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One of the pleasant stories that the French have been telling themselves is that while the first generation of Muslim migrants may hew to their Muslim ways, and be difficult to integrate, their children will increasingly leave some of those beliefs behind as they try to fit in to their new society. This turns out, alas, not to be true. “Éric Zemmour: France’s Last Chance for Survival?,” by Guy Millière, Gatestone Institute,
According to a poll published in September 2020, 74% of French Muslims under the age of 25 said the laws of Islam were more important than the laws of the French Republic. Another poll published two months later showed that 57% of French Muslims under the age of 25 wanted to live under Islamic sharia law.
It has been fondly believed by many that the “younger generation” of Muslims would both want, and be better able, to integrate into the larger society than their parents’ generation. It’s a forlorn hope. Three-quarters of French Muslims believe Islamic law is “more important” than the laws of the Republic. Another poll confirmed this preference for Islamic law: 57% of young Muslims polled want to live under the Sharia, with its misogyny, homophobia, the uncompromising violence of its hudud, or system of criminal punishment, and much more that we in the advanced West find morally repellent.
The polls also showed that Muslim gangs who live in the no-go zones and engage in the drug trade also carry out theft and looting operations against businesses run by non-Muslims close to those zones. The lawlessness spurs these non-Muslims to sell their businesses to Muslims, who risk neither looting nor threats. The gang members say that when they steal and loot, they only “take the jizya”, an Islamic “protection” tax levied on non-Muslims in territories ruled by Islamic law….
Street muggings and house burglaries by Muslims are not the only ways that they help themselves to the property of the French, and can justify to themselves as a kind of religiously-sanctioned jizyah taken from the Infidels. Muslims also steal from, and even engage in wholesale looting of, French-owned businesses on the periphery of these no-go areas. The French owners find themselves compelled, because of this constant tam-tam of theft, to sell their businesses – often at a considerable loss — to Muslims who know that as the new owners, they will not be the objects of theft and looting by fellow Muslims. Such sales, under extreme duress and at rock-bottom price, of businesses to Muslims by their French owners can be considered another form of Muslim property theft.
La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot (“France Has Not Said Its Last Word”), the book Zemmour published in September 2021, describes his disappointing conversations with French political leaders. No one has disputed a word he wrote. He organized meetings throughout the country to explain what he thought needed to be done and declared his candidacy on November 30, by posting a video on YouTube.
What Zemmour said contrasted sharply with that of his competitors. He did not try to please or water down any facts. He spoke of the destruction of France:
France is no longer France, and everyone sees it… The third-worlding of our country and our people impoverishes as much as it disintegrates, ruins as much as it torments.”
He emphasized the lack of courage of French politicians:
“I saw that no politician had the courage to save our country from the tragic fate that awaits it. I saw that all these supposed professionals were, above all, impotent.”
Explaining his decision, he said:
“I have decided to ask for your vote to become your President of the Republic, so that our children and grandchildren do not know barbarism. So that our daughters are not veiled and our sons are not forced to submit.”…
Is Zemmour too pessimistic? Look at how Muslims, who constitute 40% of the population of Marseille, the second city of France, have turned so much of it into a North African souk. Look at Seine Saint-Denis, the Parisian suburb now nearly completely Muslim. Visitors who come to see the Basilica of Saint-Denis, so important in the history of France, the church where the kings of France are buried, find themselves in a veritable Maghreb of veiled women and bearded men, and young men eyeing those French visitors with the contempt and hatred they have been taught that non-Muslims deserve.
Nor is Zemmour an “accomplice of the far right,” as Valerie Pécresse insists. There is nothing “far right” about him. But this is one of those ever-ready off-the-shelf epithets, along with “racist,” “Islamophobe,” and “fascist,” that are used to sully those who dare to express their alarm at what the large-scale Muslim presence is doing to France. Zemmour is not opposed, for example, to the welfare state, as one would expect someone on the “far right” to be. He only wants to ensure that the state’s benefits go to the French people who have been paying into the system for many decades, and not diverted to Muslim economic migrants, who have already demonstrated they are intent on milking the system for all it’s worth.
