Incomprehension Of The French Situation, And Palpable Want Of Sympathy, In NY Times Coverage

Here’s an article on France, and on the Muslims in France who do not accept the laic state, but that is not all they do not accept. They do not accept — unlike every other kind of immigrant, but just like the Muslim immmigrants to every other European country — the legitimacy of the man-made laws,and man-made customs, of the Infidel nation-states into which they have been allowed, or into which they have smuggled themselves and by dint of taking advantage of all the generous subsidies — health, housing, education, family allocations — and accompanied by wives, often plural, who seldom work but stay at home and breed (and in France receive family allowances), are engaged in what can reasonably be called the steady demographic conquest of France and of other European countries too.

There are many things that give this piece away, including the way it inserts the word “postcolonial” early on, as if the flood of Muslims into the country, and the enormous burden of their presence, is somehow justified, subliminally, by a previous, much exaggerated, “colonial” past. In fact the French ruled in Morocco and Tunisia for all of 40 years; they ruled in Algeria for 132 years (from 1830 to 1962), having determined that there was simply no other way to suppress the Musliim corsairs that constantly attacked the ships of Christian powers and seized the same, enslaving them, as they had for centuries (one of those kept as a slave for five years was Cervantes). The French established the first hospitals and schools that Algeria had ever known, introduced modern agricultural methods, and built beautiful cities, cities which have now been crumbling, for the past half-century, into dust. And they brought too, the French language, which allowed a certain access to, opening towards, a larger world, and which was part of the mission civilisatrice whose benefits can be seen in Tunisia, which owes its so-far relative success in political stability to its French-speaking elite.

As for the coverage of French worries, there is an interview or two with a lycee instructor, but nothing like a presentation of the real horror in so many French schools, which the union of enseignants would have been happy to provide for Erlanger and his assistant. There is no mention in the article of the refusal of Muslim students to participate in the minute of silence meeant to honor those murdered at Charlie-Hebdo and the Hyper-Cacher, no mention of how Muslim students refuse to study certain subjects (the History of France, Montaigne, Voltaire, the French Revolution, anything to do with Jews, such as World War II and the deportations and murders). There is nothing about the refusal, despite having had vast sums expended on them, of Muslims to show an interest in integrating into French society. The handful of exceptions, such as the political figure Rachida Dati are made much of, and some overlook how unrepresentative that handful is (and many of those who do integrate are Harkis, or Berbers). Dati, for example, is one of ten children; several of her siblings are in jail, and none of the others, as far as I know, can be said to be success stories. There’s a real desire to find Muslims who have shown their loyalty to the state, people who are integrating — and when they are found, or thought to be found, much is made of them (see Ahmed the policeman, and the recent immmigrant from Mali who hadn’t been in the country long enough to lose his innocence and his gratitude, and the Charlie-Hebdo cartoonist who was a Berber, and secular).

The article, supposedly meant to inform American readers of what is going on in France with Muslims and growing distrust and dismay with their presence, based on a new refusal to accept the party line, the pensee unique, offered up by so many in the political and media elites, fails to mention  the runaway success of Eric Zemmour’s Le Suicide francais, about the columns by Ivan Rioufol in Le Figaro, and the many thousands of readers who respond on-line, at length and often eloquently, to those columns. One might think that only the Front National, with that Homeric epithet “far-right” always affixed, demands that Muslim immigration be curtailed, and that the remedy of throwing still more money at the Muslim population, instead of analyzing what it might be about Islam that prevents the integration of Muslims into non-Muslim societies, ought to cease, not increase, as the Socialists in power are proposing.

There is nothing about proposals, supported by many, to strip of their citizenship those who have shown they are a danger to the country, and changing the laws in other ways to meet the greatest threat to France’s survival since the Nazis, and one that is in some ways more difficult to deal with. It’s the usual script, the one lots of reporters prefer, the one where those who are alarmed must be labelled “right-wing” even if there is nothing “right-wing” about  them (the anti-Islam parties in the Netherlands and Scandinavia want more, not less, publiic spending, for example, on care of the aged) unless being alarmed by the invasion of Islam must necessarily be”right-wing.”

Most telling of all, I think, is the quotation at the end, from Dominique Moisi. Moisi thinks of himself as in the line of Raymond Aron, but he is to Stanley Hoffmann, whom he knew at Harvard,  what Stanley Hoffmann was to Raymond Aron  — there’s been a steady declension from A. to H. to M.. However, among American and British journalists, Moisi is known, and is good at getting his name out (the written record of his portentous predictions about world affairs, and his solemn prescriptions for What Must Be Done, can be found at such places as “Foreign Affairs”). He is useful to those English-language repoorters in France who, ], like Erlanger, have an insufficient command of French to speak to those who might deepen their reporting, offer something more akin to what educated French people know is important.  Dominique Moisi is quoted, at the end, as saying that if he had to choose between “democracy” (by which he means head-counting) and “the Republiic” (meaning the laic state of France) he would choose “democracy.” What a frightening remark, considering how, even now, the Muslim electorate — which votes as a bloc, and on the issue of who is solicitous of Muslims, and who wary of them — might well control the outcome of elections even long before it becomes numerically even more imposing. This doesn’t appear to worry Moisi, nor if France remains France. He wants to stick with “democracy” — that head-counting — as the highest good. oes not kennly feel this possible loss, or forefell it at all. Raymond Aron, I suspect, would be worried. And Jacques Ellul, to go higher still in the empyrean, certainly would.