Algerian flags mingled with Antifa banners as migrants and left wing extremists gathered on the streets of Paris to attack police and protest deportations in a “March for Justice and Dignity”.
The event was nominally organised to protest alleged police brutality in the case of an individual identified in the media as Théo – but despite that individual speaking out against the escalating violence in France, marchers used the occasion as an opportunity to bombard police with Molotov cocktails and burning flares in extraordinary scenes on Sunday.
Rioters on the march pressed grievances on issues which stretched far beyond policing in high-crime migrant communities, however, carrying banners calling on the government to end deportations of illegal migrants.
Others made their hostility to the State of Israel clear with chants of: “We are all the children of Gaza!”
French Jews have been emigrating to Israel in increasing numbers with the growth of Islamic anti-Semitism in the country.
In February, two brothers wearing kippahs were cursed as “dirty Jews” and attacked by a group of men who spotted them walking down a side street from a hookah café. One brother reportedly had a finger cut off with a hacksaw.
Violent protests in France have, for the most part, been dominated by members of the migrant and migrant-descended community in recent months.
The presence of large numbers Antifa and Black Bloc agitators at the march may signal an informal alliance between malcontents from poorly integrated migrant communities and the extreme left, which has played an active role in street violence throughout Europe and the U.S. in recent years.
One man on the march was pictured carrying the severed head of presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, a vocal opponent of mass immigration and state-sponsored multiculturalism, on a spike.
“Financial globalisation and Islamist globalisation … aim to bring France to its knees,” she said in February.
“What is at stake in this election is the continuity of France as a free nation, our existence as a people,” she warned.
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