Global Islamic Jihad seems to have made a target of France. In the wake of the ongoing incitement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and by other Muslim leaders of public opinion who whip millions of radical Muslims worldwide into a frenzy, Islamist terrorism has once again hit at the heart of France.
These barbaric terrorist attacks, which included the beheading of two of their victims, mark another escalation in the Islamist assault that France has been suffering for years. Alas, French President Emmanuel Macron and his government fear this is only the beginning.
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France is currently the home of about 6 million Muslims. This is a much younger population than the veteran Christian one. Muslim youth feel a troubling affinity for radical Islam and do not hesitate to express it on social media and even on mainstream media.
According to a recent survey, 75% of young French Muslims believe the laws of the Quran outweigh the laws of the republic. About a quarter of them refuse to condemn the 2015 shooting in which 12 journalists working for satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo were killed over the fact that the magazine published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.
Thousands of comments posted on social media after the Oct. 16 beading Samuel Paty, a school teacher murdered for showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in class, testify as to the deep hostility these youths feel toward the valise of the French republic and the glorification of Islamic terrorism.
In 2003, the French-Jewish historian Georges Bensoussan published a book about the lives of dozens of teachers under the fear of radical Islam. In some middle schools and high schools, it has long been impossible to teach about the Holocaust without students making anti-Semitic remarks or denying outright that it ever happened.
A conversation about Israel, even in neutral terms, places the teacher in actual harm and any criticism of Islam has become absolute taboo, making the subject unbroachable.
In the 17 years since the book was published, the situation has worsened considerably. Two Islamic movements have tightened their grip on French society: The Muslim Brotherhood, whose suit-and-tie-clad members have quietly infiltrated the centers of power in politics, the media, law enforcement, and the educational system; and the galabia-clad Salafists, who have created actual enclaves in some neighborhoods.
Some French leaders, such as former President Francois Hollande, have publicly expressed concern that Muslims will establish a kind of "Islamic state," or several such enclaves, in France. In some areas, such as Saint-Denis, north of Paris, Muslims constitute a demographic majority and maintain de facto segregation.
There are about 100 such areas across France, and they have come to be known as "lawless areas" although in reality they are governed by Islamic law. French police no longer enters these neighborhoods, where imams and drug dealers have control on the ground. Young women cannot walk around in miniskirts and LGBTQ+ youths cannot identify as such. People who have refused to convert to Islam have had to move out.
Macron is aware of the danger and is currently promoting legislation seeking to counter "Islamic separatism," but many in France fear it is too late.
The French republic's values are also a religion; The religion of the enlightenment. To be French is to cultivate criticism, to believe in freedom of religion and conscience, and to advocate the separation of religion and state.
These are intolerable principles for radical Muslims. The French religion and Islamic extremism are at odds in every way, and they may soon go to war.
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