By: Rabbi Mark Wildes

What do Palestinian flags and songs glorifying Islamist terrorists have to do with overcrowded classrooms in France?

This weekend, France experienced riots leading to over 1,800 arrests, hundreds of injured police officers, shops looted, and a historic city hall set on fire. And what’s the explanation we’re being given? Poor school conditions and the cost of living.

Maybe that’s what some people were protesting. Fine. But what I’m seeing are Palestinian flags, slogans about Gaza, a vandalized synagogue, and videos of young demonstrators singing about Mohammed Merah, who murdered Jewish children in Toulouse, and Salah Abdeslam, one of the Bataclan terrorists.

What’s ironic is that France has spent years condemning Israel for building homes in Judea, the very heart of our ancestral homeland, where Jews lived thousands of years before France even existed as a country.

France should spend less time lecturing Israel about where Jews are allowed to live and a little more time addressing the extremism within its own borders.

Because this was never just Israel’s problem.

As France was burning, Jews around the world were reading the story of Noach.

Rashi, the great medieval Torah commentator from France, asks why God had Noach spend 120 years building the Ark. Surely God could have saved him another way.

Rashi answers that God wanted people to see Noach building the Ark and ask him why. Noach would warn them about the coming flood, giving them an opportunity to change their ways.

But they didn’t listen.

I keep thinking about that as I watch what’s happening in France. For years, Israel has been sounding the alarm about Islamist terrorism, only to be accused of exaggerating the threat. Europe has already suffered its own horrific terrorist attacks. And now we’re seeing the same disturbing signs of that extremist ideology surfacing among some of these demonstrators.

The lesson of Noach is that warnings are meant to be taken seriously BEFORE disaster strikes.

I pray France and the rest of the West start listening before more innocent people pay the price.