When French schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by Islamic murderers two years ago, it was a rare case of such an attack actually making the news. Because the horrifying truth is that such attacks occur nearly every fortnight in France. So routine is Islamic bloody mayhem in France that hardly anyone in the mainstream media even bothers to notice it anymore. As far as they’re concerned, it really is, as Waleed Aly blithely dismissed it years ago, just an “irritant”.
What’s most irritating about it, for the mainstream media, is that it rubs up against their near-universal infatuation with Islam: what Douglas Murray calls “Islamophilia”. Islam, they insist, is a Religion of Peace, murderous Islamic fanatics aren’t “real Muslims”. They are not them, as it were.
That France’s unending stream of Islamic murderousness might be linked to the fact that France has the highest Muslim population in Europe is either ignored or greeted with furrowed-brow perplexity.
The distinguished social scientist Pierre Manent issued this lament after the slaughter in 2016 of Father Jacques Hamel while celebrating communion in Normandy:
The French are exhausted, but they are first of all perplexed, lost. Things were not supposed to happen this way …
Instead, according to the capital-M Multiculturalist script, what was supposed to happen was that the West would throw open its gates to hordes from the Global South. This great act of atonement for, well, colonialism, or racism, or something, would usher in “the end of history”, and we’d all dance, arm in arm, under the rainbow bridge of progressivism.
Suffice to say, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
Even the poster boy for the globalist rainbow future, French President Emmanuel Macron, realises that it’s all gone very wrong. In October 2020, Macron delivered a “Fight Against Separatism” speech to the French parliament. France “must tell things as they are,” Macron said, announcing a crackdown on “radical Islamism”, whose ultimate goal was to take over the Republic completely.
Describing the threat to France of Islamism as “existential”, Macron unveiled a series of measures to counter radicalisation, and at the same time restore and renew confidence in the Republic.
Macron’s proposed reforms, though, are in some ways just more of the same: in essence, if we’re all bit nicer to Jihadis, they’ll stop killing us.
But not all of Macron’s proposals were as starry-eyed.
They include abolishing home-schooling, closing down independent schools, devoting more resources to policing and courts, bringing community language teaching under the control of the state, restoring policing in Muslim-majority zones, which he acknowledges has been let slide, reversing ghettoisation, preventing radical takeovers of Muslim organisations, and rolling back sharia creep, such as the public cafeterias which now offer only halal-compliant menus, and the separation of sexes in public swimming pools.
Yet, far from “telling it as it is”, Macron went on to merely repeat the platitudes of the Multicult and how they want it to be. Fundamental to this is the belief — widespread in conservative circles as well — that there is a “real Islam” that is pluralistic and progressive, and that “Islam needs a reformation, like Christianity had”.
But this ignores the facts of history: namely that the Reformation was an extraordinarily bloody convulsion, sparked by fundamentalist reformists. Much of today’s Islamic violence is rooted in the fundamentalist reformist movement known as Wahhabism. Do you want an Islamic Reformation? You’re in one.
One of the most ambitious of Macron’s proposed reforms was essentially to bring Islam under the state’s wing, by establishing state-sanctioned training for clerics and supervision of mosques. Unfortunately, this ignores some of the fundamentals of Islamic theology, and the culture of Islam in the West.
Firstly, non-jihadist Muslims will almost certainly be affronted by the implication that they’re in sympathy with terrorists — and who can blame them? Yet, as we see repeatedly, many Muslims vehemently reject any suggestion that jihadi violence and Islam are linked. Even when other Muslims are killing non-Muslims every other week, Muslims (and Islamophile non-Muslims) are enraged at what they see as the victimisation of Muslims.
Secondly, Muslims will almost certainly regard a state-sanctioned cleric with a degree from a secular university as an attempt by an infidel state to control their religion — and, in many ways, they’re right. Most mosques in Europe, in fact, are state-funded: but by foreign, Islamic states. In Holland, by Turkey, and in the UK by Pakistan. Most of the rest are funded by non-state foreign movements such as Salafists or Balrevis.
Such mosques will not surrender their pulpits to university-trained “imams”.
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The idea also ignores the fact that there are fundamental differences between Islam and Christianity which no amount of wishful thinking can overcome. These have tremendous implications for a secular society attempting to reach an accommodation with growing Islamic minorities in their midst.
We’ll look more closely at those in the second part of this post.