There is a remarkably economical way to manufacture a political conspiracy. Take a photograph, preferably one containing a flag, a bearded man, a religious slogan or somebody behaving badly. Add a suitably alarming caption, remove the inconvenient context and allow the human appetite for outrage to do the rest. Within hours, an individual becomes a community, a crowd becomes a movement, and an event becomes proof of a conspiracy that existed only in the imagination of the person who supplied the caption. The latest specimen comes from France, where Donald Trump has discovered that the country's student protests are not really about schools at all, but about Islam attempting to take over a once great nation. This is an impressive feat of clairvoyance, especially from a man not known to have spent much time examining French classrooms.

On 6 October, Trump declared that the unrest was the result of uncontrolled mass migration and that the school grievances were merely a cover for an Islamic project. He supplied no evidence for this remarkable diagnosis. Presidential authority now seems to include the ability to identify the secret motives of hundreds of thousands of people without the tedious preliminary business of investigating them.

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The facts, inconveniently, tell a rather different story. The protests began with French school students complaining about teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings and inadequate educational resources. Their grievances were not conjured out of thin air by some international conspiracy. Reporting by the BBC, AFP and Reuters documented the education crisis and the spread of demonstrations across the country. The protests subsequently drew in trade unions, workers and others angered by rising living costs and government spending proposals. There were clashes with police, looting and arson, and........

© Mathrubhumi English