Last weekend, as France burned—as rioters stormed Marseille city hall with impunity, as famous statues were vandalized, as hoodlums beat police cars with pipes—one insignia seemed ubiquitous in the videos: the Palestinian flag.

This may seem like a strange symbol for riots largely composed of far-left protesters who are mostly angry (at least on paper) about the state of France’s economy. France last year recognized a Palestinian state and has since become one of the Palestinian Authority’s biggest sponsors. If there was one country that would seem to have had the rioters’ ears long ago on this issue, it would be France.

It’s not just France. Look at any major protest or riot in the Western world against “the man,” and more often than not you’ll see plenty of Palestinian flags among the crowds. No other international cause attracts so much publicity among counterculture rabble—including actual genocide against Ukrainians, Uyghurs, Darfuris or any other crisis.

There is a reason for this.

Against the West

The Palestinian issue is not about national self-determination or finalizing borders. It is a deliberate attempt to undo Western civilization itself. As Brendan O’Neill wrote for Spiked: “France is being consumed by the flames of anti-Westernism, by a nihilistic disdain for the very virtues of our civilization. For that is what the so-called Palestine cause now embodies—not a concern for the Palestinian people but contempt for ‘the West.’ Not a desire for a ceasefire in the Middle East but a longing for fire here at home.”

“Palestine” as an identity is an artificial creation. Its name comes from the Philistines, who occupied a narrow stretch of coastland immediately northeast of the Sinai Peninsula. It was applied to the Levant in general in the second century a.d., when the Romans, dealing with constant rebellion by the native Jews, tried to disassociate the land from its former name, Judea. Throughout the centuries, the various Muslim empires used Palestine as the name for the general region. But it was far from the only one. For much of the Ottoman Period, the area was administered as part of “Bilad al-Sham,” or “greater Syria.” When the British conquered the territory from the Ottomans in World War i and established the Mandate of Palestine, they were simply using the old Roman name for the region rather than naming the territory after any indigenous inhabitants.

You wouldn’t know that if you asked many Palestinian authorities what their cause stands for. Many—all the way up to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas—claim that “Palestinians” have a national identity going all the way back to the Canaanites, that biblical figures like Jesus and Mary were Palestinians oppressed by the Jews, that Solomon never built a temple in Jerusalem, and other laughable claims.

In short, Palestinian national identity is built around historical fiction. The worldwide unrest rallying around its flag is aimed at erasing and replacing the West’s actual historical foundation.

“[T]he Palestinian cause,” Melanie Phillips wrote for the Times, “has become the engine and symbol of a broader revolutionary movement across the West, whose underlying aim is its destruction.”

O’Neill wrote: “It’s the great, mad omniclause—a raging engine of grievance that absorbs every local resentment and every anti-Western pathology into a single, holy crusade. The actual geopolitics of the Levant are irrelevant to the Palestinianism that has swept the West, except, of course, that many of these people long for the annihilation of the Jewish state as a proxy for Western sin.”

Douglas Murray in the Free Press quoted French writer Paul Valéry’s 1919 essay “The Crisis of the Mind”:

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. …

Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia … that these too would be beautiful names. … And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers.

“France may still read its newspapers,” Murray wrote, “but it has forgotten Valéry’s wisdom. As its critics, and the critics of its critics, search for [events] to compare these events with, they have ignored the simplest of facts: If you do not confront and remove those who hate you when they so amply demonstrate that hatred, then France too—even France—will become nothing more than a beautiful name.”

The Big Target

This hatred for Western civilization becomes more apparent when one looks at the ultimate source of the movement’s rage. Palestinianism’s historical fiction is built specifically around attacking the legitimacy of Western civilization’s most important cultural pillar: the Holy Bible.

The Bible contains the West’s founding stories, not just of the Jewish people but of many others. It is from the Bible that the West gets its concepts of everything from constitutional law to capitalism to religious freedom. The Bible’s stories inspired the West’s hallmark cultural achievements from Shakespeare’s plays to Rembrandt’s canvases to Verdi’s opera. Scientific and technological advancements from the invention of the printing press to the development of modern archaeology, one way or another, were influenced by the Bible.

The average rioter may not be thinking this deeply about the meaning of the flag he is waving, but seeing sculptures smashed and government halls looted, it’s clear that those participating have some concept that the real target of their wrath isn’t bad economists but Western civilization itself. It’s an extension of the same crusade the terrorists in Nablus and Ramallah are fighting.

“The same Bible that tells us that all human beings are created in God’s image,” Andrew Miiller wrote for our April 2026 issue, “tells us that all the land from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates River was given to Abraham’s descendants for ‘an everlasting possession’ (Genesis 15:18, 17:8). Any ideology that rejects the Bible as its authority will likely reject both the brotherhood of man and the State of Israel’s right to exist.”

Gadi Taub stated in February on the Trumpet Daily: “Those who are anti-Semite end up being anti-Western because Judaism and the Bible are the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western culture in general. … Because once you remove the pillar, then the house, your ideological house, will crumble.”

That’s not to say everything France or any Western country represents is a shining example of biblical values. Far from it. But to the rioters, this doesn’t matter. Anything that traces back to this civilization that is contrary to their own becomes a target of contempt and rage in their eyes.

The Bible reveals that man, cut off from God, is naturally hostile to God (Romans 8:7). It also says man’s degeneration and rebellion against God would be intensified in the last days (2 Timothy 3:1-5). Verse 13 summarizes: “But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived.” As far as worldwide culture and society go, the anarchy the world is witnessing on the streets of Paris, Lyon and Marseille is 2 Timothy 3:13 in action.

The French riots are sobering. The Bible states that worse unrest is yet to come. But as Miiller explained, these crises are symptoms of deeper spiritual problems. Understanding this deeper meaning opens up greater vision not only of the solution to societal problems but also of God’s plan and purpose for mankind. To learn more, read his article “Why Anti-Semitism Is Anti-Western.”