Au Revoir, la France

We would like to say, Vive la France, but, alas, the country today seems to be on life support. You have read that the government of President Emmanuel Macron has just given in to the demands of disgruntled public sector workers. Macron had tried to raise the retirement age to 64, but the workers shut down the nation, especially its transportation grid, because working past the age of 62-- the current retirement age-- is one indignity they cannot accept.

Surely, Macron had the right idea. Everyone knows that the French nation is being bankrupted by social programs. You know, the kind of programs that our Democratic Socialist politicians want to bring to our shores. And yet, Macron was ultimately no more successful than his predecessors in countering the power of radical leftist labor unions.

As we all know, one day the cupboard will be bare. We wonder what the unemployed government employees will say then.

But, that is just one of the problems that France is facing. Another, occasionally noted on this blog, is the invasion of Islamism. France is slowly dividing into two countries, one Western, another Islamic. The No-Go zones in the Paris suburbs have turned into a separate state.

The proud French nation is abandoning its commitment to freedom because freedom offends its Muslim population. As you know, the nation has a lot of Muslims and they vote. If you thought that democracy was going to save us, put that one in your hookah and puff on it.

The reports of French submission to Islam come to us from Giulio Meotti of the Gatestone Institute, via the Zero Hedge blog.

Today’s story opens with a quote by the deputy editor of a center right newspaper, called Le Figaro, describing the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket:

“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?"

Islamist attacks are now a weekly occurrence:

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.

As noted here, Islamists are not interested in assimilating. They want to take over France, to Islamicize it:

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.

And also:

In the five years since the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, which targeted freedom of expression, Islamists have been able to commit atrocities against targets such as a priest in a Catholic Church in Rouen; a national secular holiday (the Bastille Day attack in Nice); Jewish communities (from Paris to Toulouse), and ordinary people. 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. "This is a major turning point in Islamist terrorism", said Gilles Kepel, an expert on Middle East and jihadism.

Famed philosopher Pascal Bruckner explains that Islamism is winning its culture war against the pusillanimous French:

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

"Its 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."

Even the courts are afraid to hold Islamists responsible for killing Jews:

In 2017, two years after Jews were murdered in a terrorist attack at a kosher supermarket in Paris, 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. As France's Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia said, it is a "license to kill Jews".

In Western Europe politicians and intellectuals are trying to accommodate Islamism. As of now they are losing the battle and the war. In China, they take a different approach. We all find it appalling, but if the situation in France keeps deteriorating, more people are going to find the Chinese approach not quite so terrible.