shared, hated enemy: the West. The Palestine flags are not a coincidence. The migrant cohorts and the Left hate Israel because they see it as an "Ultra-White" Western colony, a kind of holdover from pre-colonisation. In their eyes, the global project of 'decolonisation' has barely begun – their aims go much further than just moaning about British Museum property – and yet it has (in their view) failed at the first stage because it has failed to annihilate Israel. It's the itch that keeps itching. Palestine is an empty signifier – as the late Ernesto Laclau would have termed it – which is empty precisely because it overflows with the meaning poured into it. And they believe they're engaged in a global campaign to topple Israel – but, and this is *crucial* – not just Israel. Israel is, in their view – and they repeatedly say this openly – simply the first domino. Once it falls, so they say, so will the rest of the West. And then we'll finally live in a Communist utopia. There's generations of young people in the West – not just of immigrant background but of native stock – who believe all of this. What they seem not to understand is that particularly the Islamists among them do not share the goal of a Communist utopia. Nothing could be further from the imagination of the Algerian in the Banlieue than a stateless, classless, moneyless society, in which one might hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. We saw much the same dynamic at play in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Khomenei was carried to power on a wave of unrest by a mixture of student intellectuals, communists, organised Islamist movements, and vast numbers of the public who could have been swayed in various ways in the moment. In the end, Khomenei came to power, and the organised Islamists hanged the communists from cranes and tortured them to death in prisons. It's the only way that sort of alliance ever ends.