I can tell some of the people commenting here are holding back, but there is an undertone of something here that isn’t very Beehaw…

Anyway.

As I live in France, I can confirm that something like this was inevitable. First of all, the politician who called the ban is severely disliked. His name is used as a synonym for poop on the internet. That is just a small detail…

It was more or less decided that he cannot put a blanket ban and would need to ban case by case, but I may have missed something since yesterday.

Through migration and gentrification, France has set itself up for minor disasters such as this. Also, through education. I am from Canada, and I remember learning about this conflict in highschool in the late '90s. But, teenager me didn’t even know at the time what a Muslim was or why religion had anything to do with it. Here in France, students do not learn about it at school, they learn about it from parents. The French way of thinking is always about time, context, and place.

So, last week was the time. Context was terrorism. Place was… Israel. The media here can be quite biased. Lots of younger people have no clue what biased means. They consume lots of YouTube and prefer things to be vulgarised, meaning simplified, and will adopt the opinion of a YouTuber or influencer quite easily. This is contradictory to how the French used to think even 10 years ago.

Since Monday, a fake story about Arabs planning a djihad has been circulating on social media. It is all over French Instagram (my partner showed me) and Telegram too.

Ignorance, fearmongering, bloodlust, racism…all the bad shit could boil over. Adding fuel to the fire is the trend of calling out and doxxing anyone who criticises country A instead of county B.

I think the police will have a busy day and some looters will again take advantage of the situation.