The French mainstream media who invited Zemmour also had to raise the questions he was asking; almost all said that he was excessive, obsessive, and that France was not in danger.
Today, “anti-racist” and French Muslim organizations continue to describe Zemmour as a racist. Francis Kalifat, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), said that no Jew should vote for Zemmour, and Yonathan Arfi, CRIF’s vice-president, wrote, “As Jews, we are of course not responsible for what Éric Zemmour says. But we have a responsibility to stand in their way”. Haim Korsia, the Chief Rabbi of France, even declared that Zemmour, who defines himself as a “Berber Jew”, is an “anti-Semite.”
Do these grand panjandrums of French Jewry really believe that no Jew should vote for Zemmour, that he is a danger to the Republic and must be stopped? He upsets because he tells a terrible truth about the future of France if present trends continue. These censorious scolds cannot allow themselves to believe what Zemmour says. It is all too distressing; it’s better to be pollyannas, hoping against hope that Muslims are not the carriers of antisemitism that Zemmour has described them as being, and as anyone of sense can see that they are. Have the heads of CRIF, and the Chief Rabbi, forgotten about all the Jews killed in France recently because they were Jews, by Muslim murderers? Let us refresh their memory: Ilan Halimi, Sara Halimi, Michele Knoll, Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh (5), and Gabriel (3), and Myriam Monsenego (8), Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, François-Michel Saada. And there have been, and will be, others.
What do Francis Kilafat, the president of CRIF, and Haim Khorsia, the Chief Rabbi of France, know about Muslim texts and teachings about Jews? Perhaps they should not be quite so quick to denounce Eric Zemmour until they have studied the Qur’an and hadith, and realized the extent of the Jew-hatred in Islam. Robert Spencer has usefully compiled many of the relevant passages in the Qur’an about Jews: “The Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the wellbeing of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); as fabricating things and falsely ascribing them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); claiming that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); loving to listen to lies (5:41); disobeying Allah and never observing his commands (5:13); disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more.
Instead of facing up to a menacing reality, Kilafat and Rabbi Khorsia think it better to “kill the messenger,” Eric Zemmour, or, rather, to consign him to the outer darkness. “No Jew should vote for Zemmour” says the head of CRIF. He’s an “antisemite” says the chief rabbi of France. Go away, Zemmour. Stop saying all these unpleasant things about Muslims, and Islam. Stop making trouble. People might listen. Besides, it might make Muslims take it out on us. “We don’ want to hear about it, we don’t want to think about it, leave us alone to carry on with our interfaith platitudes” — even as the Muslim tide rises higher and the no-go areas multiply.
President Macron never speaks of Zemmour, but members of the government and leaders of The Republic on the Move, the party created by Macron in 2017, do — and in strong words. Minister of Health Olivier Veran said that “Éric Zemmour embodies rejection, racism and xenophobia”, and is in a “permanent state of delirium”. Former Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner said that Zemmour “insults the French people every day.”
No one who has read the last two books by Zemmour, Le Suicide français and La France n’a pas dit son dernier mot, could possibly think he is in a “state of delirium.” These are works of extreme sobriety and finesse, brilliantly written by someone who is well-educated in literature, philosophy and history — and above all, in the history of France. What’s more, he is always witty and humorful. “In a permanent state of delirium”? Nonsense. One would have to go back to Léon Blum in the 1930s to find a French political figure with similar gifts of thought and expression.
Olivier Veran’s claim that Zemmour “embodies rejecton, racism and xenophobia” is absurd. His books are, rather, love letters to France, to a France that he wishes to help rescue and preserve. He does not “embody rejection”; he rejects only those who live in France, batten on its generosity, and at the same time, reject France and its people. We all know – even Olivier Veran must know — that there is nothing “racist” about sounding the alarm about Islam. One more weary time: Islam is not a race. Nor can Eric Zemmour be called “xenophobic.” He has expressed no objection to non-Muslim immigrants settling in France.
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