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Back in mid-January, I wrote about the takeover of Paris’ Gaîté Lyrique theatre, one of the French capital’s most historic arts venues, by more than 250 west African migrants. They had been invited by the theatre’s Left-wing management to attend a free conference the previous month titled “Reinventing the Welcome for Refugees in France.” When the conference ended, the migrants reinvented this welcoming gesture by refusing to leave, and their numbers grew to over 300 as sanitary conditions worsened by the day. The multiculturalist management refused to throw them out in the dead of winter, because the Left prioritizes non-Western illegals over even their own survival; so the theatre instead canceled all performances indefinitely, driving it toward bankruptcy after an estimated “several hundred thousand euros in direct losses” of ticket sales.
Businesses surrounding the 19th century venue were and are being impacted as well. The manager of the popular bistro next door reported €30,000 in lost revenue at the time of my previous article. “They are ruining my business,” the bistro owner, herself the daughter of Algerian migrants, told reporters:
They hang around outside my terrace, smoking joints and fighting among themselves. Not only do we no longer get theatregoers because the theatre is shut but we don’t get passers-by either. They’re being frightened away by all these young men.
The theatre is owned by the City of Paris, which is dominated by Socialists and Greens, so they blame government inaction instead of the squatters themselves or instead of taking responsibility for having literally ushered them in, but President Macron’s cabinet reportedly has ignored a request to intercede.
As one would expect, especially because the self-righteous theater Leftists have been “welcoming and sheltering the occupants” throughout this debacle rather than having them evicted, things have only deteriorated from there. Now the theater managers are set to abandon the building because the situation has become so “explosive,” surrender has become their only option.
There are now 446 people living inside illegally, most of them claiming to be minors who, under French law, deserve permanent government support and housing. But local officials insist the migrants are adults who had been homeless prior to being invited into the theatre. “This is an illegal occupation of a building by recognized migrants,” authorities said in December.
But no official entity wants to be perceived as anti-migrant, so nothing has been done. Thus, with theater staff feebly attempting to act as “onsite security guards,” “untenable promiscuity” among the occupiers has led to increasing sexual tension and violence, and the management claims migrants have been witnessed dealing and using drugs; they warn of an “explosive and undignified situation” that is “increasing in severity.”
A judge at the Paris Administrative Court ordered the evacuation of the building on February 13, but the council has refused to involve the police. Indeed, the migrants are being supported by radical political activists called the Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville (the Youth Collective of Belleville Park) – named after a Parisian park they first occupied – who view the occupation as part of their “anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle.”
The collective puts on daily demonstrations on the steps of the theatre which begin with the banging of drums and the blaring of slogans through megaphones as they block entry to the theatre. “We are here to claim our right to housing, health, and education,” Précieux, a Congolese migrant who claims to be 16, told the French news agency AFP.
As I wrote previously, could this migrant takeover of a theater owned by naïve multiculturalist Parisian elites be a more perfect metaphor for the mass migration that is imploding Western Europe? Countries from the UK to Scandinavia to Germany have facilitated a tsunami of ungovernable hordes of mostly military-age Muslim males from Africa and the Middle East who are overwhelming tiny villages as well as major urban centers.
In the Gaîté Lyrique theatre as in France at large, Left-wing activists who despise their own countries and civilization welcomed a steady stream of migrants from cultures that are actively hostile to the host culture, and who are now occupying the continent and demanding their “right” to sponge off the prosperity and freedoms of the West, even as they refuse to assimilate.
The only workable response should have been the swift, unapologetic eviction of the “anti-colonialist” squatters from the Gaîté Lyrique theatre, and then from the country of France itself. That would send a powerful message of strength and hope to French citizens and the people of other Western countries who are struggling with this subversive crisis. Prioritizing and coddling the occupiers over citizens and legal immigrants does not work and never will.
But now, in both the theater and the nation in the broader sense, the problem has become untenable and the authorities, neutered by multiculturalist ideology, cannot summon the political will nor the law enforcement show of force to manage it.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior