It takes a nation to protect the nation
Two recent stories make me pose this question. The stories are:
Islamic radical shot dead by anti-terrorism police in France after ...
And
France Seeks to Reclaim 'No-Go' Zones
From the first story:
‘It was part of a nationwide counter-terrorist operation aimed at capturing the gang responsible for planting a low explosive device in a kosher food shop in the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles on September 19th.
‘A judicial source in the French capital said all the men targeted today were thought to be members of a secretive Salafist group.’
From the second story:
‘The French government has announced a plan to boost policing in 15 of the most crime-ridden parts of France in an effort to reassert state control over the country's so-called "no-go" zones: Muslim-dominated neighborhoods that are largely off limits to non-Muslims.’
H/T to Miche
The explicit recognition of the Islamically inspired reaction to this crime tsunami is a welcome development on the part of the State security forces. They are not just talking about run-of-the-mill gangs and criminals but of people who follow Mohammed, are inspired by his ‘perfect’ example, and take instructions from the Qur'an ‘to strike fear in the hearts of non-Muslims.’ Qur'an 8:12
So it seems that there is a growing recognition on the part of the security forces that they are up against a different type of enemy. They should look to their history for guidance, e.g. Tours. The pushers of Sharia-land in France are up against a force that appears to call them by their right name. That is good news for all of us.
However, for the French State to truly reclaim control over its own territory from the enemies within, it will require more resolve than they have shown so far. I hope I am wrong but I fear there will be compromise, accommodation and more ‘sensitivity training.’ But they have started a process now which they must win. Anything short of complete victory and the destruction of the no-go zones in their own country will mean surrender to the forces of jihad.
On another point: The Muslim vote was crucial in voting in the French President Hollande who was fully supportive of the latest police actions. How this will work out in the larger political scene and in the long term I cannot venture to guess.
Balises : qkinana
Priest killed in Lyon ; https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/priest-killed-lyon-france-ro...
It is nice to see another State leader, other than President Trump, take on the New York Times.
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Facing protests in the Muslim world over his response to terror attacks in France, President Emmanuel Macron phoned a New York Times media columnist to rail against “bias” in the English-language media and accuse some newspapers of “legitimising this violence”.
In the New York Times interview, Macron claimed media outside France did not understand the concept of the separation of church and state, and condemned newspapers which criticised France’s policy towards Muslims.
Macron has been the subject of protests for his perceived attacks on Islam, after he backed the publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad and claimed in a speech that Islam “is in crisis all over the world today”. Protesters in some countries have called for a boycott of French products.
Speaking to the New York Times, Macron reiterated his anger at some of the English-language media’s response to recent attacks by Islamist terrorists in France.
Samuel Paty, a teacher, was beheaded on 16 October, after he showed his class cartoons from the magazine Charlie Hebdo, which mocked Muhammad, during a debate on free speech. On 29 October, three people were killed in an attack in a church in Nice.
“When France was attacked five years ago, every nation in the world supported us,” Macron said, referring to the series of terrorist attacks across Paris in November 2015 in which 130 people were killed.
“So when I see, in that context, several newspapers which I believe are from countries that share our values – journalists who write in a country that is the heir to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution – when I see them legitimising this violence, and saying that the heart of the problem is that France is racist and Islamophobic, then I say the founding principles have been lost.”
Macron, France’s president since 2017, could be pitted against far-right politician Marine Le Pen at the polls in 2022.
He said foreign media did not understand the concept of “laïcité” – secularism, or the separation between church and state.
“There is a sort of misunderstanding about what the European model is, and the French model in particular,” Macron said. “American society used to be segregationist before it moved to a multiculturalist model, which is essentially about coexistence of different ethnicities and religions next to one another.”
Macron described the French model as “universalist, not multiculturalist”. He said: “In our society, I don’t care whether someone is Black, yellow or white, whether they are Catholic or Muslim. A person is first and foremost a citizen.”
At the start of October, Macron announced a series of measures to combat “radical Islamism”, including placing greater control over mosques and the requirement that imams are trained and certified in France. Some English-language newspapers have been critical of Macron.
