The protests following the beheading of Samuel Paty are France’s Swan Song. Paty, a schoolteacher, was murdered for showing cartoons of Prophet Muhammad while teaching about free speech. According to BBC News, “Police raided some 40 homes following the attack, and the government also ordered a mosque to close for six months.” It is far too little, far too late for France. The country is well on its way to becoming a Muslim Caliphate.
The Islamization of France did not begin recently. For decades, Muslims have been coming to France in search of a better life than the ones they had back home. Until approximately 2010, immigrants came mainly from what were once France’s colonies. These countries were referred to as “protectorates,” as in the case of Tunisia and Morocco, or as part of metropolitan France, as with Algeria. Many French citizens settled in those colonies, and while the French enjoyed complete freedom, the locals were oppressed.
After France retreated from the colonies, immigrants continued to stream into France as either cheap labor or as refugees seeking shelter from hunger and war. The French, for their part, implemented a policy of assimilation and encouraged immigrants to adopt the local language, culture, and faith, namely Christianity.
But since roughly the mid-1980s, France changed its policy from assimilation to integration, and the new arrivals were allowed to retain their distinctive cultures and traditions. That decision backfired. Immigrants did not merge into the French society successfully and largely remained strangers, with their own culture and their own religion, and a clash of civilizations began.
In the early years of this century, France acknowledged its mistake and reinstalled a policy of assimilation, but the wheel could not be turned back. In the second decade of the 21st century, immigration to France grew extensively, mainly from war ravaged countries such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and others, and the French had no power to stop it.
Despite persistent warnings of the ramifications of unchecked immigration of radical Islamists, France remained hospitable to them, and they have rewarded it with death and terror. France has given up “retaking” many of its cities and neighborhoods, which have become “no go zones” for non-Muslims. French author Pascal Bruckner stated after the murder of Samuel Paty: “This is not an act of ‘separatism’; it is a declaration of war that must be dealt with accordingly.” However, the French people have no fighting spirit left in them. Even though they are by far the majority in their country, they feel powerless and helpless before their domineering “guests.”
Italian journalist Giulio Meotti, who often writes on Middle Eastern issues, recently wrote on the Gatestone Institute website, describing the current situation in France: “France’s elites… fail to understand the ideological war that the enemies of open societies have declared on them.” Another French author, Élisabeth Badinter, wrote, “[T]here is the continuity of our submission. I am convinced that if we had known how to say no, we would not be here. They all bowed their heads out of fear of appearing racist or out of patronage.”
Indeed, the French are unable to resist the takeover by Muslim fundamentalism. They have succumbed to their former subjects, but mainly to their skepticism about their way of life and principles. They no longer holler Vive la République! They want peace and quiet, but they will not get it. They will be forced to change their churches into mosques, their democracy into a caliphate, and their lives from freedom to oppression. The wheel of fate has turned on them, and the rulers are about to become subjects.
It will not happen overnight, but the process has already crossed the point of no return. We are witnessing the crumbling of one of the pillars of the Western world. And what is even more daunting is the thought that France today is Germany tomorrow, and so will be the rest of Western Europe.