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Why is the Anglo media portraying France as the villain? Targeted by fundamentalists, the French are shocked by the lack of support from their American and British friends

Macron's picture in Gaza, where he's really popular right now. Photo by MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images

Macron's picture in Gaza, where he's really popular right now. Photo by MOHAMMED ABED/AFP via Getty Images


October 29, 2020   4 mins

When Charlie Hebdo was struck in 2015, France was defiant. When blood soaked the floors of the Bataclan later that year, France despaired. Now, after seeing a schoolteacher assassinated for simply doing his job, for doing what the Republic asked of him, France is furious.

For France, the time of hashtag solidarity and “Don’t Look Back in Anger” has passed. After years of terrible bloodshed on its streets, the usual lines and excuses are well worn out among French audiences. Now, France is clearly staking out its position: that the jihadist terror they’ve endured — more than any country in Europe — is a product of the growth of Islamist ideology inside its own borders, and the cultural chasm it creates.

In a speech to honour the slain schoolteacher, the French President himself could barely hold back his emotions, while in private he is said to be ready for a “fight to the death” with Islamists. His interior minister has denounced “Islamist barbarism” and said it’s time for Islamists to feel the fear and shock of France’s actions, not the other way around. The public, too, wants real action.

While most ire is directed firmly at the Islamist murderers and their apologists, a portion of French anger is reserved for la presse Anglo-Saxon. A growing number of people, both in and out of government, feel that their country is being madly misread and misrepresented in the Anglosphere.

Among what little discussion of Macron’s campaign against Islamism in France there has been, it’s not unusual to find accusations of pandering to the far-right, electioneering, attempting to reform Islam, and enforcing hard-line secularism, or even state atheism. Macron’s policies on such a complex and sensitive issue are of course open to criticism, but they are none of these things, nor are they a knee-jerk reaction — he’s been talking about this problem for years.

Macron is not chasing a bogeyman. What he describes as “Islamist separatism” in France is a problem more developed than just about any other Western country, but there has been little recognition of this starting point. Neither has there been much recognition that Macron wants to tackle France’s own culpability in the social fault lines — the racism and the inequality that afflicts too many in the banlieues.

This problem though, goes much deeper than jihadist terror. According to expert Gilles Kepel, whose thinking is influential on Macron, the Islamist ecosystems thriving in the banlieues are inculcating children with a sense of hostility towards French values and culture. By the time kids make it to school, they are caught in a disorientating riptide between Islamists and the state school system’s efforts to impart the values of secular France. Whether one agrees with Macron’s proposals or not, as these kids emerge into adulthood, the potential for an unprecedented social rift could prove a looming disaster for the Republic.

When Samuel Paty was decapitated in the street in broad daylight for trying to teach his students a civics lesson, the New York Times ran with the woefully misleading headline “French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street”. The attack — in which the assassin who had just cut someone’s head off was shot by gendarmes — was awkwardly framed through the lens of liberal America’s anxieties over police violence, and it didn’t get much better from there.

In Le Monde, Hugo Micheron, a leading jihadism expert, slammed “hallucinatory” American coverage, writing that: “the progressive media appear uncomfortable with the facts. In the New York Times and the Washington Post, the two most influential newspapers on the left, the term ‘jihadism’ never appears.” Indeed, in some American coverage there is barely an admission that Islamic extremism is a real problems confronting France. The term “Islamism” is rarely found, unless directly attributed to Macron, as though a mere figment of his imagination. The American coverage, Micheron wrote, “illustrates the ongoing polarisation of American politics, and an increasingly distanced relationship with freedom of expression”.

As other articles bizarrely warned of rising nationalism and a French “crackdown on Islam,” President Erdogan was launching his own international version of the agitprop campaign that got Samuel Paty killed, this time against the entire nation of France.

Commenting on the media amplification of Erdogan’s portrayal of France as hostile to Muslims, prominent journalist Caroline Fourest told me: “This is American soft power helping Islamist soft power.” In an interview with L’Express, Fourest said: “The Anglo-Saxon press does not care. It understands nothing about the French situation and only reflects the American situation… The cultural misunderstanding runs deep.. It’s a form of cultural imperialism, a desire to push the French model into the American.”

Fourrest is not the only one to complain of cultural imperialism. There is a sense in France that ideas largely imported from elite US university campuses — the likes of intersectionality and identity politics — run counter to French universalism and undermine France’s efforts to tackle its unique social challenges in its own way. To then be hectored by liberal America on how to do community relations on top of this unwanted ideological import, especially in 2020, has left a sour taste in the mouth.

Not all Anglophone media is the same, and to its credit, the FT spoke to French teachers on the ground, where one admitted to not feeling safe. “If I have to show a film with a nude scene, a couple embracing, there’d be shouting,” she told the paper: “not the normal teenage stuff, real aggression, kids saying it’s not allowed.” But elsewhere the issue has been framed as if it was just an extension of the English-speaking world’s identity politics debate, a misreading that ignores reality on the ground in Paris and elsewhere.

Many American and British commentators are struggling to see past Macron’s campaign, other than its relation to what they see as a beleaguered minority community — whereas Macron’s government sees Islamism as the domestic growth of a supremacist, totalitarian political ideology that threatens the Republic and prevents citizens from accessing the rights and protections guaranteed to them. An inherently political problem, and not one of race or religion.

Nor is the French sense of betrayal confined to the press. Erdogan has accused Macron of mental instability and compared the situation of French Muslims to that of Jews in 1930s Germany (notably, Paris’ Grand Mosque vehemently disagrees), yet the early silence from the British Government compared to other European leaders was deafening, and certainly not lost on French diplomats.

France has just witnessed one of its schoolteachers decapitated for blasphemy in the street in the year 2020, yet it is somehow coming out of this situation as the menace, the deliberate provocateur bringing all this violence on itself. This is despite most of the appalling atrocities France has suffered having nothing to do with Charlie Hebdo whatsoever.

France is its own country with its own history and its own complex challenges, and it has every right to defend itself against Islamist subversion and jihadist atrocity. While the accusations of colonialism and islamophobia are expected from Imran Khan and Erdogan, perhaps not so from France’s friends. The next time our countries face these horrors — which we will — no doubt France will be more generous and understanding with us than we have been with her.

 


Liam Duffy is a researcher, speaker and trainer in counter-terrorism based in London.

LiamSD12

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Dominic Straiton
Dominic Straiton
4 years ago

One day, whens its far to late the West will wake up to the realisation that Islam has no place in a liberal democracy. Whats left of The French and English will spit at our memory for letting the catastrophe happen.

M Spahn
M Spahn
4 years ago

Who would have thought that irreversible experiments based on wishful thinking are not wise when the future of Western civilization is at stake. Oops.

Iain Hunter
Iain Hunter
4 years ago
Reply to  M Spahn

Who says they’re irreversible?

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  Iain Hunter

It’s pretty irreversible.

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago
Reply to  Iain Hunter

It is irreversible unless we have the stomach for a real ideological fight.

That would mean every leader in every civilised country stating clearly and loudly that every resident has the right to blaspheme.

It would mean scrapping the term “islamophobia,” and replacing it with a term specifically for discrimination against muslims. Make it clear in law that expressing distaste for any belief systems (e.g. islam or fascism or communism) is a human right.

A Bcd
A Bcd
4 years ago
Reply to  Joe Blow

Sorry, I started to reply then changed my mind. Where is the cancel button?

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
4 years ago
Reply to  Iain Hunter

Because they are breeding like crazy and Westerners are not.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Karl Juhnke

“Bonking like bunnies” is the technical term, I gather.

nick harman
nick harman
4 years ago

It’s too late now. Islam was turned back at Poitiers last time but that was a frontal attack. But maybe it’s Islam’s turn now? Christianity has run out of steam.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

No, the Chinese will have Islam for breakfast, watch and see!

Neil Mc
Neil Mc
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

As Kissinger said about the first Iran – Iraq war, ‘It’s a shame someone’s got to win!’

Colin Macdonald
Colin Macdonald
4 years ago
Reply to  Neil Mc

I think some Israeli PM said “pity they both can’t win!”

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

Great. So we have a choice between Islam and China. Meanwhile the West sinks with the dying sun….

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  dikkitikka

Not if ‘we’ follow the example of the Roman Republic in 146 BC, when it found itself irritated by the pretensions of both Carthage and Corinth.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  dikkitikka

The Roman Republic put pay to troublesome Carthage and insolent Corinth in the same year, what some now call 146 BC.

