France Keeps Burning Because of Third-World Muslim Immigration
Most Muslims aren’t rioters. But the riots keep starting where Muslim immigrants live, and France keeps refusing to ask why.
by Kaizen Asiedu Oct. 21, 2026
I’ll admit that I hesitated to give this letter the title I did.
Talking about ethnic and religious groups is always difficult. As Westerners, we are hypersensitized to racism and prejudice.
So much so that we’d rather avoid the conversation about groups altogether.
But in multicultural societies, when people act as groups, we need to talk about the actions of groups.
And Muslims from the third world act as a group.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. All groups exhibit in-group preference.
But several of the ways this group in particular acts are in conflict with Western norms and values, because some third-world Muslim values are fundamentally incompatible with Western values.
(A note on “third world.” I know it’s not politically correct or technically precise anymore. In professional circles it’s considered an outdated Cold War term. But it’s still used colloquially, it’s familiar, and the average person knows exactly what it means: a descriptor of a country’s level of development. I don’t think it’s inherently offensive. So I’m using it here.)
Analysis of groups has to be different from analysis of individuals.
It would be irrational to meet a particular Muslim from the third world and assume he values Sharia over national law, sympathizes with Hamas, and supports rioting as a form of protest.
But it’s equally irrational to pretend that, evaluated as a group, there isn’t a disproportionately high expression of all three.
57% of French Muslims aged 15 to 24 say Sharia matters more than the laws of the Republic.
24% of them say they sympathize with Hamas. Among French Muslims of all ages, it’s 19%. Among French adults overall, it’s 3%.
In a hyperpolarized culture, you’re supposed to open with a list of caveats. The problem is that by the time you’re done listing them, nobody cares about the point.
Hence the title.
I’m hoping I’ve earned enough credibility with you for you to know I don’t approach anything from hate. There are 4.5 million Muslims in America, and the vast majority are great Americans. There are progressive Muslims, conservative Muslims, fundamentalist Muslims. None of that is in dispute.
What’s in dispute is whether we’re allowed to say that a significant subset of this population is extremely difficult to assimilate into Western culture, and that where they go, problems go too.
I’m saying it.
Third-world Muslims are not the only ones rioting in France.
The riots are the work of a coalition: white leftists, socialists, opportunists, and teenagers with no ideological commitments at all who just revel in the chance to act out.
So why single out one group?
Three reasons.
There is a clear pattern across Western Europe: this particular group grows in numbers and influence, and violence follows. In the UK, where Muhammad is now the most common name for newborn boys in England and Wales, we now know that thousands of British girls, over decades, were molested by predominantly Muslim men of Pakistani heritage (Pakistan is 96% Muslim), and that it was covered up by UK authorities for fear of appearing racist.
In Spain, this July, around 50,000 people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta in a matter of days. 72 died in the rush. The Spanish military was called in. I wrote a whole article about it.
Germany has its own chapter. In August 2024, a Syrian man who had dodged deportation stabbed three people to death at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen. He was convicted of membership in the Islamic State. This July, an Islamist already known to German intelligence drove a van into crowds at Berlin Pride, killing one person and injuring 29.
There is a common variable in the disorder across Western countries, and it’s a particular group.
We need to talk about it.
And we need to talk about it without demonizing individuals, and without letting it collapse into a culture war over which group is superior.
Ironically, just as third-world Muslims are moving into first-world Western countries, first-world Westerners are moving into first-world Muslim countries. The UAE gained an estimated net 9,800 millionaires in 2025, more than any country on earth. Dubai is full of Londoners.
There have been Muslim empires that rivaled anything Christendom built: the Abbasids, the Ottomans, Al-Andalus.
People can hold their own views on which cultural software is “superior.” That’s a different argument.
The point is this: if you love the West and the Western project, Islam is the most difficult software to integrate.Within the broader Muslim community, there are significant subsets that are hostile to Western values, and the numbers above say those subsets are bigger among the young, not smaller.
