Musab Younis teaches politics at Queen Mary University of London.
There was an illegal demonstration for Palestine in northern Paris on Sunday, 15 May. It was quelled by 4200 police officers under the command of the city’s police chief, Didier Lallement. Protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza had been banned on the direct order of President Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin. They might be composed of ‘risky elements’, Darmanin warned. He asked the police to be ‘particularly vigilant and firm’.
At school, I would sometimes be approached in the playground by children I didn’t know. I must have been about seven or eight. Appearing in front of me, they would call me racist names. Then they wandered away. I don’t remember being distressed by these incidents. Sometimes, though, children came over to tell me that they weren’t racist. They knew that racism existed; they...
The point-blank shooting by police officers of 17-year-old Nahel M. during a traffic stop in Nanterre last Tuesday was not a unique occurrence. On 7 June, three weeks before Nahel’s death, police in Paris killed a 21-year-old passenger in a car that had allegedly refused to stop for a check. The passenger was not named in media reports; she was described only as a ‘young woman’. On 14 June, two weeks before Nahel’s death, a 19-year-old Guinean supermarket logistics worker, Alhoussein Camara, was shot dead near Angoulême at a roadside checkpoint.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.