‘We’ can do it again, just put your faith in the US Navy.

A few “buckets of instant sunshine” should do the trick!

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

You want the US navy to bomb Islamic countries because the US media is pathologising France as a racist country because white Christians are being beheaded? Novel approach.

I’d argue that US actions in the Middle East (wars against secular regimes) and their allies are part of the problem.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Eugene Norman

I’m astonished you didn’t start with the arrogant expletive you used to reply to Fraser Bailey 15 days ago, and I quote: ” I have more knowledge than you”. You then continued your insolence by describing him as “addled “.

Not a good report, however even to an adolescent, well meaning, dreamer such as yourself you must realise that China is a major threat to Western civilisation and will have to be destroyed?

As for Islam, by comparative analysis only a minor irritant to most of us, but to Israel a major threat. Therefore it would be sensible to chastise them as well, less they get “ideas above their station”.

It was ever thus, and the Roman Republic is both an inspiration and a guide, do you not agree?

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

But china is no threat at all. It’s on the other side of the world. You keep proclaiming it a threat but explain nothing.

It’s a threat to US hegemony but not to Europe. Turkey is a clear danger to Europe as Macron has begun to realise. That means that my response to Fraiser was inadequate. Muslims on their own aren’t a threat as the offices of state and the army are never going to be taken over, but with the addition of an external State ramping up the rhetoric that might change.

As for the Roman Republic you are probably referencing Carthage. But Rome was in mortal danger from Carthage, which was close by and had marched on Rome. The Roman republic didn’t care about China or any power too far away to be a threat.

And while you destroy a city you can’t destroy a civilisation of 1.2B, not without destroying us all.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Eugene Norman

Surely you are aware Eugene, that China’s military budget is three times that of India, a power of similar size?
China’s bellicose behaviour in the South China Sea, its veiled threats about Taiwan, and its recent homicidal behaviour in the Himalayas cannot have escaped your notice?
Historically you must know of the, horrors of the “Great Leap Forward” and the ludicrously named ‘Cultural Revolution’?
China maybe on the “other side of the world”, but today, with ICBM’s capable of 10,000 miles, that is meaningless, is it not?
Incidentally, Carthage was no threat to the Roman Republic in what some call, 146 BC, having been emasculated after the defeat at the Battle Zama in what some call, 202 BC. However some Romans believed Carthage was beginning to recover and a preemptive strike was called for.
This is precisely why I advocate a strike against China before it becomes rather ‘messy’.It would also be sensible to take concurrent action against the irritant, that is Islam,don’t you think?

George Parr
George Parr
4 years ago
Reply to  dikkitikka

We’ve done well to last this long seeing as we were first torpedoed in the 1940’s.

Stuart McCullough
Stuart McCullough
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

Not before they have allowed it to undermine the West further and advanced their own economic and political interests.

Peter Mott
Peter Mott
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

As in Xinjiang?

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Peter Mott

I was rather hoping they would follow the example of their cousins the Mongols, and go all the way to Bagdad.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

No need to go all the way to Baghdad. Clean up Europe and let them eat each other in the ME. They are completely useless.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago
Reply to  Peter Mott

Yes, the hors d’oeuvres so to speak.

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

Yes. Muslims are out outbreeding Westerners, but the Chinese won’t allow them to take over if The West capitulates. China will then ‘save ‘ The West from Jihad at a huge price.

George Parr
George Parr
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

Yep, they’ve dealt with them admirably in the North West provinces

Iain Hunter
Iain Hunter
4 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

It’s never too late.

Adrian
Adrian
4 years ago

I’ve known a whole bunch of nice Muslims in my time.
They don’t want to take the side of the Islamists, and they won’t unless they are pushed. So why push?

Chris Morris had it right. Four Lions did more to promote peace in this country than any other cultural artifact.

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

Why push? Because appeasement never works.

The “nice muslims” you know must accept that “blasphemy” is a human right. That the murders in the name of their faith are utterly immoral. And they have a duty to profess the right of all to speak freely.

If your suggestion is that they actually represent a kind of “fifth column,” waiting to be called if sufficiently offended, then so be it. Our human rights are every bit as important as theirs and not one of us should be expected to live by islamic blasphemy codes – and they might have to face a choice.

Mari Brylsky
Mari Brylsky
4 years ago
Reply to  Joe Blow

And is blasphemy against LGBTQ + also a human right? As I assume, there should be no taboo or sanctity? No protected groups in society? Anyone could say what he wants and for this reason, for example, the bank cannot close his account? Meanwhile, banks that refuse to provide services to right-wing or Christian activists are refering to protect the values of a liberal society…

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago
Reply to  Mari Brylsky

I have no idea what “blasphemy against LGBTQ+” means. Direct threats against people who are gay, or transsexual, should be illegal. Stating the belief that transwomen are not real women might not be everyone’s idea of a happy utterance, but it should not be illegal.

I have a simple, liberal and clear view on free speech: I believe that the only speech that should be limited by law is direct threat, or incitement of imminent violence. (Potential exceptions: contractual limits e.g. NDAs, trade secrets, national security, insider trading)

I do not believe there is a justifiable legal definition of “hate speech.” Even in the benighted times we live in in the UK (draconian speech codes emerging), I believe there is a distinction between stating racial hatred (however objectionable) and >inciting< it.

I believe that banks which “dump” customers over their views should lose their license to operate; I believe that students that prevent guest speakers from speaking (as opposed to protesting non-disruptively) should lose their right to graduate.

Free speech is THAT important.

alex bachel
alex bachel
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

That is the point, the “nice” Muslims are irrelevant, they will go along to get along and the extremists will win. Nice bit of virtue signalling, by the way. I have lots of Black friends.

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

I too know lots of nice Muslims. The pushers are Jihadists.

Alex Wilkinson
Alex Wilkinson
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

The so-called ‘nice’ muslims often appear to me to be individuals who have yet to really face the conflict within them between their muslim identity and the liberal values of the West where they have come to benefit from living. And there’s no question that their muslim identity is the deepest and most sacred to them. The majority of them would feel vindicated by Islam ascending in the West and would tacitly support it all the way.

There’s no question that they see themselves as God’s chosen people, and the rest of us as animalistic non-believers, but for now they keep quiet about it because they like their i-phones.

Mark S
Mark S
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

Who’s pushing?

Adrian
Adrian
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark S

All sides.

Imagine it. You are a moderate Muslim. The Muslim fanatics are telling you to become fanatical. The intolerant left are calling you a fanatical homophobe. The Islamophobes are calling you a child rapist.

Which way do you turn?
At least the Jihadists will allow you to keep your religion.

David Barry
David Barry
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

“I’ve known a whole bunch of nice Muslims in my time.”

At the risk of confirming Godwin’s Law, Germany in the 1920s and 30s was considered the most educated and cultured country in Europe. I’m sure that most of them were “nice”.

People who are nice as individuals can behave differently when a mob mentality takes over. Loyalties are tested and difficult decisions have to be made.

Adrian
Adrian
4 years ago
Reply to  David Barry

Yup, and choosing to join the communists to prevent the growth of the nasty people would have pushed many in the nice camp into the nasty camp.

Can we grow the middle in order to push out the loonies on the fringes? Or is our only choice to force loyalties to be tested, and difficult decisions to be made?

David Barry
David Barry
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

But is the middle actually capable of pushing, or just demonstrating weakness? I don’t see Sweden doing a lot of pushing, but things don’t seem to be going well there.

Which comes first, Islamic expansionism when numbers approach critical mass, or Islamophobia – a relatively recent word as far as I know, and a reaction to, not a cause of, aggression. In 2020 I’d argue that people generally know far more about Islam than they do about Hinduism and Sikhism. Why? Because Islam has been doing the pushing and I fear will continue to do so regardless. Nobody (apart from the rare loon) pushes against Hindus or Sikhs, because they don’t need to. Chalk and cheese.

Andrew Baldwin
Andrew Baldwin
4 years ago

I don’t agree, Dominic, and am shocked that your comment received so many likes. I have no expertise on the subject, but someone who does, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, who is Jewish himself, sees the way out of these hideous atrocities through the reform of Islam. Freedom of religion is one of the cornerstones of a liberal democracy. Without it, one has an illiberal democracy. The state can come down hard on Islamists, but not on Islam, and there is a distinction.
Liam Duffy made the good point that the Anglosphere now seems to be so obsessed by accepting Moslems it is playing into the hands of violent Islamists. He doesn’t mention him, but in my country, Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a particularly disgraceful example of this. His remarks on the Nice massacre contained no mention of the words “Islamist” and denied that the butcher of Nice, who had a Koran with him and shouted “Alahu akbar” as he went about his work, had anything to do with Islam. Trudeau went on to give a speech on how wonderful Canadian Moslems are. It bordered on the delusional as while the majority of Canadian Moslems are peaceable we have our own Islamist terrorists here too, who not that many years ago conspired to behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Trudeau is all about identity politics and doesn’t care about protecting Canadians. However, he is right in not wanting to prohibit Islam.