Macron says the people blaming Muslim migrants are “stupid.” The people blaming Muslim migrants say Macron is deflecting. Both are working from half the picture.
This week Macron, speaking in Doha, said foreign leaders had made “unacceptable and even stupid comments” about the riots. He said France had been accused of being “invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists,” and called that “totally false.” Trump had said the unrest “has to do with immigration.” Netanyahu called it an “invasion of extremist Islam.”
So let’s consider Macron’s comments about the focus on Muslims being “stupid.”
It’s a fact that these riots started in the Paris banlieues, the ring of suburbs with the highest share of Muslim immigrants in France.
It’s a fact that the three big riot waves of the last twenty years all started in that same ring. Clichy-sous-Bois in 2005. Nanterre in 2023. Créteil in 2026.
It’s a fact that rioters stormed Marseille city hall and hung a Palestinian flag inside.
It’s a fact that Macron’s own government, in May 2025, published a 73-page report warning that “Islamist entryism” by the Muslim Brotherhood threatens national cohesion, and that Macron himself convened a Defense Council over it.
What’s happening in Paris sure looks like a lack of national cohesion.
It’s a fact that the protest is composed of a coalition that’s not just immigrant Muslims.
It also includes white leftists, socialists, yellow vests, opportunists, and teenagers with no ideology at all.
And it’s a fact that the same pattern of social disorder, disproportionately involving Muslims from the third world, is playing out across Western Europe, in the UK, in Spain, in Germany.
Multiple things can be true at once.
It’s not just third-world Muslims and their children.
But the epicenter, every time, is where the third-world Muslim immigrants live.
There’s a risk in this conversation, and I’m aware of it.
Genuine bigots will use even the most carefully constructed argument to justify a hatred they already hold. Call that risk Islamophobia, understood colloquially as hatred of Muslims. Western liberals are extremely sensitive to it.
But there’s a risk on the other side, and the West has stopped weighing it.
The risk of social decay from never addressing the compatibility of a group whose norms and values are radically different from your own.
And the risk of admitting the radicalized subsets of that group: Islamists and jihadists, who threaten the physical safety and the institutions that Western societies run on.
The second risk is already here. Marseille city hall is the proof.
And the most alarming part is that it’s happening inside a coalition, with leftists and socialists marching next to the Palestinian flags.
We’ve seen this exact coalition before.
Iran. 1979.
From here, you’ll learn:
Islam, Islamism, and jihadism: why the difference matters more than anyone admits.
What happened in Iran in 1979, and why the history is harder to dismiss than it sounds.
The exodus: who is leaving Europe, and what it says about where it’s heading.
Islam is a religion.
Islamism is a political project: the belief that Islamic law should govern the state. No separation of mosque and state. Sharia as the law of the land.
Jihadism is Islamism by force.
Islamists don’t necessarily need to use force. They also use democracy against itself:
You allow large numbers of Muslims into the country.
They have more children than the native population.
Over time, they gain voting power.
They use the democratic system itself to reshape Western institutions.
They push for immigration policies that attract more Muslims.
And they grow as a bloc until they can outvote everyone else.
That’s the Islamist threat. Legal, patient, and already underway in parts of Europe.
Turkish President Erdogan said it out loud in the 1990s: democracy is a tram. You ride it to your stop, then you get off.
Then there’s the obvious threat: jihadism.
People who use violence to accomplish the same project, or simply to seize power and impose their beliefs.
Now, every religion has extremists. Christian extremists. Jewish extremists.
But look at who’s doing the killing. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the four deadliest terrorist groups in the world are Islamic State, JNIM, the Pakistani Taliban, and al-Shabaab. All four are Islamist.
Only one religion consistently produces people who fly planes into buildings and shoot civilians in the street for religious reasons.
And the deeper problem is sympathy for extremists among moderates.
You don’t see a quarter of young Christians sympathizing with the Lord’s Resistance Army.
You don’t see a quarter of young Jews sympathizing with Kach.
You do see a quarter of young French Muslims sympathizing with Hamas. Hamas uses its own civilians as human shields and went into a music festival to rape, kidnap, and kill.
