Student protests across Europe are a desperate cry for help, an appeal to governments to build a brighter, hope-filled future. Instead of paying attention, European politicians have decided to manhandle the protesters, misrepresent their demands and manipulate public opinion.

Different narratives are now competing to explain what the protests are really about.

They want to be taught properly. They want more teachers, an end to overcrowded classes, dilapidated buildings and inadequate school meals and an admissions system that sorts young people by class and postcode.

In Belgium, students have protested education cuts and fees. Greek students occupied Syntagma Square over rents, student housing and energy bills. Italian students demanded money for schools rather than war.

But politicians seem intent on telling a different story.

For many EU leaders it is – yet again – all about migration.

Hungarian prime minister Péter Magyar has decided that the chaos in French cities makes it “clear to everyone why Hungary advocates the strictest possible approach to migration.”

Poland’s Donald Tusk, who insists he will not repeat the mistakes of other European countries, joined the leaders of Denmark and Italy at the EU leaders’ meeting in Brussels last week to push for an even tougher Fortress Europe.

Together, they almost succeeded in getting others in the EU to agree to a statement linking crime and “irregular” migration.

On the other side of the Atlantic, US president Donald Trump instructed Europe to “close your borders and take control, before it is too late!” while his deputy JD Vance criticised Western liberals for bringing the “third world” to France.

Parts of the media focused on the violence, particularly the looting and destruction carried out by those who have joined the protests to create chaos, rather than on the demands that brought students onto the streets in the first place.

In France, meanwhile, it was the presidential campaign that shaped the political response, with Marine Le Pen from the National Rally calling for law and order and blaming “decades of immigration” for the violence while her protégé, Jordan Bardella, said the police should have more weapons and greater powers.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Insoumise, Le Pen’s leading rival in the elections next year, was accused of fuelling student anger. French centrists struggled to find their footing and their voice. President Emmanuel Macron made an angry television appearance before heading to the Middle East with a delegation of business leaders.

So far, very predictable.

Old playbook: one enemy, no solution

Divert, distract, dehumanise and scapegoat are the oldest tricks in wily politicians’ playbook. The well-worn recipe is simple: take a social crisis, remove its economic content, replace it with a face, a religion, a border. Then offer an enemy, not a solution.

When public services fail, blame the outsider. When wages stagnate, blame the foreigner. When housing becomes impossible, blame the newcomer rather than the landlord, the investor or the government that stopped building.

And when young people take to the streets, describe them as manipulated, criminal, alien or dangerous. Treat their anger as a threat to public order rather than a warning that something is profoundly wrong. Say there has been foreign manipulation and disinformation.

Then turn the full force of the state against the symptoms of the crisis while leaving its causes untouched and change the the subject from justice to fear, from schools to borders, from the future to the past.

Meanwhile, the money goes elsewhere.

Europe is pouring resources into defence and rearmament. Governments speak endlessly of competitiveness, productivity and strategic autonomy. But these questions cannot become excuses for neglecting the social foundations on which Europe’s future depends.

Seriously, who is going to make an ageing Europe competitive if the people expected to build its future cannot afford to have one? Who will run Europe’s basic services if migrants go “home”? What does strategic autonomy even mean if young Europeans cannot get a decent education, find secure employment or afford a home?

Contradictions

We should know by now that security cannot be measured in weapons alone. It also depends on how secure citizens feel, and whether they believe they have something worth protecting. Security demands that people have politicians they can trust and institutions which work for them.

A Europe that invests in its military capabilities while allowing its schools, housing systems and public services to deteriorate risks hollowing out its own strength.

Believe me: I know. I was born in Pakistan, a country which thrives on war and conflict and neglects the well being of its citizens.

There is another contradiction. As young people struggle to make their voices heard, the EU is planning cuts to funding for civil society organisations that defend rights, support communities, hold power to account and help turn public anger into democratic participation.

The EU has always – rightly – backed citizens’ calls for democratic participation, equality and inclusion when it happens in Tunisia, Egypt or Hongkong. How can our leaders close down such calls for participation when they are made at home?

Sadly, politicians and parts of the media have lost young peoples’ trust – and when that faith goes, so does democracy.

The EU can and must offer young Europeans a story of hope, inclusion and progress towards equality. Leaders who prefer to hallucinate about migrants should spend more time living up to the EU’s values by investing in education, affordable housing, decent jobs and public services.

We must give our young people a meaningful voice in decisions that will shape their lives. Our collective future quite literally depends on it.

