Retreat from the Enlightenment 228

France is submitting to Islam.

“Voltaire fades before Muhammad, the Enlightenment before Submission.”

 – Giulio Meotti quotes and comments in his article at Gatestone:

“Five years after the killings at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, France has learned to live with the Islamist threat,” wrote Yves Thréard, deputy editor at the daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Not a month goes by… without a murderous attack with the cry of “Allahu Akbar” taking place on our soil…. But what is the point of fighting the effects of Islamism if we do not tackle the origins of this ideology of death? On that front, however, denial continues to compete with naiveté. Nothing has changed in the last five years. On the contrary.

In the name of diversity, non-discrimination and human rights, France has accepted a number of blows to its culture and history… Islamists are a hot-button issue. They continue the fight which, even without weapons, has all the allure of a war of civilizations. Is the famous “Charlie spirit”, which some people thought was blowing after the January 2015 attacks, just an illusion?

France has been marking the fifth anniversary of the deadly jihadist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which took place on January 7, 2015. Last month, French Senator Nathalie Goulet warned that more attacks were likely. “In France we have a serious problem and we need to do more to prevent extremists from acting. As it stands, there will be more attacks,” Goulet said. There are believed to be 12,000 radical Islamists on France’s terror watch-list, “however only a dozen are thought to be under 24-hour surveillance”.

This week was marked by yet a new string of Islamist terror attacks: police injured a knife-wielding man on a street in the northeastern city of Metz, two days after a suspected Islamist radical in the Paris suburb of Villejuif stabbed a man to death, an act that prosecutors are treating as a terror attack. In both incidents, the assailants shouted “Allahu Akbar.” This type of attack was dubbed “ordinary jihad” in a Le Figaro editorial this week.

On January 7, 2015, the cartoonists and journalists Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski, the psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, the economist Bernard Maris and the policeman Franck Brinsolaro fell under the bullets of the jihadist brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. Charlie Hebdo‘s 2020 anniversary issue commemorated the massacre and slammed the “new gurus of monolithic thinking” who are trying to impose politically correct censorship.

The outburst of indignation of the French people, gathered in Paris for a massive demonstration on January 11, 2015, was not enough to awaken the spirit of resistance of the French leaders and elites against Islamism and its collaborators. “The seriousness of the Islamist political fact in France is strongly underestimated,” says the lawyer Thibault de Montbrial, president France’s Center for Internal Security Studies.

In a country that used to stand for freedom of expression, self-censorship is soaring. “For the humorists in France, it’s always easy to make fun of the Pope and the Catholics, it’s always easy to make fun of Jews, it’s always easy to make fun of Protestants,” confesses a long-time Charlie Hebdo columnist, Patrick Pelloux. For Islam, it is not easy. “We feel that this religion is scary. The word Islam is scary, and on that, the terrorists have won.”

While French prisons have become a breeding ground for jihadists, the Islamization of the cities’ suburbs, the banlieues, is proceeding full tilt. The weekly Le Point recently devoted a cover story to the “territories conquered by the Islamists”. In many of these areas, violence rages; 1,500 cars were torched there on New Year’s Eve. In recently published book, “Les territoires conquis de l’islamisme” (“The Territories Conquered by Islamism”), by Bernard Rougier, a professor at the University Sorbonne-Nouvelle and director of the Center for Arab and Oriental Studies, he explains that Islamism is an “hegemonic project”, splintering working-class neighborhoods. These “ecosystems”, he states, work on a “logic of rupture” of the French society, its values and institutions, and are built on mosques, bookstores, sport clubs and halal restaurants. …

“Today,” said the president of the Ministry of Education’s Conseil supérieur des programmes, Souâd Ayada, “the visibility of Islam in France is saturated by the veil and the jihad.”

Souad Ayada is a Muslim, a spécialiste de la spiritualité et de philosophie islamiques, so it’s doubtful that she was complaining. (If those in charge of education in France all think so badly, no wonder the nation is fading away. “Visibility” cannot be”saturated”. Veils cannot saturate anything. Nor can “the jihad”. )

While Islamist preachers and recruiters are out on the streets, seeking out the weak minds that will form the first line of their holy war, political Islam also forms electoral lists in France’s suburbs.

