On Saturday evening in Grenoble, a concert by French DJ Barbara Butch was interrupted after roughly twenty minutes when around 200 pro-Palestinian demonstrators, some affiliated with the left-wing party La France Insoumise, entered the venue and threw bottles at the stage. The artist, a prominent figure in Paris’s LGBTQ+ nightlife and a Jewish woman, was escorted from the scene. The Grenoble public prosecutor has since opened an investigation for “concerted obstruction of freedoms,” an offence punishable by one year’s imprisonment.

The immediate trigger, according to French media reports, was Butch’s signature on a tribune supporting a proposed law against antisemitism, as well as her participation in a 2025 concert at the French ambassador’s residence in Tel Aviv. The city of Grenoble and the interior minister condemned the disruption, and the deputy mayor for culture filed a complaint for intimidation and projectiles. On Tuesday, a separate tribune signed by 300 cultural figures, including actors Alain Chabat and Géraldine Nakache, expressed solidarity with Butch, arguing that the targeting of a minority individual under the guise of anti-Zionism amounted to antisemitism.

The incident has exposed a fault line within the French left, where Butch had long been celebrated as an icon of body positivity and lesbian visibility. Commentators in Paris note that the same intersectional framework that once positioned her as a symbol of multiple marginalised identities failed to mobilise in her defence when the perceived aggressors came from a pro-Palestinian camp. This pattern is not isolated. A report commissioned by Berlin’s Department for Justice and Anti-Discrimination, published this month, documents a sharp rise in antisemitism within the German capital’s queer scenes since the October 2023 Hamas attacks, with Jewish LGBTQ+ people reporting exclusion and pressure to adopt anti-Zionist positions. In the United Kingdom, Amnesty International UK retracted a report last week that had labelled gender-critical feminist and gay rights groups as part of an “anti-rights movement,” after a swift backlash from more than 20 organisations that accused the human rights body of ideological bullying.

Meanwhile, in Australia, retired police officers in Tasmania have publicly criticised the state government for failing to launch a promised mental health pilot programme for former officers dealing with work-related trauma, with the police minister citing budget constraints. In Queensland, Australian media report that the state government has declined to release a summary of recommendations from a victim-survivor working group on domestic violence, which was sharply critical of police responses and called for a civilian review mechanism. The Grenoble investigation remains ongoing, and no charges have been filed. The broader question of how progressive institutions respond when their own frameworks are turned against their erstwhile champions remains unresolved.