Hugh Pettit
Hugh Pettit
4 years ago

One of the NYT’s articles is headlined “France, Waging a Crackdown, Honors a Teacher and Depicts a Plot in Beheading”. What the hell does “depicts a plot” mean? Two kids were paid money to identify the teacher. These journos are so demented by their ideology they’ve become functionally illiterate.

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  Hugh Pettit

Besides that their headlines are written atrociously. Moronic kids.

nick harman
nick harman
4 years ago
Reply to  Eugene Norman

Actually the NYT is always arse achingly correct in its English, the subs are monsters, it just often reads terribly as they have tin ears.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Hugh Pettit

The New York Times has lost it’s collective mind…they bang on about fact checkers and yet regularly write risible nonsense about almost everywhere.

It’s become, as has the Guardian, basically a activist bloggers site.

Steve Craddock
Steve Craddock
4 years ago

I may disagree with some of the French governments policies as anyone has the right to disagree with ours.
However, in this case after such an appalling act of barbarity all peoples should really stand together in their condemnation. Agnostics, -theists, atheists et al must unite in agreement that such behavior has no excuse or justification; but that is unfortunately where the truth emerges. Some people think it is actually OK to do this to ‘the others’, the ‘not us’, the unbelievers and they even have a handy set of labels ready to dehumanise and ridicule them. Labels that they have heard and have been taught to them by their peers and parents since early childhood and reinforced routinely every day or every week if an individual is so inclined.
I don’t have a ready suggestion or answer to such a complex issue but what I would like to say but with a certain degree of justly founded trepidation: “je suis Français”

J StJohn
J StJohn
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve Craddock

‘Agnostics, -theists, atheists et al must unite’ , Authoritariian much?

Neil Mcalester
Neil Mcalester
4 years ago
Reply to  J StJohn

You show a lack of understanding of the nuances of the English language, ‘must’ has 2 meanings, the second: “expressing an opinion about something that is logically very likely.” – nothing to do with compulsion.

nick harman
nick harman
4 years ago
Reply to  Neil Mcalester

Ohh I am not sure that’s not being a bit hair splitty.

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  J StJohn

It is authoritarian for people to unite?

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
4 years ago
Reply to  Eugene Norman

No. It is democracy. Many seem to confuse this.

Edward Jones
Edward Jones
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve Craddock

je suis Francais will have has much effect as Cameron’s and other politician’s arm-in-arm display of je suis Charlie Hebdo. Soon we will see je suis Nice.

wgeoff.56
wgeoff.56
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve Craddock

One policy would be to ban the teaching and practice of sharia because that encapsulates the worst aspects of Islamic doctrines.

Geoffrey Simon Hicking
Geoffrey Simon Hicking
4 years ago

“…the New York Times ran with the woefully misleading headline “French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street”. The attack ” in which the assassin who had just cut someone’s head off was shot by gendarmes ” was awkwardly framed through the lens of liberal America’s anxieties over police violence…”

The New York Times can go to —-

M Spahn
M Spahn
4 years ago

The Wokehadis have turned it into a campus newspaper.

nick harman
nick harman
4 years ago

It is actually factually correct and free of bias and emotion.Daily Mail ‘ Three cheers for French Police who gun down Islamic terrorist after he hacks down innocent old lady in unprovoked frenzied attack on the Street”

henrysporn
henrysporn
4 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

no it isn’t factually correct. As a former headline writer of many years, the fact that the “beheading” wasn’t specifically mentioned goes against every journalistic instinct. This would have been a factual, yet much more accurate, description: Teacher beheaded, police kill attacker.

pierrat.al
pierrat.al
4 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

Absolutely not.
It’s a imprecise statement concerning the attack. “Knife attack” means nothing about the kind of wounds inflicted.
“Beheaded” ou at last “knife murder” does.

Roger Inkpen
Roger Inkpen
4 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

This is the actual Mail headline – just as unwieldy as your made up one, but rather more sober:
Terror victim beheaded by Tunisian migrant who killed two other worshippers in church rampage + Macron says ‘France is under attack’ + Two more attacks stopped

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Roger Inkpen

Online headlines tend to be less punning than most people usually believe them to be because puns don’t work well in serach engines (indeed don’t work at all) and as the entire media world…MSM and disintermediated media need clicks so the headlines tend to be unweidly suitcases crammed full of search terms loosely arranged to resemble statements.

The bloke above was right…news is whatever is different..i.e *new*….so person stabs victim isn’t (sadly) all that new whereas beheading people who you stab still is.

It’s a kind of conciously patronising sense of superiority that has become very prevalent especially in what used to be the *liberal* media whether print, as here, or broadcast (TV news or radio).

A particularly bad example was/is the way the BBC will actively suppress the ethnicity of the Grooming Gangs every time a new one gets busted…That got so bad that when it happened you actually read it mentally as *Must be South Asian then*….which doesn’t help anybody.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

You have made that headline up.

Harvey Johnson
Harvey Johnson
4 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

Quite an imagination you have on you, Nick. May I suggest you branch out into fiction?

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago

They seem to have edited it . I hope you grabbed it…

Ingrid Nozahic
Ingrid Nozahic
4 years ago

My husband is French so keeps up with all the French press. Over the years we have noticed that U.K. press has been very selective about what they think the British should know about the going’s on over the Channel. Some jaw dropping occurrences don’t even turn a headline.

What happened to Samuel Paty is, in my opinion, among the worst acts to have happened in Europe in my lifetime. As a history teacher for many years, I know that you have to be so careful to deliver curriculum with minimum subjection. It is very important for teachers to encourage independent thinking rather than doctrine. I imagine that was exactly what Samuel Paty was trying to do. This story hit me hard and still does. I was astonished to see how little media attention the story attracted over here.

I can’t comment on the wider points raised in this article but I have noticed how we do not get the full story over here.

jake.plenderleith
jake.plenderleith
4 years ago
Reply to  Ingrid Nozahic

The slaying of Samuel Paty in the street was brushed over quickly. I cannot believe how rapidly the news cycle moved on, as if it were a trifling regional news story, not a medieval execution in Paris in 2020. Nobody I know spoke about. It can only be fear. The utter barbarity of it has left a profound impact on me.

There is more of this to come. I don’t welcome it, but it is not a confrontation we can shirk. Mr Paty was braver than I can put into words. Who would have thought that was a virtue required of a teacher in the 21st century.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago

“Who would have thought that was a virtue required of a teacher in the 21st century”.

It is everyday in the USA.

jake.plenderleith
jake.plenderleith
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

The very act of beheading.

Yes Mark, it’s this special quality that disturbs me.

But you’re right. You’re subtle denunciation has convinced me it’s no different from a US school shooting. I take back my renunciation of the decapitation of a French teacher.

Karl Juhnke
Karl Juhnke
4 years ago

The difference being that gun enthusiasts don’t blame the victims.

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago

Is it the very act of beheading that disturbs you?

If so, you should look at the damage both low and high velocity weapons have done to American school children in recent years. There is very little difference. Murder is murder.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Mark Corby

What aboutery gets nowhere…. either defend the sawing off of a teacher’s head for challenging his class (and after having flagged that some muslims might want to leave and were free to do so) or condemn it

But don’t just head off on some other topic.

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago
Reply to  Ingrid Nozahic

You are describing a crucial macro problem of which the BBC is but an example. It is a shameful state of affairs.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Ingrid Nozahic

One weird aspect of this is there is liable some overwhelming percentage of Leave voting people (y’know, the ones often depicted as hating Europe and the Europeans and being bigoted thickos) will be ready to unreflexively support Macron and France in this…while the Bien Pesant Remainers (y’kow the ones that love Europe and Europeans) will have many amongst them hand wring and what-abouting like crazy.

Ingrid Nozahic
Ingrid Nozahic
4 years ago
Reply to  Ted Ditchburn

So true. Both my husband and I are leave voters (well he would have done had he been allowed). This is the one of a few times I have supported his stance. I think if you are French now you should want to look past ideological identities and seek a solution. Nice has happened since this article – I can’t understand this world.