French President Emmanuel Macron opposed banning these political groups.

“France is a budding Islamic republic,” noted the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal. In those “territories”, he said, live many of the terrorists who attack France, from the Kouachi brothers of Charlie Hebdo to the jihadists who murdered [and tortured – ed] scores of people at the Bataclan Theater.

Islamists have, in addition, recruited dozens of French soldiers and ex-servicemen who have converted to Islam. Many have come from commando units with expertise in handling weapons and explosives.

France is turning into a “society of vigilance” in its fight against the “Hydra” of Islamist militancy, as Macron said. …

He said that? But will do nothing to stop the influx of Muslims whose holy duty it is to wage jihad? Or even ban known “political groups”? “Vigilance” may not be quite enough.

Last October, an Islamist struck in one of France’s most secure buildings: the monumental Paris Police headquarters near Notre Dame cathedral, where he murdered four of his colleagues. … “It is hard to believe that the police on which we rely to protect us and which is supposed to be our last rampart against terrorism, can itself be the victim of terrorism, with throats slit in the holy of holies of the Police Prefecture.” 

In the wake of the attack, seven police officers, “suspected of radicalization”, had their guns confiscated.

And without their guns they can do no harm? Their brother jihadists in London could teach them how to use knives and mechetes to inflict death and injury. But come to think of it, they know how. They used knives in the Bataclan Theater. “The French Parliamentary report contains details of how victims’ bodies had been mutilated, such as by eye-gouging, disemboweling, castration, and beheading,” Wikipedia reports.

“I have the impression that our immune defenses have collapsed and that Islamism is winning,” says the French writer Pascal Bruckner.

There’s an observant citizen!

He is quoted further:

[Islam’s] main demands have been met: nobody dares to publish caricatures of Mohammed anymore. Self-censorship prevails…. Hate is directed against those who resist obscuring information rather than against those who obscure it. Not to mention the psychiatrization of terrorism, in order better to exonerate Islam. If we had been told in the early 2000s that in 2020, around 20 French cartoonists and intellectuals would be under police protection, no one would have believed it. The threshold of servitude has increased.

“Sunk” is what he means: the threshold has been lowered, made easier to get over. To enter into servitude. The easy choice for the French now is to submit to Islam.

Five years after the terrorist murders at Charlie Hebdo, free speech is less free [read “gone” – ed] in France. “No one today would publish the cartoons of Muhammad,” said Philippe Val, the former editor of Charlie Hebdo, recently.

“For the past five years, I’ve been going to the police station every month or so to file a complaint about death threats, not insults, death threats,” says Marika Bret, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo today.

In Paris, five years after the murders at Charlie Hebdo, there was a big march to protest not terrorism, but “Islamophobia”.

“Voltaire fades before Muhammad, and the Enlightenment before the Submission,” wrote the author Éric Zemmour.

In 2017 … a Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, was tortured and murdered in her Paris apartment by her neighbor, Kobili Traoré, who was yelling “Allahu Akbar”.  A court of appeals recently ruled that Traoré, because he had smoked cannabis, was “not criminally responsible” for his actions.

And so he was acquitted.

Which means that anti-Semitism, even when it results in murder, is licensed in France.

Actually, anti-Semitism is a grand old French tradition. But now it is not merely tolerated and quietly practiced in the land of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, it is an aim, a cause, a duty. Because it was commanded – and an example of the mass murder of Jews set – by Muhammad himself.

France has capitulated to Islam. The EU has capitulated to Islam. In all the countries of western Europe, the peoples are condemning themselves to live in fear. In subjection. And in  sorrow. For in Islam there is no laughter, and no singing and dancing. And no wine, mon frère, no wine. No beer, mein Bruder, no beer.

Standing almost alone in the Western World against this retreat from the Enlightenment is America. At least for as long as Donald Trump is president.

Good night France, good night Europe 810

732 C.E. A Frankish army saves Europe from Islamization, winning the Battle of Tours under the command of Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer).

