As Mark Steyn angrily wrote, “Je Suis Charlie” is a lie. Only Charlie was Charlie. No-one else had the guts to stand up to murderously intolerant Islam, and that’s why so many of Charlie Hebdo’s staff paid the ultimate price. It was all-too-telling that, even as they were marching and preening that Ils étaient Charlie, politicians and media figures were simultaneously surrendering to Muslim extremism by agreeing to never publish anything likely to “offend Muslims”.
Such hypocrite poltroons are most definitely not Charlie, but teacher Samuel Paty was. Like the Charlie Hebdo staff, Paty was determined to stand firm with the foundational French values of secularism and free expression.
It now remains to be seen whether France will do the same.
France is preparing to expel 231 foreigners on a government watch list for suspected extremist religious beliefs, a police union source said, two days after a Russian-born Islamist beheaded a teacher[…]Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin asked local prefects to order the expulsions at a meeting on Sunday afternoon, according to the source and Europe 1.
Of the total number of suspects, 180 people are currently in prison and 51 were due to be arrested in the next hours, the police union source said.
Darmanin also asked his ministry’s services to examine more closely the requests of people wishing to obtain the status of refugee in France, the source said.
Well, it’s a start: 231 down, tens of thousands to go. If Britain has, by official estimation, some 30,000 extremists on its books, then it’s fair to assume that France has as many or more. Europe is reaping the whirlwind of its open borders delusions. Teachers shouldn’t need to be protected from the scimitars of deranged Muslims. Perhaps the strategy that ought to be considered is shutting the borders and taking the honey of residence-on-demand and easy welfare off the table.
There are promising signs that France may be preparing to do something very like that.
Naturally, the left-media are aghast.
Other groups targeted in the raids included Muslim associations previously given government subsidies for their work promoting better civic relations, and only 15 of the people arrested had any connection to the gruesome attack on Friday.
Direct connection. They might not have participated in planning the attack, but how many of them had repeated the standard Islamic line that death is the penalty for such “blasphemy” as drawing cartoons of Muhammad?
But, of course, the left-media try to blame it all on wicked ol’ righty.
Thousands of people took to the streets in cities around France over the weekend to demonstrate their horror at the killing. And politicians, especially on the right, jostled to sound the alarm against “the enemy within”, as the hardline Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin put it in a radio interview, referring to radicalised Muslims.
Some voices were raised against the breadth of the government’s raids, but in general the tone was set by President Emmanuel Macron‘s likely principal challenger in 2022, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, whose party has targeted Muslims and immigrants for nearly 50 years.
“This situation calls for a strategy of reconquest,” Le Pen said. “Islamism is a bellicose ideology whose means of conquest is terrorism.”
As ever, the reporting is peppered with ad hominem slurs: “the right”, “far-right”. As always, as Mark Steyn also wrote, the left are less worried about Islamic violence than about a so-called “backlash” against next week’s Islamic terror attack.
Even before the attack on Paty, Macron, looking to consolidate a right-leaning electorate that is his only solid base heading into the 2022 election, had embarked on a campaign against what he called “Islamist separatism” in a speech earlier this month.
The speech reinforced the idea, current on the right, that there is a large and hostile Muslim contingent waiting in the wings — the country’s suburbs — to tear down French values. Macron vowed to end home-schooling as well as the practice of bringing in foreign imams[…]Some 51 Muslim aid organisations would also be targeted by the police this week, the interior minister said, some of which would be dissolved at Macron’s request. Darmanin called the most prominent of them, Collective Against Islamophobia, the CCIF, which compiles a register of anti-Muslim acts, “an enemy of the republic”.
The SMH might can sneer all they want, but, with Islamic terrorist attacks being perpetrated or planned once every fortnight, the French have no reason to doubt Muslim hostility to French values, or that many Muslim organisations are enemies of the French republic.
Let’s hope that France hasn’t decided to grow a pair and stand up to Islamic extremism too late.
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