On Thursday, Amnesty International criticized the president and his government, saying they had “doubled down on their perpetual smear campaign against French Muslims, and launched their own attack on freedom of expression”.
In a report, the charity pointed to the conviction in 2019 of two men who burned an effigy of Macron at a protest, and suggested Muslims did not enjoy the same freedoms as others in France.
“While the right to express opinion or views that may be perceived as offending religious beliefs is strenuously defended,” the report said, “Muslims’ freedoms of expression and religion usually receive scant attention in France under the disguise of Republican universalism.
“In the name of secularism, or laïcité, Muslims in France cannot wear religious symbols or dress in schools or in public sector jobs.”
Macron’s call to the Times came after he told a French journal Europe must work to be a challenger to China and the US if it is to thrive.
“The changeover of the administration in America,” he said, “is an opportunity to to pursue in a truly peaceful and calm manner what allies need to understand among themselves – which is that we need to continue to build our independence for ourselves, as the US does for itself and as China does for itself.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/16/macron-france-foreign...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/15/business/media/macron-france-ter...
Wow, Macron is going from strength to strength!
Nah - just window dressing from Macron - he is just trying to get ahead of the increasing populist-nationalist mood by delivering a fake nationalism.
Joe also says that. So if it weren't for Marine le Pen, none of this pushback would be happening. I guess I just allowed myself a few moments of optimism.
Ex French general fears civil war ; https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/12/09/french-former-top-gener...
According to this article the Left in France is more sensible than in the UK. That is a very low bar! However the Left in France are focusing on Islamism. Imo, Islamism is the child of Islam. So I blame the parents. I am reminded of a chat I had many years ago with a member of SIOE from Bulgaria who assured me that the Left/communists in his country would not allow Islam to get even a toe hold. I guess many generations of Devshirme practice over 200 years by the Ottoman empire/tyranny has created an almost genetic distrust of all things Islamic. We in the West do not have 200 years to learn the same lesson.
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https://unherd.com/2021/01/the-french-left-against-islamism/
The French Left against Islamism
Debate around extremism has been plagued by cringe-inducing naivety
BY LIAM DUFFY
Today, with most Western countries reverting to type and responding to jihadist terror with obscurantism and denial, it looks like far fewer people were Charlie than was actually claimed. Not so in France, though, which is more or less united behind President Macron’s decision to confront the country’s domestic Islamist movement. In one poll at the end of last year, a staggering 79% of French citizens agreed that “Islamism has declared war on the Republic”.
To his critics, Macron’s hard line was a cynical manoeuvre designed to reduce the electoral threat to his right posed by Marine Le Pen and National Rally. But such a claim ignores the threat that Islamism does pose to France. It is also to misread who is directing the country’s conversation on extremism. For the truth is that the impetus behind France’s skirmish with Islamism doesn’t come from the Right, but from the Left.
This shift did not happen overnight. Way back in 2002, the left-wing feminist collective Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives) was founded following a series of high-profile organised gang rapes known as tournantes – or “pass-arounds”. They soon became vocal advocates against escalating misogyny and violence against women. But they were particularly concerned with the French authorities’ empowerment of Islamist and Salafist groups to tackle the social ills of drugs and crime, which to the feminists culminated in an Islamist culture of sexual repression, misogyny and extremism.
This was famously attempted in the commune of Trappes, some 30km from Paris, where the Salafist community was enlisted to steer young members away from criminality and delinquency. One resident gushingly described how “mothers saw their children return to religious practice. It was a relief.” By 2013, however, it became starkly clear that this experiment in activist Salafism had all but failed. Trappes was seized by religious rioting and the commune set an ignominious national record in sending 80 jihadist recruits to Syria. At the time, Ni Putes was denounced for being “Islamophobic”. But, if anything, the riots acted as a vindication of their warning.
Yet Ni Putes was hardly an isolated example, a fringe outlier on the peripheries of French debate. In the same year as its launch, a collection of essays titled Les Territoires Perdus de la Republique, or The Lost Territories of the Republic, was published, which warned of rising antisemitism and radicalisation among second and third generation Muslims. In the book, a number of schoolteachers – those tasked not just with imparting knowledge, but the values of the Republic – pointed out that classrooms were disintegrating along ethnic and religious lines, that the ideals of secularism and universalism were facing an unprecedented challenge.
