The Daily Mail reports that Paris’ Gaîté Lyrique theatre, known for radical shows and exhibitions, staged a conference on December 10 titled “Reinventing the Welcome for Refugees in France.” The free event featured talks by top academics and Red Cross officials. More than 250 migrants, mostly from France’s former west African colonies, were invited. When the conference ended, the migrants decided the theatre made a good winter shelter and refused to leave.
The theatre’s Left-wing management issued a statement last week noting that the number of people occupying the venue is “continuing to increase” to around 300 people (Streetpress.com puts the number at 340). The theatre had to cancel all performances until at least January 24, and now faces bankruptcy after an estimated “several hundred thousand euros in direct losses” of ticket sales.
“The sanitary conditions are deteriorating day after day and the teams are facing this situation alone,” the statement read. “Although this occupation is forced, it is unthinkable for the Gaîté Lyrique to throw these people out onto the street in the middle of winter.”
It’s actually not unthinkable. There are lawful means to evict these squatters who are likely in the country illegally anyway, and driving the theatre out of business and poisoning the premises with unsanitary personal practices to boot. It’s only unthinkable to the theatre management because the multiculturalist Left always prioritizes the comfort and whims of illegal non-Western migrants over even their own survival.
So the theatre blames government inaction instead. According to the Daily Mail,
Paris’s Socialist-led council, which owns the building, claims it has looked for accommodation for the migrants but that none was available.
It has called for the government to deal with the problem, but President Macron’s centrist cabinet is said to have ignored the request and is reluctant to get involved in the debacle.
Businesses surrounding the 19th century venue are suffering losses too. The bistro next door, a popular spot for theatregoers to eat and drink before and after shows, has reported €30,000 in lost revenue so far.
“They are ruining my business,” the bistro manager, herself the daughter of Algerian migrants, told The Times:
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.
How young? Well, the migrants all claim to be under the age of 18, meaning they are considered unaccompanied minors and under French law have the right to be housed and assisted by local authorities.
“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.
But local officials insist the migrants are adults who already were known to the authorities and had been sleeping on the streets prior to taking advantage of the theatre’s invitation to entrez vous. “This is an illegal occupation of a building by recognized migrants,” authorities said in December.
This illegal occupation was organized by Collectif des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, or the Youth Collective of Belleville Park (named after the Paris park they previously occupied). The Collectif bristles at the age test, calling it “racist.”
The Daily Mail notes that the group describes the theatre occupation as a focal point for its “antiracist and anticolonial struggle.” (Wait – I thought it was about “housing, health, and education”?) 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.
Could there be a more perfect metaphor for the mass migration that Western European countries from the UK to Scandinavia to Germany have facilitated from Africa and the Middle East, a tsunami of ungovernable hordes of mostly military-age Muslim males that has overwhelmed tiny villages as well as major urban centers?
In the Gaîté Lyrique theatre as in France at large, self-righteous, virtue-signaling, Left-wing activists who despise their own countries and civilization, and who reject having children of their own out of a self-loathing passion to save the planet, 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.
France’s recently installed interior minister Bruno Retailleau has vowed to crack down on illegal migration: “The French people want more order in the streets, order at the borders,” he said in September. But this vow is too little, too late unless his own government, and other Western authorities, kick out the globalist elites who got their citizens into this situation in the first place. They must somehow muster the political and cultural will to do whatever it takes to reclaim their civilization from a migrant invasion that threatens to replace Western values, liberties, and institutions with sharia law and other barbarisms.
A good, small first step would be 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.
Make France and the rest of Europe Great Again.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior