As France deals with another round of rioting, some people have blamed the country’s immigration policies for the violence. Others have blamed left-wing agitators, but on Wednesday, AP reporters Sylvie Corbet and Joseph Wilson penned an article for the fact-checking section that insisted that neither is to blame. Instead, they insisted the violence is a result of ordinary criminals trying to take advantage of the situation.
At one point, the duo sought to debunk the claim that “Migrants of Muslim heritage are doing most of the damage in France and Italy.”
They countered with, “It is difficult to know the exact sociological makeup of the protesters, but no one group has been singled out as being responsible for the violence. Authorities and police have not linked immigrants to the rioting in France.”
Corbet and Wilson also claimed, “Accounts of the protests and images of the unrest seem to show they are representative of France’s diverse society, which has seen influxes of people from France’s former colonies in Africa and Asia for generations.”
What about the idea that “France’s far-left is at fault”?
While Corbet and Wilson admitted that there has been left-wing violence, they refuse to assign any blame, “France’s far-left party has backed the student movement from the start, and is now being blamed for the disorder by political rivals ahead of April’s national election. While radical far-left activists have been found by authorities to be behind some of the violence, they are not entirely to blame for the extent of the vandalism and clashes.”
They also seemed to suggest that efforts to blame the left is campaign rhetoric, “The center-right [President Emmanuel] Macron, who will step down next year, accused far-left activists of trying to foment chaos by attacking buildings and police, as did other political leaders in France. Right-wing figures elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. have done the same.”
The fact that Macron is not “center-right” aside, Corbet and Wilson also demanded that everyone remember, “France has a long tradition of street protests over social and political concerns, which are sometimes marred by violence on the fringes of otherwise peaceful marches, leading to clashes with police.”
Sure, that violence goes back to 1789, and current rioters invoked those political ideas by also storming The Bastille, but AP insists you don’t blame the left:
The radical far-left is too small to account for violence on this scale, said Sebastian Roché, a professor at Sciences Po Grenoble, who has studied policing for more than two decades. ‘It is a very small core, a very small milieu, because these are not structured groups.’
Roché said looting in particular is ‘not at all how these groups operate,’ and is mostly the work of criminals seizing the opportunity created by the disorder.
Meanwhile, back in reality, according to a Google Translate version of an article on the French news site, 20 Minutes, French intelligence signaled out three groups for the October 17 violence, one of which may sound familiar:
However, in their view, the ‘far left’ and the ‘radical extreme left’ were behind the actions on Saturday. According to intelligence services, the ‘far left,’ whose number of known activists is around 5,000, is composed of ‘radical violent groups, operating outside the democratic and republican sphere,’ explains the security source. They are divided into three ‘ideologically distinct’ groups: ‘the antifa,’ the most numerous, ‘the anarcho-autonomists,’ and ‘the anarchists,’ the oldest movement. Under the term ‘radical extreme left,’ the services describe activists who carry out ‘violent actions on the ground’ according to a ‘well-defined method.’
The French government has also blamed the Black Bloc for the violence.
AP’s insistence that you can’t blame the left, despite them admitting that left-wingers have been arrested for violence, because they are a small part of the larger protests, is missing the point. If you are someone who has had your property destroyed by an anarchist or even just a criminal opportunist, you don’t really care that they represent a small percentage of the protestors. Meanwhile, the only reason anarchists and other assorted criminals have an opportunity to riot is because supposedly mainstream leftist protestors continue to push France down the road of financial ruin.
