Earlier this week, before leaving for Auschwitz to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the Nazi German extermination camp, President Francois Hollande appealed to French Jews, saying that “You, French people of the Jewish faith, France is your country, your place is here, in your home.”
Earlier in January, in an interview in The Atlantic, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that “If 100,000 people of Spanish origin were to leave, I would never say that France is not France anymore. But if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”
What have we here? The country of Dreyfus– the country of Vichy and Drancy, Nobel Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat’s home away from home, the country in which “Death to the Jews” has been yelled by mobs in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries—is this country actually waking up?
As my colleague Dr. Richard Landes has noted, somewhat bitterly, these very vocal French leaders and the French media have been entirely missing in action for the last fourteen years when French Jewish-only blood was spilled: In Marseilles, Toulouse, and Paris, in a series of torture-murders, beatings, stabbings, shootings, and attacks against synagogues and Jewish schools—anyone who cried out “anti-Semitism” or Intifada was considered an alarmist and an annoyance. Philippe Karsenty was sued by France’s Channel 2 for his righteous challenge regarding the Al-Dura Blood Libel.
Honorable Monsieurs: A French (and European) Intifada against the Jews has been raging, not only in Israel but in Europe (especially in France), from the autumn of the 21st century. Did you really think your non-Jews would be spared?
France may have reaped a whirlwind of its own making as an oil-hungry nation who, under De Gaulle, got the oil breaks but only if they welcomed Muslim immigrants, their families, and their “customs.”
Europe did not want to do the hard work of vetting, deporting, or educating those Muslim immigrants who envied, feared, despised, and were intolerant toward the entire Western Enterprise. Instead, it adopted a policy of “multi-cultural relativism,” which allowed such immigrants to create rural mini Algerias, Turkeys, Iraqs, Afghanistans, and Pakistans right in the heart of Europe. This was supposed to prove that a very unredeemed Europe was, after all, politically correct and anti-racist.
Tell that to the Muslim girls and women who were and are still are being forcibly married and veiled against their will—or honor killed for resisting.
France, Holland, Germany, England, Italy, Scandinavia, refused to understand that such workers would have to be carefully assimilated or they might very well form parallel, potentially hostile, anti-Western communities, something they proceeded to do. No one foresaw that second and third generation Muslim immigrants might become radicalized and turn to Jihad both abroad and at home in Europe.
French author Jean Raspail envisioned all this. For example, in 1973, Raspail published an extraordinary and prescient novel, The Camp of the Saints. He imagined a flotilla of millions of brown-skinned immigrants traveling from the Ganges to France. An all-powerful, multi-culturally correct intelligentsia that has taught Europe that it must atone for its racist, colonial guilt welcomes the invasion. France (European culture) is destroyed, both from within and without. The novel is raw, thrilling, overwhelming, ironic, cruel, bitter, and every bit as brilliant as George Orwell’s 1984. At first, Raspail was attacked as a racist. Within a decade, European government leaders were all reading his work. Now what Raspail feared has indeed seemingly come to pass.
Oriana Fallaci also called this out early in the 21st century—and was condemned as a racist, sued by a convert to Islam in Italy for “blasphemy,” put on trial in Paris for “inciting racial hatred in a book which has denigrating passages about Islam,” finally forced to flee Europe only to spend her last years, quite ill, away from her beloved Italy.
In a long piece at The Atlantic, Shadi Hamid, a Fellow of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institute, has just suggested the unthinkable. Paraphrasing Yale political theorist Andrew March, Hamid writes that it does not take too much “moral courage” to announce that one is “against the killing of apostates, mutilating genitals, and kidnapping schoolgirls.” Wait for it. Hamid writes, “What presumably would take more courage, at least in France, is for a major political party to call for a rethinking of laïcité, and for broadening, rather than narrowing, French national identity.”
Polygamy, child brides, the burqa and the stoning of adulteresses—here they come.
Over the years, I have suggested that Europe may have reaped a terrible, karmic destiny: It slaughtered the non-violent, highly assimilated Semites (the Jews), and in return has gotten our violent, Semitic cousins from North Africa, the Arab Middle East, and from central and southeast Asia. Until this moment, Europe continued their own anti-Semitism by siding with the Arab Street/the Intifada against the Jews; they also hoped that their pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist views would spare them a general anti-infidel Intifada in Europe.
Only because non-Jews (Charlie Hebdo journalists and cartoonists) were massacred for what they did, has France noticed that four French Jews were, in a connected action, massacred for who they are.
There are currently 475,000 – 550,000 Jews living in France. Between 1948 and 2013, 81,885 left France, most often to Israel. Between January and August of 2014, nearly 5,000 French Jews have left for Israel.
An American-Israeli friend tells me that “One can walk in Tel Aviv, not just in Netanya, and hear only French being spoken. A French-Jewish man who came to hear me speak said, “Why should I have to leave France? It is my country. Let the trouble-makers leave.”
A French-Christian man who was close friends with one of the Charlie Hebdo victims told me: “We are all equal citizens of France and of the world and I am sad to see thousands of Jews leave. What’s important is what we DO now, how we get the bastards who did this. The situation is tough for all of us here. The jihadists are OUR enemy too.”
I am not sure that wealthy and sophisticated French Jews will willingly leave lavish lives for an impoverished or uncertain future in Israel. Many wealthy German Jews lingered until it was too late to get out. Prime Minister Netanyahu is to be congratulated, not condemned, for welcoming French Jews “to the land of (their) forefathers.” Neither should Netanyahu be condemned for his willingness to speak to Congress about Israeli security, the Israel-American alliance, and the extraordinary danger of a nuclear Iran.
All of us—Civilians, citizens of the world, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists—all share this danger.
If France is so ready to arm each and every French Jew with their own bodyguard, I wonder why President Hollande exited the Great Synagogue of Paris when PM Netanyahu spoke?
Likewise, how can we blame Netanyahu for accepting Congress’s invitation to speak—when President Obama did not see fit to send a single high profile representative to march in solidarity with France and the world, and given that he was able to bring a 30 person high-profile delegation to extend condolences upon the death of Saudi King Abdullah?
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.