This article was first published on Shada’s Substack. You can subscribe for free to receive new posts and support her work here.

Every day, children are killed in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Where are the outraged headlines?

The number of children killed in Gaza since Israel started its onslaught, following the Hamas attack on 7 October, 2023, is estimated at more than 21,600. 

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that since the so-called Israel-Hamas ceasefire, an average of “at least” one child a day – 300 children over 300 days – has been killed in the enclave. 

Children, toddlers, and babies are being killed in their homes, schools, hospitals, shelters, and on roads marked by displacement. They are also dying because the basic structures that should protect them – family, healthcare, education, food, water, and refuge – have been systematically destroyed.

Where are the urgent statements from EU and world leaders?

EU governments continue to authorise arms transfers to Israel despite rules which require governments to deny licences where there is a risk that military equipment will be used for serious violations of international humanitarian law. 

Every EU member state is also bound by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the EU’s own treaty, which requires the union to promote children’s rights. 

Why are these international rules and domestic commitments not being applied to the children of Gaza?

Children rights beyond Ukraine

The EU does care for children. In Ukraine, the EU treats children as individuals rather than statistics: it convenes coalitions, compiles names, traces families, imposes sanctions, creates mechanisms for return and makes the fate of children a central diplomatic demand. 

In her State of the Union address last month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – a proud mother and grandmother – introduced and praised the courage of Sasha, a six-year-old Ukrainian girl who lost a leg in a Russian missile strike in Ukraine but has now returned to her beloved gymnastics.

Von der Leyen quite rightly made the suffering of Ukrainian children intimate and personal. It is more than time she did the same for Palestinian children.

But let’s not only blame political leaders for their indifference, their lack of historical knowledge of Palestine’s occupation and their limited understanding of Palestinian calls for justice. 

Parts of the legacy media must also own up to their responsibility in normalising the abhorrent.

Powerful mainstream media have preferred to “repeat Israeli propaganda and sometimes simply cut and paste IDF press releases” rather than accept the analysis of Palestinian journalists, writers and scholars, writes Bhakti Shringarpure.

Her criticism reflects a wider ongoing discussion on the sourcing and framing of Gaza coverage, with studies spotlighting how Western media has described Israeli suffering by using emotive language around 11 times more often than Palestinian suffering. References to Israel’s “right to defend itself” appear roughly five times as frequently as references to Palestinian rights.

Also, as the immediate shock of the bombardment recedes – but the killing continues – Gaza has dropped down the news cycle. 

Assal Rad,  author of “Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide”, describes the logic: “The façade of a ceasefire has created the space to cover it less. In reality, the conditions on the ground for Palestinians in Gaza have not changed.”

It is also less politically costly for leaders and media to focus on settler violence and settlement in the occupied West Bank, since it can be described as the work of “extremists” rather than of the Israeli government.

EU silence

Our lack of a strong reaction to what is happening is Gaza is also the story of how bystander societies can watch, absorb, and rationalise horrors – and move on. 

Additionally, the killing of Palestinian children is preceded by their political “unchilding”, a process which Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian says begins before the missile falls, when Palestinian children are imagined not as children with futures but as demographic threats, future militants, or extensions of an armed group. 

Their age, instead of guaranteeing greater protection, becomes entangled with suspicion.

Even amid such savage violence, some people are not giving up. 

Their bosses may still look the other way, but EU Staff for Peace, which holds vigils in front of the European Commission and the EU Council every Thursday, has held gatherings to read out the names of children killed in Gaza, thereby according individuality to children whom the political and media systems have reduced to numbers.

As one EU staffer told me: “We only have a time slot of three hours and the last time we only managed to read out the names of children up to three years old. It took us one hour to read out the names of Palestinian babies under one-year old.”

Hind Rajab, who was five, was killed on 29 January 2024 by Israeli fire on the car in which she was trapped. Her body was found 12 days later alongside the bodies of members of her family and two paramedics who had gone to rescue her.

Israel has acknowledged firing on the car but has not admitted that her killing was unlawful, citing an ongoing investigation. In other words, there has been no accountability.

The obscenity is not only that Hind was killed, but that by now the killing of children in Gaza has become a familiar event. 

The shame is that so many of us have constructed a hierarchy in which some children summon the world’s full moral and political force, while others are ignored.

Omar El Akkad, in his seminal book says that “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” Given the cowardice on display over the last three years, I sometimes wonder if there will ever really be a true global moral reckoning.