Giulia Khawaja
Giulia Khawaja
4 years ago
Reply to  Ingrid Nozahic

Agreed. Such as when, in the BLM riots a bike was thrown at a police horse which threw the woman rider and bolted, the BBC reporter said “a policewoman fell off her horse”

Nigel Clarke
Nigel Clarke
4 years ago

Why is the Anglo media portraying France as the villain?

Because otherwise the years and years of our MSM telling us that lighting a candle and having a jolly sing-a-long to combat Islamist terror attacks might look like it was the wrong idea…and we should have dealt with this problem long ago by deporting those who wish us harm.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Nigel Clarke

Those that wish to harm you are citizens of France/UK/Germany…how are you going to deport them?

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

It is because the western media is as dumb, demented and almost entirely duplicitous, as we see with their refusal to report the Biden scandal, which is 1000 times bigger than Watergate.

On the one hand it’s disgusting, on the other hand the truth can now get out there online. Had the American people trusted the media, Hillary would have been president. Had the British people trusted the media, we would still be in the EU. That distrust has only grown massively since 2016.

As Tim Pool said some time ago, the average person is now more intelligent (and, I would say, better informed) than the average member of the media. In the past that wasn’t the case.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Fox News , NY post, and the rest of conservative media has covered the Biden “scandal”…We do KNOW that people that vote Trump do not read the liberal press…so why do you care?
What makes you think than NY Times readers are going to change their mind on Trump/Biden?

” If the American people believe the media, Hillary would have been president.” – she won the popular vote by 3M, are you suggesting that the electoral college is the more accurate reflection of the people relationship with MSM?
On one hand you claim no one listens to MSM and on the other hand you want them to cover the Biden scandal? Strange, no?
You are like Trump; he complains about NY Times while giving the paper more interviews than any other.
Cognitive dissonance?

Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

As a once dedicated NY Times reader, I’ve definitely changed my mind. The paper is nothing more than a radical left echo chamber now.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

Perfectly acceptable position, don’t read it and don’t demand to cover the stories (with the view-angle) that you want.

Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

I think you misunderstand the nature of the press in America. British papers have always written from an explicit political position, and there have always been a wide number of papers to choose from. Up until lately, American papers, with less competition in any given regional area, tried to represent a wide political viewpoint, with emphasis on impartial “truth”.

Just walking away as the paper of record turns into BuzzFeed style click farm for the loony left is not an acceptable position. It’s destroying a pillar of society.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times etc. would argue that they cover the news in an unbiased way but have an editorial position that is progressive.
WSJ would say that it leans toward the right.
The real issue is that the “creative” industries is dominated by people with left wing biased.

Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Sorry, but do you think the news coverage of the UK in the NY Times is unbiased? It’s a complete joke filled with selective reporting, half truths, and outright lies. This would not have been acceptable ten years ago.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

That is your opinion, others would disagree. If I look at (say) Brexit through the eyes of MPs like Mark Francois, Bernard Jenkyns etc. would it not be a complete joke?

Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

They’re politicians, not supposedly unbiased news reporters.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

If NY Times reports Brexit through the eyes of MPs that supported Brexit would it not be a joke – that is what I meant.
People complain (yes there is a left wing biased) about NY Times because they don’t like the news as they read it in the pages of NY Times.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

The NY Times is not only biased, it literally lies, time and time again. This goes back to the run up to the Iraq war when it did not question the lies of the Bush administration. (Tim Pool or Jimmy Dore brought up these headlines from 2002/3 a few days ago).

David Stuckey
David Stuckey
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

As opposed to Fox News who can barely broadcast anything that is true??

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 years ago
Reply to  David Stuckey

how does pointing at Fox exonerate the campus paper known as the Times?

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Yes, and NY times has accepted that it was WRONG about its reporting about Iraqi WMD!
Why do you crave SO MUCH NYT’s approval?

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

AT least in theory, news is news, it is a factual report as to what has happened. In practice the media over reports the things that have happened that underpin its own views, and under or selectively report those items that don’t. But a sensible editor, a principled reporter, would still strive to achieve a reasonable balance and leave their opinions to the editorial columns. That does not happen anymore, partly due no doubt to cost pressures, but I suspect mainly, as Fraser Bailey says elsewhere in these comments, because the quality of of reportage intelligence is not good.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  JR Stoker

That is why we have many news sources; if you don’t like NY Times reporting go for Washington Examiner or NY Post.

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

One claims to be the paper of record, though.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

You are describing the problem not the solution.

The mimicry of the silo problem in social media by the mainstream media and most perniciously by print media and Broadcast TV news rooms who think of themselves as progressive keepers of the flame of impartiality.

Who do they think they are kidding? Only themselves really, as an earlier poster wrote, these days the readers are very often better informed and open minded than the writers.

Paul Savage
Paul Savage
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

The point is that it is not news. It is opinion masquerading as news.

Adrian
Adrian
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

That’s precisely what he was saying, only the other way around.
I.e. historically US news was flat but limited to single papers per region unlike the UK news which was politicised but with multiple different papers with multipel viewpoints.
Those single, flat, papers have now gone woke, mostly to turn into Buzzfeed clickbait.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

The UK used have a more layered print media than the USA with Nationals available everywhere but also multi layered Regionals (usually mornings) bit metropolitan city evenings nd regional and local weeklies, all reporting news slightly differently,

That’s decayed into dust now of course, but back then, whatever the paper’s wrote they were never like the very polemical, politicised papers we have now, and that’s especially so with exactly those papers that used to pride themselves on being progressive.

Grenville Smith
Grenville Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

It’s a complete joke filled with selective reporting, half truths, and outright lies.

That’s so emphatic, it sounds like you know what you’re talking about! So please point me to somewhere I can find non-selective reporting, only complete truths and no lies at all, please? I’ll gladly subscribe!

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

A writer, who never came to the North east by the way, wrote authoratatively of a society that would have been an exageration if he had been writing about a refugee camp in Syria. The view they have portrayed of Britain is framed beyond aall reason by the identification of ‘Boris’s Brexit Britain’ with ‘Trumpism’.

The weird thing is they feel this is somehow great journalism or even ‘progressive’.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Ted Ditchburn

“The view they have portrayed of Britain is framed beyond aall reason by the identification of ‘Boris’s Brexit Britain’ with ‘Trumpism’.”
“..beyond all reason” – Really???
Nigel Farage & Trump?
Many Brexit supporting MPs (long time Brexiters) supported Trump and saw Brexit & Trump’s election as (almost) the same thing.
And so did (since the article it is about the media) many in the Brexit supporting press.
Let’s not be too selective about the facts.

nick harman
nick harman
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Yes for some reason creative smart educated people lean left.

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  nick harman

Probably because they were in the education system for too long. I’m guessing that the smart creative educated right wing people, of whom there is probably an equal amount, got there through luck?

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

Really good point…..

Paul Savage
Paul Savage
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

No one is demanding that the NYT expresses the “view that they want”. They are simply observing that the NYT does not cover the Biden scandal at all. i.e. it is not a newspaper of record.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Paul Savage

Fine, NYT is not the newspaper of record.
And Fox News is fair and balanced.
Why do they crave NYT’s approval?

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

I, too, was once a NY Times reader, and would buy it when in NY. These days I don’t even pick it up when it’s free in the library.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

What makes you think than NY Times readers are going to change their mind on Trump/Biden?
changing minds is not the point; a ban on the story is. The NYT is part of the same media gaggle that foisted Michael Avenatti on the public with his serial accusers of Kavanaugh, each of whom was summarily discredited or admitted to lying. It’s the same media that silenced transcripts from the House Intel Committee that revealed no one having any evidence of the collusion Adam Schiff’s tinfoil hat insisted was there.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

If NY Times is as bad as you say why do you care about its editorial position in HB story?
Read the NY Post!

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

The Times is and has been the assignment desk for the US tv networks. They get their marching orders from the campus paper. Are you purposely missing the point or honestly unaware of it?

Paul Savage
Paul Savage
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Because it presents itself (as do you) as a source of factual information. It is not a question of its editorial position. It is that it no longer reports the news at all.

