> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Coming to a Town Near You
- URL: https://goodoil.news/coming-to-a-town-near-you/
- Published: 2026-10-22T00:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T00:29:59.000Z
- Description: Pull the other one. Economic pressure certainly causes social dissatisfaction. Hunger can ignite riots. But that’s not what is igniting these riots.
- Author: Reproduced with permission
- Tags: World Politics

[**Laura Dodsworth**](https://www.thefreemind.co.uk/p/the-intifada-comes-home?ref=goodoil.news)  
*Writer, photographer, commentator.*

The same streets that permitted pro-Palestinian marches within days of 7 October are now burning, with shops looted, public buildings torched and people terrorised by far-left thugs and criminals.

This was predictable.

Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in France, Belgium, Portugal and Italy. Amusingly, Al Jazeera calls these ‘cost of living protests’. The Musée du Louvre posted that it has closed due to the ‘student social movement’. Dear me, whatever are the students learning these days, which requires world class museums to close their doors? The *Guardian* invokes ‘school conditions, housing costs and the cost of living’. Pull the other one. These are the respectable explanations, the ones that allow the establishment to file the violence under economic woes rather than confront the political forces that have helped to legitimise it.

Economic pressure certainly causes social dissatisfaction. Hunger can ignite riots. But that’s not what is igniting these riots.

Safety is fragile. It was shattered on 7 October in Israel. The Israeli military was unprepared for the atrocious assault, and the massacre exposed what can happen when people are left without adequate protection. More Jews were murdered in a single day than on any other since the Holocaust.

The French state, too, appears to have been unprepared for the latest incarnation of French political revolt. These days, some protesters wave the flag of a state that does not yet exist: Palestine.

This article was originally published by [the Free Mind](https://www.thefreemind.co.uk/p/the-intifada-comes-home?ref=goodoil.news).