That isn’t to say that the teachers’ sense of urgency — or that of Ni Putes — was widely shared on the Left, or even the centre. In fact, as late as 2014, national discussion surrounding Islamism was still, to an extent, plagued by cringe-inducing naivety. In April of that year, journalist David Thomson appeared on a typically French news programme to assess the steady exodus of jihadist recruits to ISIS’s nightmarish project in Iraq and Syria. Thomson, who by this point had interviewed dozens of French jihadis, calmly explained that that French jihadis see France as a legitimate target, as an “enemy of Allah”.
For this now painfully obvious insight, Thomson was humiliated on national television. Facing the indignation of seven panellists and a presenter, the journalist – barely allowed to finish a sentence – was accused of “populism” and “stigmatising” French Muslims, while other guests drew comparisons between ISIS recruits and the anti-fascist volunteers of the Spanish Civil War. Of course, France was a target. And an honest attempt to understand Islamism and its militant jihadi offshoots would have made this clear. As one anonymous imprisoned jihadi made clear recently: “France is a symbol, an enemy. If you can push it into a civil war, if you’re able to make France lose its strength, its social contract, then you will have an open door to a victory in Europe.”
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It wasn’t long before Thomson’s every word proved correct: just one month later, a Frenchman fresh from the Syrian jihad, Mehdi Nemmouche, gunned down four people at the Jewish Museum of Brussels. Later, between the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the assassination of Father Jacques Hamel in July 2016, jihadists would kill a total of 239 people in France. Thomson, for his troubles, ended up on a jihadi kill-list and went into hiding.
For much of the French centre and liberal-left, afflicted by what Thomson labelled “jihadoscepticism”, the attacks proved a rude awakening. In particular, the shootings at Charlie Hebdo’s offices struck at the core of the French Left’s secular, anti-clerical values. (Despite the British media’s portrayals of the magazine as Islamophobic and racist, it sits firmly within the traditions of the Left.)
Since then, every section of French political society has woken up to the threat of Islamism. Just as with Ni Putes’s vindication, one of the contributors to The Lost Territories, a history teacher named Iannis Roder, has found himself exonerated and thrust into the public eye. The decision to invite him to deliver a Ted Talk in 2017 signalled his total rehabilitation by the liberal professional classes. To this day, Roder still challenges the escalation of classroom “separatism” through an influential left-leaning think tank, Fondation Jean-Jaurès.
More significantly, a raft of left-wing commentators and politicians have stepped into the rhetorical and ideological territory carved out by Ni Putes and others. Then Prime Minister Manuel Valls adopted a firmer stance than his fellow socialists on security, secularism and Islamism, though he paid for it electorally. Journalist Caroline Fourest and Marianne magazine, firmly of the Left, became fierce and fearless public advocates against Islamism, while prominent socialist voices such as Gilles Clavreul and Laurent Bouvet offer full-throated criticism of the far-left’s indulgence of it.
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Why is the Anglo media portraying France as the villain?
BY LIAM DUFFY
Even the academics have got on board. Echoing the explosive 2002 essay collection, leading scholar Bernard Rougier published Les Territoires Conquis d’Islamisme, or The Territories Conquered by Islamism, detailing the growth of Islamist movements of France – and, more importantly, where Islamists have become the de facto local authorities. Soon, long-held truisms about the socioeconomic causes of radicalisation were subjected to rigorous questioning, exemplified in the work of Hugo Micheron. Why, for instance, does Trappes hold the record for jihadist foreign fighters but a neighbouring commune with the same socioeconomic profile account for zero? What made the tiny affluent Southern town of Lunel “the capital of French jihad”, but Marseille, a big city with its own share of social ills, immune to the lure of extremism?