2017 C.E. France capitulates to Islam and ensures the Islamization of the greater part of Europe?

From Gatestone by Giulio Meotti:

 After two years and 238 deaths at the hands of Islamic terrorism, what did France do to defeat radical Islam? Almost nothing.

It is this legacy of indifference that is at stake in the looming French presidential elections.

If Marine Le Pen or François Fillon win, it means that France has rejected this autocratic legacy and wants to try a different, braver way.

Whatever her faults (we suspect she is an anti-Semite like her father, though she has tried to put distance between her opinions and his on this as on other issues), we hope she wins because she would not only try to stop the Islamization of France, she would also try to take France out of the corrupt undemocratic European Union. François Fillon – to his credit an admirer of Margaret Thatcher – is also against Islamization, but not against the EU. 

If Emmanuel Macron wins, France as we have known it can be considered pretty much over. Macron is, for example, against taking away French nationality from jihadists. Terrorism, Islam and security are almost absent from Macron’s vocabulary and platform, and he is in favor of lowering France’s state of emergency. By blaming “colonialism” for French troubles in the Arab world, and calling it “a crime against humanity”, he has effectively legitimized Muslim extremist violence against the French Republic. …

France’s fake war began in Paris with a massacre at the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Twelve cartoonists and policemen were massacred by two brothers who shouted, “We avenged Muhammad, we killed Charlie Hebdo”. After a few days of marches, vigils, candles and collective statements such as “Je Suis Charlie”, half of the French intelligentsia was ready to go and hide underground, protected by the police. These are academics, intellectuals, novelists, journalists. The most famous is Michel Houellebecq, the author of the book Submission.

In which the protagonist, an academic, decides to convert to Islam because he can then have more than one wife.

Then there is Éric Zemmour, the author of the book, Suicide Française (“The French Suicide”); then the team of Charlie Hebdo, along with its director, Riss (Laurent Sourisseau); Mohammed Sifaoui, a French-Algerian journalist who wrote Combattre le terrorisme islamiste (“Combating Islamist Terrorism”); Frédéric Haziza, radio journalist and author at the journal, Canard Enchaîné; and Philippe Val, the former director of Charlie Hebdo. The latest to run was the Franco-Algerian journalist Zineb Rhazaoui; surrounded by six policemen, she left Charlie Hebdo after saying that her newspaper had capitulated to terror and refused to run more cartoons of Muhammad.

“Charb? Where is Charb?” were the words that echoed in the offices of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day he and his colleagues were murdered. “Charb” was Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the magazine that had published cartoons of Muhammad. Charb was working on a short book, On Blasphemy, Islamophobia and the true enemies of free expression, posthumously published. Charb’s book attacked self-righteous intellectuals, who for years had been claiming that Charlie Hebdo was responsible for its own troubles, a childlike view, popular throughout Europe. It is based on the notion that if everyone would just keep quiet, these problems would not exist. Presumably, therefore, if no one had pointed out the threats of Nazism or Communism, Nazism and Communism would have quietly vanished of their own accord. Unfortunately, that approach was tried; it did not work. The book also criticized “sectarian activists”, whom he said have been trying “to impose on the judicial authorities the political concept of ‘Islamophobia’.”

As for “the Left“, he wrote: “It is time to end this disgusting paternalism of the intellectual left” — meaning its moral sanctimony. Charb delivered these pages to his publisher on January 5. Two days later he was murdered.

Now, some of these people he was calling out are trying to hide their cowardice by attacking him. In recent weeks, a number of cultural events in France have tried to “deprogram” the public from paying attention this extremely important book. A theatrical adaptation of it, attended by one of the journalists of Charlie Hebdo, Marika Bret, was scheduled to take place at the University of Lille. However, the president of the University, Xavier Vandendriessche, said he feared “excesses” and the “atmosphere”, so he eliminated Charb from the program. Twice. The play’s director, Gérald Dumont, sent a letter to the Minister of Culture, Audrey Azoulay, mentioning “censorship”.

At the same time, Charb’s book also disappeared from two events at a cultural festival in Avignon. “How to reduce the dead to silence”, tweeted Raphaël Glucksmann. “Killed in 2015, banned in 2017”, Bernard-Henri Lévy summed up.

