Chaos reigns supreme in France as mobs of young people, many of them from the country’s burgeoning immigrant population, have blockaded streets and monuments, repeatedly attacked police, looted stores, and set fire to historical buildings in a weeks-long rebellion reminiscent of the Paris Commune of 1871, where rebels seized control of the capital and threw up barricades across the city, set fire to historical landmarks, and terrorized their fellow citizens.
Is ‘soft war’ too soft of a word to actually explain what is happening?
To retake the city from the communards, government troops killed thousands in street fighting and summary executions. Hopefully, such drastic measures will not be required to re-establish the government’s monopoly on force, which President Emmanuel Macron, like other Western leaders, has done a poor job of maintaining. But when and if this monopoly is reestablished, the country will still have to contend with a long-term threat to its stability: a persistent rebellion against the French state comprised of leftist students and young Muslims from the banlieues.
American commentator Ismail Royer, whom Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) interviewed in early 2023, has repeatedly argued on X that the riots are unrelated to Islam or Islamism. The unrest began on October 1, 2026, as protests over underfunded schools. On October 6, Royer wrote, “Anyone who claims these riots have anything to do with Islam is deceived or attempting to deceive.” That same day, he reposted a message criticizing the government’s response to young people and added sarcastically, “Wait a minute[,] I thought the riots were about establishing an Islamist dictatorship.”
Fox News commentator Asra Nomani, a staunch opponent of Islamism, confirms that while one Muslim student organization, Étudiants Musulmans de France (EMF), has promoted the protests, the revolt is largely incited by “adult-led communist groups, labor unions, political parties, revolutionary-left organizations, advocacy groups and international propaganda outlets.”
The evidence belies the notion that the rebellion has nothing to do with Islam or Islamism. Many of the rebels and looters engage in their lawless acts under Palestinian, Moroccan, and Algerian flags—indicating that Islamic identity plays a role in the willingness of Muslim immigrants to participate in what looks increasingly like an “intifada” against the French state. There is some evidence that rioters are targeting Jewish business and have been instructed to leave Muslims alone. At the very least, images of dark-skinned men, apparently of North African origin, looting stores and local businesses in Paris indicate that young Muslims are willing supporters of what Macron calls an attempt to “damage the republic.”
Moreover, Islamist-aligned activists have used the unrest to push their long-running campaign against the secular rules that govern French public schools, namely the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols—including the headscarf—and the 2023 ban on abayas. Before the October 1, 2026, walkouts, pupils at the Lycée Jacques-Brel in La Courneuve blockaded their school on September 23 with placards reading “occupez-vous du viol, pas du voile” (“deal with rape, not the veil”). The teachers’ unions at the school backed the protest as a stand against “Islamophobia.” EMF support for the protests is another cause for alarm. According to a Le Point investigation, an Interior Ministry report described EMF as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2025.
FWI‘s Jules Gomes reported that pupils storming a high school in Beaugency sang a rap song glorifying Mohamed Merah, who murdered a rabbi and three Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012, and Salah Abdeslam, the lone survivor of the ISIS cell behind the 2015 Paris attacks. The video led prosecutors in Orléans to open an investigation for “apology for terrorism.” Gomes also reported that rioters sang the same song while vandalizing a Catholic church in Soullans.
The rioters may not be fighting for an “Islamist dictatorship,” as Royer sarcastically put it. But a movement whose activists demand that the Republic dismantle laïcité to end “Islamophobia” in its schools, and whose foot soldiers chant the praises of jihadist killers, is hardly unrelated to Islamism.
Rice University sociologist Craig Considine, a writing fellow at the Middle East Forum, also rejects the “It’s Not Islam” narrative.
Speaking on The MEF Podcast on October 19, 2026, he said the riots are “being framed by a large portion of the media as simply young, disgruntled students who are upset that they don’t have enough math teachers. It’s certainly much more than that.”
Considine, whose new book When Marx Meets Islam describes a “Red-Green alliance” of leftists and Islamists waging a “soft war” on the West, argues that the coalition’s strategy “is transnational” and “can be repeated in any other Western country.”
The scenes from France, he admitted, have him questioning his own terminology: “Is ‘soft war’ too soft of a word to actually explain what is happening?” For a Jew in France, or a conservative “who loves their country, who’s not Islamophobic, but who also doesn’t welcome Islamist groups,” he asked, “what do you do?” Then, as someone who has “been to Abu Dhabi many times,” and applauds the United Arab Emirates’ turn away from extremism, Considine posed the question that should trouble every European leader: “[I]s Abu Dhabi safer for Jews, for conservatives, than Paris or London?”
