The Fracturing of France, by Giulio Meotti.
US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron engaged in a public diplomatic clash just days before Trump visited France this month. The spat began when, in a radio interview, Macron suggested that Europe needed an army to protect itself from the US. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” said Macron.
Protecting France from the United States? In a November 11 speech commemorating World War I, Macron in a diplomatic welcome to his guest, attacked “nationalism”. President Trump had proudly called himself a “nationalist” less than three weeks before.
Macron, it seems, was using the armistice signed in 1918 to forget what is going on in France in 2018.
Islam is growing and increasingly assertive in France:
Gérard Collomb, France’s Interior Minister until last month and currently Mayor of Lyon, is apparently pessimistic about the situation in his country, according to comments reported by Valeurs Actuelles. “People do not want to live together,” Collomb lamented, continuing that the responsibility for security during the recent immigration has been “huge.” Collomb also warned that there is only a “little time” to improve the situation. “It’s difficult to estimate but I would say that in five years the situation could become irreversible. Yes, we have five, six years to avoid the worst,” he added. …
If there is a place where Collomb’s explanation about “secession” is not only a warning but already a reality, that place is Molenbeek. Roger Cohen, in The New York Times, called it “the Islamic State of Molenbeek.” And such districts are not only a Belgian phenomenon. “Today, we know that there are 100 neighbourhoods in France that have potential similarities with what happened in Molenbeek”, said France’s then Minister of Youth Affairs and Sports, Patrick Kanner, in 2016. One is the town of Trappes, not only famous for the international soccer star Nicolas Anelka, but also for the number of jihadists from there who went to fight in Syria or Iraq. …
In the last few months, the current French scenario has not been dominated by new big terror attacks, but by a daily rain of intimidation. A Frenchman in his 60s was walking down a Paris street with wrapped Christmas gifts last week, when a stranger knocked off his eyeglasses before slapping him. “That’s what we do to the infidels”, the attacker said to the man. A few days before that, a French Jewish citizen was also attacked in the street by three men. …
On the ideological front, “Macron is following in the footsteps of presidents who have tried, and failed, to establish an ‘Islam of France'”, Politico reported. … French authorities seem to ignore that the vast majority of terrorists from France have been French citizens, who spoke a perfect French and, unlike their parents, were born in France. They were perfectly “integrated”. They rejected it.
Meanwhile the reporting on the current riots in France say it is only about the cost of living, triggered by carbon taxes:
Last year, Macron presented himself as the candidate making “a break with the system.” In five years, his presidential mandate will be over. According to his former Interior Minister, Gérard Collomb, these will probably be the last years before the real “break” could become irreversible. Not only for France, but also for Europe.
via Tip of the Spear