During the past two years, the publishing industry itself has played a central role in censoring and supporting censorship, by censoring itself. The philosopher Michel Onfray refused to release his book, Thinking Islam, in French and it first came out in Italian. The German writer, Hamed Abdel Samad saw his book Der islamische Faschismus: Eine Analyse (“Islamic Fascism: An Analysis”), a bestseller in Germany, censored in French by the publishing house Piranha.

The French courts, meanwhile, revived le délit d’opinion – a penal offense for expressing political opinions, now an “intellectual crime”. It was explained by Véronique Grousset in Le Figaro:

“Insidiously, the law blurred the distinction between the discussion of ideas and the personal attack. Many organizations are struggling to bring their opponents to justice”.

It means that the legal system is hauling writers and journalists to court for expressing specific ideas, in particular criticism of Islam.

In just two years in France, Muslim organizations have dragged to trial great writers such as Georges Bensoussan, Pascal Bruckner, and Renaud Camus. It is the Islamists’ dream coming true: seeing “Islamophobes” on trial to punish their freedom of expression.

Charlie Hebdo’s physical massacre was therefore followed by an intellectual one: today, Charb’s important book cannot find a room in France for a public reading; it should, instead, be protected as a legacy of courage and truth.

Even in French theaters, free speech is being crushed. Films about Islam have been cancelled: “The Apostle” by Carron Director, on Muslim converts to Christianity; “Timbuktu” on the Islamist takeover of Mali, and Nicolas Boukhrief’s “Made in France”, about a jihadist cell. A poster for “Made in France” – a Kalashnikov over the Eiffel Tower – was already in the Paris metro when ISIS went into action on the night of November 13, 2016. Immediately, the film’s release was suspended, with the promise that the film would be back in theaters. “Made in France” is now only available “on-demand”. Another film, “Les Salafistes”, was screened with a notice banning minors. The Interior Ministry called for a total ban.

After the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the country seemed for a short time to return to normalcy. Meanwhile, thousands of Jews were packing up to leave France. At the request of local Jewish community leaders, the Jewish skullcap disappeared from the streets of Marseille, and in Toulouse, after an Islamic terrorist murdered a Jewish teacher and three children in 2012, 300 Jewish families pack up and left.

France’s never-begun war on terror …  collapsed around the three most important measures: removing French citizenship from jihadists, “de-radicalizing” them and closing their salafist mosques. …

 The Territorial Information Center (SCRT) recommended that there are 124 salafist mosques in France that should close.

Only Marine Le Pen has demanded that.

Three days after the November 13 Paris massacres, President Hollande announced a constitutional reform that would strip French citizenship from Islamic terrorists. Faced with the impossibility of finding a shared text by both Houses, as well as with the resignation of his Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, Hollande was forced to cancel the move. It means that hundreds of French citizens who went to Syria for jihad can now return to their country of origin and murder more innocent people there.

The Bataclan Theater – the scene of a massacre in which 90 people were murdered and many others wounded on November 13, 2015 – recently reopened with a concert by the performer Sting. His last song was “Inshallah” (Arabic for “If Allah Wills”). That is the state of France’s last two years: starting with “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the greatest”), chanted by the jihadists who slaughtered 80 people, and ending with a phony invocation to Allah by a British singer. “Inshallah,” said Sting from the stage, “that wonderful word”. “Rebirth at the Bataclan,” the newspaper Libération wrote as its headline.

The director of the Bataclan told Jesse Hughes, the head of American band Eagles of Death Metal: “There are things you cannot forgive.” True. Except that France has forgiven everything. The drawing on the cover of Charlie Hebdo after the massacre – a weeping Muhammad saying, “All is forgiven” – was the start of France’s psychological surrender.

The first round of the 2017 French presidential election will be  held on April 23, 2017. If no candidate wins a majority, a run-off election between the top two candidates will be held on May 7, 2017.

Victory for Marine le Pen would also be a victory for Donald Trump’s populist revolutionary movement agains the globalist ruling establishments of the West which have invited the hordes of Islam into their countries.