In most religions, the extremists are isolated by the moderates.
In Islam, too often, they’re insulated by them.
Here’s what happens, time and again, inside the West and outside it.
Islamists start inside an alliance with other groups.
Then they consume the alliance for their own political end.
Most Americans have very little understanding of radical Islam and how it operates.
The more history you know, the more you understand that concern about this group in the West is historically informed, not a right-wing reflex.
Look at Iran.
Persia was Zoroastrian for a thousand years before Islam. It didn’t convert. It was conquered, in the 7th century, by Islam.
So by 1979 Iran had been Muslim for over a millennium.
And it was also a secular, modernizing, pro-Western country.
Tehran had universities, nightclubs, and women in miniskirts.
Then came Western interference. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, after he nationalized Iranian oil.
Understandably, anti-Western sentiment built for 25 years.
When the revolution came in 1978 and 1979, it was a coalition: liberal nationalists, leftist students, communists, and Islamists under Khomeini.
Sound familiar?
The leftists thought they were getting a leftist revolution.
They got the revolution.
Then the Islamists went from friend to foe within months.
They crushed the radical, guerrilla left (the Mojahedin) in 1981.
They banned the communist Tudeh Party in 1983.
Finally, in 1988, thousands of leftist prisoners were executed in a matter of weeks.
The revolution was a Trojan horse for Islamists. The leftists carried it through the gates.
Most Iranians never voted for a theocracy. The 1979 referendum asked one question: Islamic Republic, yes or no. What that meant was decided afterward.
Khomeini’s faction was the most organized and most ruthless partner in the coalition, and when the Shah fell, it ate the others.
Islamism doesn’t need a Muslim majority. It needs an opening: a crisis, a coalition, and a host society too divided or too polite to say no.
Iran had all three in 1979.
France has all three right now.
Multiple things can be true at once. The 1953 coup was America’s and Britain’s doing, and it was wrong.
And whatever your issues with Western interference, they pale next to the suffering that followed under the Islamic Republic.
This January, the Islamic Republic of Iran killed thousands to tens of thousands of its own people for protesting.
Iran went from secularism to theocracy.
From women walking freely to women beaten over a loose headscarf.
From a country where you could march to a country that shoots marchers.
From a rising middle-income economy to a sinking one.
The leftists who marched in 1979 got none of what they marched for.
The more you see the demographic trends and the rising violence, the more you see something else: Europe’s best and brightest are leaving.
This used to be impossible. If the most capable people in a country didn’t like where it was going, they had nowhere else to go. They were invested in local politics. They stayed and fought for their values.
That’s over.
I’ve been living in Medellín, Colombia, for five months.
Not a week goes by that I don’t meet someone from the UK who tells me, in no uncertain terms, that the UK is doomed and they have no intention of going back. I hear the same from Belgians.
These are men in their 20s and early 30s. Highly ambitious, highly capable, millionaires or future millionaires. The exact people you’d want to stay and fix the country.
In 2025, the UK lost a net 16,500 millionaires, about $92 billion in wealth.
UBS called it the largest private-wealth migration in history.
So here is the equation France, the UK, and Belgium have written for themselves:
You import a population that doesn’t share the culture and tradition of the native population.
You don’t vet them for compatibility.
You don’t require them to assimilate.
And the natives most aligned with your culture pack up and leave.
The writing is on the wall for the West. One only needs to read it.
None of this is irreversible. Bugs can be fixed. But only if you admit they exist.
Ask the question on the way in: Do you accept that French law sits above religious law? How do you feel about Hamas?
Make assimilation a requirement with consequences. Language and civics tests as conditions of residency and citizenship, enforced. Denmark already has a version of this.
Stop apologizing for asking. White guilt is the operating system the bugs run on. You cannot fix a problem you’re ashamed to name.
Just like you don’t let anyone into your house, you don’t let anyone into your country.
And if France still doesn’t want to talk about it, well. C’est la vie.
