“The critical situation can possibly be summed up with this one tidbit: one-third of French Muslims say they want to live according to Islamic sharia law and not according to the laws of France.”
Yes, there really is an Islamic problem in France. The repeated terror attacks, which have exposed the deep insecurity around “l’identité nationale,” have led to demands for foreigners to assimilate, rather than just integrate into the French way of life and culture. France has had a longstanding tradition of demanding that immigrants assimilate, dating back to the 19th century when it was used as a policy toward its Jewish population and then its colonized countries. Most French people say there are too many foreigners in France, immigrants do not make an effort to assimilate, and Islam is incompatible with French values.
University of Paris professor Guy Millière writes that the state “scarcely maintains law and order in France” in the face of Muslim violence: “France is a country at the mercy of large-scale uprisings. They can explode anytime, anyplace. French leaders know it, and find refuge in cowardice.”
Uproars over the influence of Islam regularly flare up in France, whether it’s over the wearing of the veil, school dinners for Muslim pupils, or most notably, the wearing of ‘burkinis’ on French beaches—an issue that made global headlines last summer when the swimwear was banned by around 30 French mayors.
The Muslim population of France was approximately 6.5 million in 2016, or around 10% of the overall population of 66 million. In real terms, France has the largest Muslim population in the European Union, just above Germany.
Although French law prohibits the collection of official statistics about the race or religion of its citizens, Gatestone Institute’s estimate of France’s Muslim population is based on several studies that attempted to calculate the number of people in France whose origins are from Muslim-majority countries.
The start of radical Islam is the process of settlement that begins when immigrants have no desire to either assimilate or abide by the laws of this country and begin to undermine and attempt to change our society from within.
A poll by the Ipsos institute for Le Monde newspaper has revealed that 65 percent of French people say there are too many foreigners in France—a figure that has remained elevated in recent years, with the figure as high as 70 percent in 2017.
When it came to the other ever divisive issue of the role of Islam, 60 percent of the people questioned for the survey titled “French Fractures 2017″ believe the religion of Islam is “incompatible with the values of the French Republic.”
Two years ago, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris suggested converting empty churches into mosques. Possibly along those lines, a report released by France’s main think tank suggests that French authorities should replace the two Catholic holidays—Easter Monday and Pentecost—with Islamic holidays and a token Jewish holiday (Yom Kippur) as well.
“France is no longer a Catholic country,” according to Frederic Lenoir, editor-in-chief of Le Monde des Religions. Similarly, the newspaper Le Figaro wondered if Islam can already be considered “France’s prime religion.” By rejecting Christianity, France will soon end up not even teaching “also Arabic,” but only Arabic, and marking Ramadan instead of Easter. Instead of wasting their time trying to organize an “Islam of France,” French political leaders, opinion-makers, and think tanks should look for ways to counter the creeping Islamization of their country.
After a law was passed in 1990 prohibiting discrimination “based on ethnicity, nation, race, or religion,” it was used to “criminalize any criticism of Arab and African delinquency, any question on immigration from the Muslim world, any negative analysis of Islam.” Many writers have been fined, and most “politically incorrect” books on those topics have disappeared from bookshops. The French government asked that history textbooks be rewritten to include chapters on the crimes committed by the West against Muslims, and on the contributions of Islam to humanity.
Possibly most telling of all was the trial in France of Georges Bensoussan. Bensoussan, a scholar of the Holocaust and one of the world’s leading historians of Jewish communities in Arab territories, was put on trial last December after a Muslim lobby group and a French human rights organization that was founded by Jews in the 1920s initiated a criminal lawsuit against him. Citing the work of an Algerian sociologist, he asserted in a radio interview that “in Arab families in France and beyond, everybody knows but will not say that anti-Semitism is transmitted with mother’s milk.”
Bensoussan later insisted he meant this as a metaphor for culturally transmitted bias. Nevertheless, his words prompted both the Collective Against Islamophobia in France and the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, or LICRA, independently to initiate a criminal trial against him for allegedly inciting racial hatred.
The 17th Criminal Tribunal of Paris acquitted Bensoussan, ending a polarizing trial that observers regarded as a significant test case for determining the boundaries of academic freedom amid growing inter-ethnic tensions.
In August 2017, the Ministry of the Interior issued a statement that almost 300 jihadists were back from Syria and represent a risk. All of them could come back to France with French passports. None of them have been arrested.
French President Emmanuel Macron, while in Abu Dhabi on November 8 to inaugurate a museum, said: “Those who want to make you believe that anywhere in the world Islam is destroying other monotheisms and other cultures are liars who are betraying you.”
On November 13, back in Paris to pay homage to the victims of the attacks two years earlier, Macron participated in a release of multicolored balloons, watched them float to the sky, and then laid flowers where the victims were killed. The plaques state that they were “murdered” but not that they were victims of terrorism. Soon, as Prof. Millière accurately noted, the word “terrorism” could also disappear from France’s vocabulary.
The critical situation can possibly be summed up with this one tidbit: one-third of French Muslims say they want to live according to Islamic sharia law and not according to the laws of France. Striking similarities are starting to be experienced in the United States. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) pushes a strong agenda, in this writer’s view, for sharia courts and laws to be upheld in US courts, changes in our public school systems to accommodate Muslim holidays, and religious beliefs at the expense of Judeo-Christian values.
The start of radical Islam is the process of settlement that begins when immigrants have no desire to either assimilate or abide by the laws of this country and begin to undermine and attempt to change our society from within.
Are we seeing the future of American society by looking at what is happening in France? The signs in France, and for much of the rest of Europe, are telling. If we keep going the direction we are now, it will only be a matter of time before France’s problem is ours.