Brian Dorsley
Brian Dorsley
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

it’s a bad state of affairs if we resign ourselves to low journalistic standards. Without reliable news media people will turn to conspiracy theories for information. However, I think this is on par with previous technological innovations. With the invention of writing, people eventually stopped believing in the ancient gods and Axial thought became dominant. When the printing press became mainstream, people began to believe in witches and demons again; Orson Welles’ radio broadcast War of the Worlds had people panicking in the streets; and the Nazis used film media as tools of mass-propaganda against the Jews. Right now we have the internet which is being utilized by big tech-billionaires to propagandize against the masses. By labelling ‘taken-for-granted’ freedoms as ‘white privilege’ they are able to effectively engineer society into a techno-communist ‘utopia’. Those who resist can be neutralized by lumping them in with the far-right.

This is why it is important that we have high expectations of our news media. If we fail to do that, we grant them the power to convince the gullible that they are justified in their hatred toward others.

Peter Kriens
Peter Kriens
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

What we need are journals that are in a vigorous debate with other journals to discover the truths. Splitting the world in different spheres that internally agree is the worst of all possible solutions. Only in competition do you find what’s worthwhile.

It frightens me that you think that a press that only wants to tell what it’s readers want to hear is positive. I tend to read for what I disagree with because that is the only way to learn.

The NYT used to be great in this 😓

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Sadly all too many people still subscribe to most of the baloney that MSM spouts. I have (I would have thought) intelligent and (I would have thought) ‘thoughtful’ friends, who still cling to the intelligence of MSM. It is awkward being centre left, because I have to challenge these mouthpieces and so I am probably now considered alt-right. I would be encouraged if I see more of a general push back.

Ingrid Nozahic
Ingrid Nozahic
4 years ago

I feel exactly in the same predicament

Brian Dorsley
Brian Dorsley
4 years ago
Reply to  Ingrid Nozahic

Me too. It’s of grave concern to me that the term ‘far-right’, which was once a label reserved solely for neo-nazis, is now being applied to people who don’t conform to a political agenda, especially when placing this in the context of Herd’s other article today about how corporations can erase you.

mike otter
mike otter
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

True and now that the “4th estate” has woken up to what the internet means look how they are clammering to censor or even close it down!

claire.orush123
claire.orush123
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

I completely agree, Frazer, and what I see in current mainstream media is intent to cause division on a macro scale and have everybody at one another’s throats whilst supporting the encroachment of totalitarian attitudes throughout western governments. Thankfully, more and more people are wising up to their little game.

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Well, possibly more educated, though I would not equate that with intelligence per se. And these days we all have a delightfully diverse selection of echo chambers to immerse ourselves in.

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Up voted your comment mainly for the final paragraph….

Brian Dorsley
Brian Dorsley
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

Your last paragraph struck a nerve with me. Up until now I believed most journalists to be purposefully misleading. It never occurred to me that they just might be stupid. In a way I find that more frightening.

indulgemeuk
indulgemeuk
4 years ago

I have to say, I’m sympathetic but France and the EU in general has been instrumental in creating this problem in the first place. Of course media coverage does not acknowledge this but we know it don’t we. Anyone who’s been against immigration from the Islamic world has warned about this kind of thing for a couple of decades now, and we were smeared as racists for our trouble. They even invented a word for it, “islamophobic”, to further the smears.

I hate to say this is what you wanted France, because it’s not France is it. It’s the global elites wanting cheap labour. If anyone should be decapitated it’s them, not innocent school teachers.

Nick Whitehouse
Nick Whitehouse
4 years ago
Reply to  indulgemeuk

Did not Tony Blair say that diversity and a multi culturist society would be good.
I wonder why?

indulgemeuk
indulgemeuk
4 years ago

It’s the Davos set. Identity is cheaper than labour isn’t it, hence the rolling out of “wokeness”, the big push for mass immigration and the delusion that it would all work out fine in the long run. It has for the 1%. For the rest of us who have to live with it, not so much.

peterdebarra
peterdebarra
4 years ago
Reply to  indulgemeuk

… Merkel’s “million” is now close to two million ” what with chain immigration, stratospheric birth rate ( state funded ) and casual under estimation of illegal aliens coming in … perhaps it was a Red strategic plot after all …

indulgemeuk
indulgemeuk
4 years ago
Reply to  peterdebarra

Didn’t Merkel say “multiculturalism has failed”, and then proceed to do precisely nothing about mass immigration to Europe?

You see what I mean about two-faced politicians.

peterdebarra
peterdebarra
4 years ago

… up at the South Pavilion the attitude is : couldn’t care less and, as for ghastly, money grubbing legal Sharia Cherie”

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago

Ton rub the Right’s nose in Diversity, was his reasoning. Also cheaper wages.

Kate H. Armstrong
Kate H. Armstrong
4 years ago

I think his precise term was ‘multicultural enrichment’!! From which the self-identified ‘elite’ are well protected.

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  indulgemeuk

Why start off blaming France then? If anything these global elites are more prominent in the Anglo Sphere.

indulgemeuk
indulgemeuk
4 years ago
Reply to  Eugene Norman

Who’s blaming France, except insofar as the French elites who run the place have been instrumental in this policy. I’m talking about “fighting France”, to use World War II language. Not Vichy. The people of France, not the people who govern them (ironically Macron is one of them, two-faced though he is, deploring it with one face whilst supporting the mass immigration policy with the other).

Stu White
Stu White
4 years ago
Reply to  indulgemeuk

Does fear of decapitation mean you are an Islamophobe?

Gerry Fruin
Gerry Fruin
4 years ago
Reply to  indulgemeuk

I recall Pakistani’s moving into Bradford in the fifties. Some came to work in the Woollen mills. In a very short time they took over whole areas. This was not done in a natural way. It was a nasty use of bullying and vandalism that made the people who had lived there for generations, eventually move out. And then their extended families joined them. The area’s became a no-go area’s.
A visiting senior Pakistani policeman at the time could not believe the council has allow what he stated as the criminal class’s (banned in cities in Pakistan) take control.
So not a couple of decades ago. It was well understood many decades ago. At the time what seemed bizarre was that the Indian community integrated extremely well. We were ignorant of the cultures. Now we know and it is far too late. Look on the bright side. Muslims won’t integrate, what this means is they live in their own relatively small pockets. While the rest of our beautiful country is free for us to enjoy and live our own lives.
For now anyway.

D Ward
D Ward
4 years ago
Reply to  Gerry Fruin

Yet when Mr Powell warned of the dangers of this (communalism) 50+ years ago, he was vilified and anyone who mentions his name is deemed a far-right xenophobe.

juliabaytree
juliabaytree
4 years ago
Reply to  D Ward

I always thought of his “Rivers of Blood” speech when reading anything about the Tottenham riots and the hacking to death, by machetes I believe, of poor P C Keith Blakelock. He bled a river.

Douglas Roxborough
Douglas Roxborough
4 years ago
Reply to  Gerry Fruin

Absolutely true – well said

Colin Macdonald
Colin Macdonald
4 years ago
Reply to  Gerry Fruin

Perhaps we can grant Bradford and Sparkebrook their independence, then they can support themselves and remove the burden from the native taxpayers. Or if we’re desperate to subsidise spongers maybe we can arrange to send them their dole money back home in Kashmir, and therby reduce the burden of child rape and bombings here in Blighty.

David Barry
David Barry
4 years ago
Reply to  Gerry Fruin

“The area’s became a no-go area’s”

I’m not disputing the demographic changes that took place but I know the areas you are talking about (Lumb Lane, Manningham, for instance) and they were NOT no-go areas in the 1950s – 70s. The more aggressive attitudes came later when numbers reached critical mass and Arab influence increased, which seems to be the normal pattern.

Exaggeration and invention damage an argument which otherwise raises some important points.

Gerry Fruin
Gerry Fruin
4 years ago
Reply to  David Barry

David we have a slightly different slant on what a no-go area is. I have seen an area off Manningham Lane, near City ground become what I and the people who lived there in the 50’s claim it was definitely extremely uncomfortable to even walk through. Also ‘perceived’ (I accept) dangerous for children.
Friends there, along with neighbours were literally forced out. A friendly area became a grotty ghetto.
I lived for short time in the 80’s in Heaton and watched the rapid move from Oak Lane once
middle class area now 100% Pakistani dump. Into the prosperous area where I lived. I’d bet that is now controlled by the Imams now. All this taking over, with no attempt to integrate or not allowed too doesn’t have a pleasant outcome. Normally I have a positive outlook but the result of a Muslim takeover of our way of life is a certainty and that is beyond sad.

David Barry
David Barry
4 years ago
Reply to  Gerry Fruin

“David we have a slightly different slant on what a no-go area is.”