Crucially, all of these developments have taken place in the mainstream. A culture of public intellectualism sees those such as Roder, Thomson, Fourest, Rougier and Micheron on TV shows and in newspapers in a way that their British colleagues might only find themselves in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. It’s a refreshing reminder that the West’s understanding of Islamism doesn’t have to be hampered by political tribalism: for the Left in Britain, the cause is Western foreign policy; for the average liberal-minded academic, it’s economic and social marginalisation; while for the far-right and certain sections of the Right, Islam is to blame.
In recent years in France, though, the centre-left has shed this deadweight and articulated arguments against Islamism and for the values of the Republic. Yes, the far-left remains obsessed with “anti-imperialism” and identity politics. But there can be no doubt that those not on the fringes now focus on the political dimensions of Islamism, without implicating ordinary French Muslims in the manner of the far-right.
That is particularly important, as few things have boosted the Western far-right like the perception that the establishment is unwilling to confront the thorny issues of the day. Yet in France – and perhaps there is a lesson in this for us in Britain – the Left and the centre are pulling the rug from beneath the far-right’s feet. It follows that the former darling of centrist liberals, Emmanuel Macron, has been on the very same intellectual journey. The only question for France remains whether or not this is too little, too late.
The French Left have been almost entirely complicit. But they are facing a fork in the road.
They can keep on avoiding Le Pen's party, or they can support [Macron (= global capitalism) + misogynistic homophobic Islam].
Eventually Le Pen's party will be in control. But the Left will leave it until it is at breaking point before they make their choice. They disgust me so much.
My two summers driving across France made me realise how much they have to lose and how close is this loss. By chance in 2019 I stayed in Evreaux, a small city in northern France. I thought it was a microcosm for the imminent violence in France, my thought being "I wouldn't want to be old and white in this city". A year later, the murderer of Samuel Paty came from Evreaux to behead that teacher. My gut feeling that the small city was filled with immigrants who hated the French was proven to be more than a feeling.
69% of French don't like "Islamo-Leftism", if this poll was just amongst the indigenous French, it would be higher ; https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/02/28/nearly-7-in-10-french-s...
France is probably 30% immigrants. They've been saying since the 1990s that France is 10% Muslim. It is illegal to collect race/religion data in France.
A few years ago I found a website where someone calculated the % of Muslims in Sweden. The site has since disappeared, probably banned.
Antony a dit :
69% of French don't like "Islamo-Leftism", if this poll was just amongst the indigenous French, it would be higher ; https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/02/28/nearly-7-in-10-french-s...
Welcome to 4 Freedoms!
(currently not admitting new members)
Just fill in the box below on any 4F page to be notified when it changes.
Most Western societies are based on Secular Democracy, which itself is based on the concept that the open marketplace of ideas leads to the optimum government. Whilst that model has been very successful, it has defects. The 4 Freedoms address 4 of the principal vulnerabilities, and gives corrections to them.
At the moment, one of the main actors exploiting these defects, is Islam, so this site pays particular attention to that threat.
Islam, operating at the micro and macro levels, is unstoppable by individuals, hence: "It takes a nation to protect the nation". There is not enough time to fight all its attacks, nor to read them nor even to record them. So the members of 4F try to curate a representative subset of these events.
We need to capture this information before it is removed. The site already contains sufficient information to cover most issues, but our members add further updates when possible.
We hope that free nations will wake up to stop the threat, and force the separation of (Islamic) Church and State. This will also allow moderate Muslims to escape from their totalitarian political system.
These 4 freedoms are designed to close 4 vulnerabilities in Secular Democracy, by making them SP or Self-Protecting (see Hobbes's first law of nature). But Democracy also requires - in addition to the standard divisions of Executive, Legislature & Judiciary - a fourth body, Protector of the Open Society (POS), to monitor all its vulnerabilities (see also Popper).
1. SP Freedom of Speech
Any speech is allowed - except that advocating the end of these freedoms
2. SP Freedom of Election
Any party is allowed - except one advocating the end of these freedoms
3. SP Freedom from Voter Importation
Immigration is allowed - except where that changes the political demography (this is electoral fraud)
4. SP Freedom from Debt
The Central Bank is allowed to create debt - except where that debt burden can pass across a generation (25 years).
An additional Freedom from Religion is deducible if the law is applied equally to everyone:
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