Around 250,000 people protested funding cuts in France that have left public schools with leaks, rats and not enough desks. Aiden Stretch reports on the demonstrations that have turned violent.
Page A4From§Eachthe early evening edition — 6 October 2026
Students demand more desks and fewer rats, receive a verdict on Islam instead.
As it ran on the front
The French school system has a basement problem, and the basement problem has become a geopolitics problem, and somebody had to call it what it actually is: an uprising against Western civilization itself. That is the position, and it is not hard to hold once you ignore the second paragraph of every wire story about it.
Start with the Washington Examiner's account from October 1st: a week of protests by high-school students in the Paris region had already escalated into arson and battery of police, forcing Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu into an emergency meeting. The far left, naturally. Mayhem has a sponsor, and in this telling it was never the roof.…
…(cont) Except Common Dreams, reporting the next day, has the roof. Jean-Luc Mélenchon told reporters Friday that labor unions were joining the students for a strike the following week — students, the paper notes, who "have been protesting poor school conditions and teacher shortages." Not a caliphate. A ceiling.
Still no mention of Islam. The buildings are just old.
Then the New York Post found the word it wanted: an "intifada in the heart of Europe," an "orgy of Islamo-leftist violence." CBS, filing the same week, put the actual crowd at 250,000 people protesting funding cuts that have left public schools with leaks, rats and not enough desks. A quarter million people, marching over rats, rebranded as a jihad by a tabloid with a headline to sell.
And the president picked it up whole. "This isn't about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country," he posted Tuesday, blaming "out of control mass migration" for a protest CBS had already tied to leaking roofs and missing desks. I want to be clear that none of those — not the migration, not the religion — are what the demonstrators, who are French teenagers, have been chanting about since before the Post ever showed up. They are chanting about rats. Hundreds of schools shut over rats, teacher shortages and desks that do not exist, and a president who read a tabloid headline and decided the real crisis was theological.
The schools are still closed. The desks are still missing. Nobody in Washington or on the Post's editorial page has offered to pay for either one.
“They cut the money for desks and roofs, then call the kids who noticed it terrorists. The Post needed a word that sells papers, Trump needed a word that isn't "budget," and "intifada" did double duty for both of them. Nobody's fixing the rats, but everybody's talking about Islam now.”
“This isn't about schools, it's about an out-of-control migration crisis, exactly like the president said — though the crowd CBS counted was marching over rats and missing desks, not borders. Did I say rats? I mean it's obviously borders. No — it's the desks. It's both, it's neither, it's whatever keeps the funding bill off the table.”
The receipts
President Trump blamed the widespread student-led protests in France on Islam and "out of control mass migration" on Tuesday. “What’s happening in France is nothing less than out of control mass migration. This isn’t about schools, this is about Islam wanting to take over a once great Country,”
What started late last month as a protest about underfunded public schools has morphed into an orgy of Islamo-leftist violence.
Left-wing French political leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon said Friday that labor unions across the country were planning to strike next week alongside students who have been protesting poor school conditions and teacher shortages, as demonstrators reported unwarranted force by the police and the protests devolved into violence in parts of…
· Student protests in France leave hundreds of schools closed from the morgue, 2 Oct 2026
· France gripped by violent student riots attributed to far-left instigation from the morgue, 1 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.