Probably. To me, a no-go area is an area, or just a collection of buildings, where outsiders and the police are excluded under threat of serious violence or death. More common in the US (and perhaps France and Sweden) than here, so far.

Without wishing to defend what has happened to Bradford, Dewsbury etc for one minute, there have always been areas of larger cities which are best avoided. The Quarry Hill flats in Leeds spring to mind, and there was an area in S Bradford (I forget exactly where) which was generally referred to as The Piggeries.

The people of Bradford have been well and truly conned. When I was growing up there we were assured that the recent arrivals would integrate over time. ‘Multiculturalism’ was not in the vocabulary – that came later when it became clear that integration was not happening and the goalposts had to be moved. My grandparents, who had lived through two world wars, saw their neighbourhoods change beyond recognition and they were considered racist for complaining. Wild accusations of ‘racist’ are not new. Then we had the Ray Honeyford business (at a time when Eric Pickles was chair of the Education Authority!). Riots in 2001 saw a pub which I used to pass on the way to primary school firebombed.

People who should know better think that all cities are more-or-less the same, just different in size. Not true. They look at London, a very robust international city which is buffered by (in normal times) thousands of commuters and a vast number of international visitors. It adapts. Bradford does not have this. It has one centre (damaged architecturally, but that’s another story), the reason for its original expansion has gone, and the effect of unplanned immigration has been devastating.

End of rant.

Gerry Fruin
Gerry Fruin
4 years ago
Reply to  David Barry

Spot on. Nowt we can do though. Glad I’m a long way away. Keep well.

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  indulgemeuk

My son has quoted to me studies that shows immigrant populations adopted the host culture after Renoir three generations. We are si mply not seeing that happen with these very traditional ME and Asian cultures.

Andrew D
Andrew D
4 years ago

Erdogan is right in one respect, that it’s like 1930s Germany. However this time the stormtroopers are Muslim, and the appeasers are the liberal media

J StJohn
J StJohn
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew D

Yes. The French state , like the Nazi state has entitled itself to indoctrinate your children against your religion using the money you earned for the benefit of your children , by taxes imposed by force.

Adrian
Adrian
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew D

Hitler explicitly did not want the Jews to integrate. France wants them to.

The argument for integration got lost a long time ago, because it was assumed that the integration would all be one way.

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  Adrian

Which is as it should be, really.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew D

Please, Muslims DO NOT HAVE the German talent for organization.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 years ago

Is this a serious question? The US media certainly and apparently its UK counterpart are dedicated to painting the whole of Islam as one giant rainbow anyone who dares say otherwise as a heretic. We’ve been warned against “Islamophobia” since 9/11, yet the same media is stone silent about one anti-semitic attack after another.

The Western media has no hesitation in ritually attacking Christianity but wets its pants over a religion whose adherents have carried out atrocities on six continents. And those atrocities were not centuries ago; they’re happening now, perhaps slowed a bit by the Covid fixation.

Paul Wright
Paul Wright
4 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Hardly. Are you saying that the Mail, Sun, Times, Telegraph and Express are not part of the UK media?

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 years ago
Reply to  Paul Wright

Hardly what? I can attest to the US media by living here. It’s not hard to imagine a similar sense among UK outlets. Stories about violence across Europe that had roots in one community were ignored or soft-peddled, the perpetrators of terror attacks were labeled “Asians” or “North Africans” as if that was going to fool people.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

They were labeled North Africans (Cologne sex attacks) because they were from NA. And it is easer than saying Maghreb or Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. I don’t think anybody good fooled.

Patrick Elson
Patrick Elson
4 years ago
Reply to  Paul Wright

media barely paid lip service relative to the scale

peterdebarra
peterdebarra
4 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

… look at the ongoing atrocities of the islamist child-rape gangs of Rochdale, Rotherham and 38 other towns ” no bleating MPs, no Enquiry, few arrests let alone convictions, over two decades tens of thousands of local girls raped and abused ” virtual silence from the BBC – though they have deep data and research on the scandal … and certainly no in depth report from the now leftist, colourist New Yorker magazine …

Ted Ditchburn
Ted Ditchburn
4 years ago
Reply to  peterdebarra

Just to be fair to Sarah Champion I think you should exempt her from the silent MPs group?

Mike Finn
Mike Finn
4 years ago

We should keep in mind that the majority view is sometimes that least reported. Many people have deep convictions on what is right and wrong in areas such as these and will not be swayed by media opinion or weasel words. These are normal people who do not feel the need to shout about and justify themselves on social media, but whose solidarity and support is expressed in private in a way that may have greater societal impact in the long term than via the online megaphone.

Claire D
Claire D
4 years ago
Reply to  Mike Finn

Well said.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
4 years ago
Reply to  Mike Finn

how’s that working out? Because here’s an article that suggests that the normal people are not just being ignored but often targeted by the media peddling a narrative.

Mike Finn
Mike Finn
4 years ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Well, firstly, there’s no such thing as “the” normal people; secondly, the article says no such thing, reporting that there is consternation in France at the reporting from outside France; and thirdly, France is one of the world’s most successful countries by many measures, as well as being considerably more tolerant than many others.

So I’d have to say things overall are working out pretty well for France, although – to use an analogy – I imagine it stings a bit when your supposed friends suggest you had perhaps worn the wrong clothes and so deserved to get attacked in the street.

Pauline Rosslee
Pauline Rosslee
4 years ago

I don’t accept that the Anglo world does not support France with its awful problem with Islamists.
Individuals do support France and the latest atrocity – with Samuel Paty’s beheading all teachers and many others will be shocked and abhor this brutality. The problem is that our media is too scared and floppy about this problem and fears a reaction should they report or comment on these incidents. The BBC reported today on an elderly woman almost beheaded inside a church in Nice – and someone was wheeled out to justify it… No condemnation, or support for Macron. But that’s to be expected with the BBC!

Think of how we bend over backwards to appease these people- Muslims who refuse to integrate in any way – manage to vote, claim benefits, (and so many are unemployed and on benefits) use the NHS and speak or read NO English. In France they do NOT provide translations, into a dozen or so languages- or translators as we do. wasting £Millions. as much as half a billion. NO, in France you MUST learn French. This I know having a home in France and recently needing to pay the tax on it, online- in French.

France’s problem is a numbers problem- they have so many Muslims and hence many live in their own Islamic world- even in France. And of course they breed far more than others do.

Yes, our children will come to regret we did nothing to stop this- I fear for all our granddaughters and great-granddaughters growing up in Europe with Muslims perhaps in places with the French, or English etc in a minority. Democracy is new to us – my mother’s mother could not vote when my mother was born in 1918.

But, for many Muslims democracy, male and female equality, liberal values, and free speech are foreign to them and not important and barely exist in their countries of origin.

sheybby
sheybby
4 years ago

France is victim of the universalism brought about by its revolution. This is what happens when you don’t take into consideration the educational and cultural backgrounds of immigrants and refugees before allowing them to settle in your country. This is what happens when you enact continental-wide open-borders policies.

Every year, more than 25 000 people are granted refugee status in France, the majority being low-skilled individuals completely estranged from French society. Add to that the millions of low-skilled irregular migrants who can move freely across the Schengen area and you have a recipe for disaster.

France is undergoing what is possibly the fastest ethnic mutation in European history. In three generations, France went from a predominantly white (Celtic-Roman-Germanic) catholic country to a predominantly multi-ethnic atheist society. Problem: France’s multiculturalism is slowly mutating into multi-civilizationism where different communities share the same space while holding onto radically different cultural values.

The majority of French Muslims grew up in neighbourhoods predominantly populated by African immigrants. They hail from working-class backgrounds and did not inherit much cultural capital from their parents. It’s true that the majority are peaceful but even when they don’t turn criminals or terrorists, the fact remains that culturally speaking, many live on the fringe of French society. Due to the continuous arrival of Muslim immigrants, many French muslims marry and live among themselves only interacting with the rest of society at work.

My father is a Tunisian history teacher. He came to France as a student and married a French woman. I’ve personally witnessed how among French North Africans, the cultural difference between those who hail from working-class backgrounds and those who grew up in middle-class neighbourhoods is striking. Those of us like myself who grew up in predominantly French neighbourhoods have integrated much better. Through constant exposure to French culture, we have internalized a lot of western liberal values. On the opposite, my cousins who grew up in predominantly Muslim areas are more conservative and more keen to withdraw into the Maghrebian community.

I have seen many people blaming the Left for everything that is wrong in this world. However, these people conveniently leave out the role played by the neoliberal Right in the demise of the Western Nation-State. In the 1960s and 1970s, France could have continued to bring European immigrants to fill its labour demand. After all, there was no shortage of white catholic Spaniards, Portugueses, and Poles looking for better opportunities abroad. However, all the way to the 1980s, French governments chose instead to bring low-skilled African immigrants ” many of whom were Muslims with norms and practices that greatly diverged from ethnic French people. In the 1970s, Francis Bouygues, the founder of Groupe Bouygues, one of France’s largest conglomerate successfully lobbied the French government to pass a family reunification law, allowing immigrants to bring their family to France, hence ensuring they would permanently settle in the country.

The reason is that French industry captains saw in African migrants ” who lacked class awareness ” a way to break the labour movement, undermine unions, and weakens the Communist Party, one of France’s largest political forces at the time. As such, the French ruling-class counted on immigrant workers, legal or illegal, to take up low-paid jobs, unattractive to the country’s workers, and to serve as a reserve army of the unemployed and underemployed labour, to lower the wages of the entire working class. To this day, some of France’s major industries (agriculture, construction, hospitality”¦.) still rely on the same cheap and easily exploitable labour force made of undocumented migrants.

Pro-market governments were so eager to bring down communism, they ended up trading the red threat for an islamic one.

G Harris
G Harris
4 years ago
Reply to  sheybby

Brilliant analysis.

Phil Bolton
Phil Bolton
4 years ago
Reply to  sheybby

You should be writing for Unherd. Excellent commentary from someone in the know. Thanks.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Reply to  sheybby

Thank you for your very knowledgeable and perceptive comment. I believe you have commented here before on these matters, at similar length and with equal perceptiveness.

Yes, as I have said for many years, the Europeans didn’t want to do their own dirty work so they brought in cheap labour. This was a hubristic error of truly historic proportions.

Jon Read
Jon Read
4 years ago
Reply to  sheybby

Excellent post. One can be very sure who is in charge once it is safely ascertained which groups are deemed immune from criticism.

Jeremy Smith
Jeremy Smith
4 years ago

Because MSM in the Anglo world has a left wing biased and reflects more and more the Woke culture. Worst, their craziness is being exported to Europe.
The left wing in general is softy-softy when it comes to Islam.

Peter Taylor
Peter Taylor
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

The French policy of laicite, I may be spelling it wrongly, offers absolute religious freedom of belief, worship and expression. The left and others including these journos are looking to create yet another victimhood that they can feed on to drive their vision of society. Given the number of such events there we should all stand with French attempts to keep a free society in the face of a minority trying to foist their aims and ideas onto it

Brian Dorsley
Brian Dorsley
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

Which surprises me. Many on the left lead lifestyles that go directly against Islamic belief.

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  Brian Dorsley

Cognitive dissonance is a thing.

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  Jeremy Smith

That in itself is contradictory, that a woke liberal medium will pander to highly conservative non western cultural sensibilities by almost automatically placing the perpetrator of this crime as a victim of a clumsy, unthinking State.

Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey
4 years ago

Three more killed this morning by the Religion of “Peace”.

J StJohn
J StJohn
4 years ago
Reply to  Andrew Harvey

In a study of ‘lockdown’ ( Religion of Peace?) still births rose by 300%. That’s an extra 2500 dead babies nationally in the UK; if we had the stats.

Michael St John Croasdale
Michael St John Croasdale
4 years ago

I find the headline of this article totally misleading. It refers to “The Anglo Media, and implicates American and British friends. “The Anglo-Saxon press” referred to is the American Liberal press. It’s not the British press, or no evidence of such in this article. Liberalism has come to dominate the press in Britain and America in that they don’t want to upset anyone, and both countries suffer for that as they will not “call a spade a spade.” France has faced much more fatal, and other impact, from Islam historically, more so than other Western countries, and deserves the support from its neighbours, in its time of need.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
4 years ago

The French shocked by the lack of support from their American and British friends?

The country whose navy would escort terrorists to within paddling distance of British beaches were they allowed to do so. All in the name of forcing the UK to stay in the Holy German Empire. Live by the real politik sword, die by the real politik sword.

peterdebarra
peterdebarra
4 years ago

… BBC Radio 4, World at One news today at 1300 … the Nice islamist killings – one a typical beheading – do not even feature in the headlines – though a local comedian’s death from natural causes does … simultaneously the Telegraph : “”” France raises alert status to ‘terror attack emergency’ after three stabbed to death – latest updates”” … this looks like a final straw as far as tolerance for the biased BBC is concerned …

Ingrid Nozahic
Ingrid Nozahic
4 years ago
Reply to  peterdebarra

Interesting

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

As the events in Nice (and Avignon) this morning demonstrate, we are perhaps reaching the crisis point. We either remain as secular states with freedom of expression – particularly the freedom to mock or insult ALL religion – or we succumb to Islam.

For some years, most of the press/media in the West has demonstrated that it no longer believes in freedom of expression and is completely incapable of performing anything resembling proper journalism. Of course, there are honourable exceptions such as Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, and even Sue Reid in the Daily Mail. Thus it has totally abdicated its prime purpose and is, now, little more than a platform for privileged but mindless members of the middle class to feel good about themselves.

Michael Cowling
Michael Cowling
4 years ago
Reply to  Fraser Bailey

In Avignon it might have been just a brawl, from what I’ve seen.

I have Muslim friends in several countries who are not interested in living in a theocracy. I don’t think that you can tar everyone with the same brush.

Colin Macdonald
Colin Macdonald
4 years ago

This “analysis” from the BBC news website after Paty was decapitated. “There is evidence that a growing number of people are uncomfortable” with French secularism. I wonder who these people might be? I dare say quite a number of Christians are “uncomfortable” about the direction of French society but so far don’t butcher to death those who disagree with them. There follows some mealy mouthed crap about reassessing the dividing line of secularism, ie don’t print beastly cartoons that offend sainted minorities. Of course the Beeb toes the line and has been Sharia compliant for years.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

That’s why I call it the British Broadcasting Caliphate.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
4 years ago

If I was French, which I am not, I might reflect on the French intellectual left’s sustained anti-Americanism. That said, viewing France through a similar prism is no answer. No nation can be asked to sustain such atrocities with sangfroid, hoping that better civics’ lessons and job creation schemes in the banlieues will eventually bring peace. French non-Muslim lives matter, too.

Caroline Galwey
Caroline Galwey
4 years ago

This really highlights the cognitive dissonance swamping the Anglosphere’s elites at the moment. Precisely the same people who marched, tearfully, to be allowed to remain in the EU, who lionized Macron when he was first elected, who damned Brexiteers as backward xenophobes, will be the ones who are now denouncing Macron as ‘racist’ and inflammatory for wanting to defend core French values – while people who voted to leave the EU are most likely to support him. This truly shows up our ‘educated’ class’s real principles: you hate England most, conservative America next most, then Europe, and reserve all your love for their implacable enemies.

That said, France ought to take some responsibility for exporting the half-baked ideas of Lacan, Saussure and those other soixante-retard New Left ‘thinkers’ who’ve got such a malign grip on academe in the Anglosphere. To a large extent that is where the rot started.

Jon Read
Jon Read
4 years ago

The over educated have form when it comes to trading common sense for the illlusion of academia sourced knowledge

bob alob
bob alob
4 years ago

It’s understandable that the Govt can’t speak out about this subject since they are apparently negotiating a trade agreement with Turkey, the UK has the same issues with Islamic extremists as France though, and for a very long time now the media have been part of the problem, when the message is “don’t look back in anger” then we should at least be refusing to buy into it, instead, like the idiots we are, we do nothing and the problem get’s worse because of it.

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago

The French reaction here is to be applauded. I don’t think that any country in the Anglo sphere could come out with the rhetoric that Macron did.

bobertc172
bobertc172
4 years ago

Islamist ideology? Islam is the ideology.
Islamist barbarism? Every Muslim’s Qur’an is rife with barbarism.
Islamist separatism? How many ‘moderate’ Muslims also want that?
Jihadism never appears. Jihad is not an ‘ism’. It is a core component of Islam,
Islamic extremism? At what point does compliance with Qur’an become extremism?
Crackdown on Islam? Shutting down the parallel legal system of Islamic law.
Growth of a supremacist, totalitarian political ideology? Islam is a theocracy.

Yes, France has every right to defend itself against subversion of its laws

David Cockayne
David Cockayne
4 years ago

Which British newspapers and commentators are ‘portraying France as the villan’? I see reference to the usual US suspects but, so far as I can see, even the reliably Woke Gruaniad seems to be playing a straight bat.

Pete Kreff
Pete Kreff
4 years ago
Reply to  David Cockayne

In the Guardian’s case, “playing a straight bat” means simply reporting the bare minimum of information. For a paper that is so supportive and protective of the teaching profession, it gave minimal coverage to the murder of a teacher for doing his job.

There was only one analysis/comment piece, an editorial claiming that this event has “revived France’s long “debate” over secularism. First, there really is no debate: France is a secular country and secularism enjoys vast support right across the country. Second, this is not really about secularism: secularism is not opposed by Christians, Jews, Buddhists or Hindus in France, only by some Muslims.

It is one of the Guardian’s many wilful blind spots. To the paper’s credit, it reported on the survey that said over 50% of Europe’s Jews were thinking of leaving Europe. But, in a paper that is supposedly the friend and champion of minorities, there was no outrage, no curiosity even. Imagine if a survey showed half, or even 20 per cent of Europe’s Muslims were thinking of leaving: the Guardian would be demanding an investigation and action to prevent this.

Colin Macdonald
Colin Macdonald
4 years ago
Reply to  Pete Kreff

The rule of thumb at the Graun is that a muslim terror victim gets 10 times more coverage than a non muslim, trust me, I’ve actually done the donkey work and counted the articles. And many of those articles connected to Islamic terrorism are actually about Islamophobia. It’s not that the Graun doesn’t cover Islamoterrorism it’s that it, and the rest of the MSM is so partial when reporting it.

David Cockayne
David Cockayne
4 years ago
Reply to  Pete Kreff

But I see no evidence of the claim that the British press is portraying France as the villan.One may right observe that the Grauniad and the anti-British Broadcasting Corporation are Wet, Woke and Woeful but I don’t see evidence of them lauding the disgusting Mahathir Mohamad.

Pete Kreff
Pete Kreff
4 years ago
Reply to  David Cockayne

I didn’t actually make any claim about the British press. My comment dealt solely with the Guardian and its attitudes.

I’m sorry if it came across as invective against you, that wasn’t what I’d intended.

Sometimes just thinking of the Guardian and its nasty mix of cowardice, wilful blindness, dishonesty… see, I’m getting worked up again.

Neil Mc
Neil Mc
4 years ago

The UK media led by the BBC and the leading US media are all leftists and totally out of touch with the populations. I feel sure the people of the Anglosphere feel the same as the French and would agree the same solutions if given a chance.

pwgallo
pwgallo
4 years ago

There is no place for medieval religious fundamentalism of any ilk in a modern society, be it Jewish, Islamic or Christian, or otherwise. It should be opposed and vilified like the rot that it is.

David Barry
David Barry
4 years ago
Reply to  pwgallo

Agree entirely.

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago

The argument should be simple: violently attacking someone for publishing a cartoon is no different to violently attacking someone because they wear a burka.

The responsibility not to offend a muslim by making jokes about islam is non-existent.
The responsibility not to offend a fascist by wearing a burka is non-existent.

Violence is the responsibility – the crime – of the perpetrator, not the ‘provocateur’. The cartoonist is as innocent as the burka-wearer. Not to see this is to privilege muslim offence over other peoples’.

henrysporn
henrysporn
4 years ago
Reply to  Joe Blow

how many burka wearers have been violently attacked, let alone murdered, let alone decapicated, let alone massacred along with dozens of other burka wearers. False equivalence. Very false.

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago
Reply to  henrysporn

I simply fail to grasp your point.
Or, perhaps I wasn’t clear: violence as a response to self-expression is not acceptable. Ever.

Whether you are offended by a “blasphemous” cartoon, or by the presence of an islamic symbol in your community, attacking people with violence is not ever tolerable.

My argument is >mostly< addressed to the idiots (whether muslim or not) who imply that the person creating the “offensive” cartoon has in some way done something wrong. They have not.

Charlie Hebdo has as much right to publish scurrilous cartoons as a woman has to wear a hijab.

henrysporn
henrysporn
4 years ago
Reply to  Joe Blow

then you’re thick. people offended by cartoons murder people. People offended by burkhas do not. End of.

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago
Reply to  henrysporn

[Some] people offended by cartoons have indeed murdered people. And, it is utterly vital that we all state – clearly and loudly – that the cartoonists involved are free of all responsibility. Just as no woman dressed “provocatively” is guilty of anything if she is raped while so dressed.

Have you never heard the constant drone of whining from the likes of Warsi and others in the offence-seeking sector of the “muslim community” about how “islamophobic attacks” supposedly rise after jokes about burkas.

We have to embed, deeply in our culture, the fact that muslim offence doesn’t matter. Muslims can choose to be offended. Just as anyone else can. Their offence should not be privileged over anyone else’s.

Vilde Chaye
Vilde Chaye
4 years ago
Reply to  Joe Blow

you’re making my point. Yet originally you made the false, very false,equivalence between “violently attacking someone for publishing a cartoon is no different to violently attacking someone because they wear a burka.” And,as I said,you’ll have to dig deep to find burqa wearers attacked in anywhere near the violence or frequency of cartoon publishers.

Joe Blow
Joe Blow
4 years ago
Reply to  Vilde Chaye

Fair enough. I agree that violence towards muslims as a result of their self-expession is probably far, far rarer than violence by muslims because of someone else’s self-expession. (Though, there have been some very violent attacks, like the guy who drove his car into a group outside a mosque).

Let me change the style of expression: any act of violence on the basis of self-expression (be that speech, dress, writing or drawing) is indefensible. Yet – and here is the point that worries me the most – nobody blames the burka-wearer for provoling the attacker. Yet, cartoonists are blamed for provoking muslims.

A Bcd
A Bcd
4 years ago
Reply to  henrysporn

Come to think of it, quite a few “burka wearers” have been violently attacked, murdered, decapitated (“honor” killings, anyone?), and massacred along with dozens of other burka wearers, as the majority of those victimized by such atrocities, perpetrated all over the globe, are (other) Muslims.

My heart breaks for France. Why, oh why, did they so firmly reject Marine LP in 2017? I am a lifelong Democrat and lean to the left, but if I were a voter in France I would have supported her. The situation there has not just become dire. It has been dire for decades. I can’t see it becoming anything but worse.

phoren.returned
phoren.returned
4 years ago

In the English press, a moderate Muslim is one who does not decapitate people, period. The bar is that low. He/she is, however, allowed to cheer on those who do the dirty deed. In fact, he/she has taken on the cheerleading duty to a strident level, to compensate for his/her seemingly unfathomable aversion to human blood.
Those Muslims, who like other normal humans are open minded and possess the live-and-let-live quality (unbelievable as it may sound, even today majority of Muslims belong to this silent category) are derided as apostates, wimps and unworthy of being called Muslims. Past that, they are fair game too.
The system is so completely watertight that the chances of someone rising from within the ranks to lead Muslims towards normalcy appears like a hopeless fantasy.
The leftists of the world have made common cause with the militant loud mouthed Muslims. The only logic for this is ‘enemy’s enemy is friend’. They (the leftists) have no idea that if Muslims gain political power and impose sharia, they (the God – and brain- less leftists) will be the first casualties.
Overall, the world is headed towards a major flashpoint. I sure hope someone has a plan to secure Pakistan’s nukes before we reach the tipping point (I know India does but, someone else also should have a plan b).

Alison Houston
Alison Houston
4 years ago

Sunni Islamist terrorism was whipped into being by American and British intelligence services during the Soviet era and then developed further by Clinton in the Balkans and then by the various Iraq wars, the Libyan mess the later, post Soviet Afghan mess, and the funding of Al Nusra front and others in Syria and the White Helmets ( many of whom are now residing in safety in England, posting pro Islamist statements of social media, but still heroes as far as the left, the BBC and MI6 are concerned).

The Democrats are expecting to beat Trump, they will be back to their old tricks, whipping up hatred in the Middle East, funding Islamic extremism with help from their corrupt friends in their own and our intelligence services before you can say James Le Measurier is dead.

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  Alison Houston

That’s right but many people would support “our boys” and therefore all the wars over there. The wars, no more than out sourcing, benefit a tiny elite.

Pete Kreff
Pete Kreff
4 years ago
Reply to  Alison Houston

Sunni Islamist terrorism was whipped into being by American and British intelligence services during the Soviet era

I suspect that Sunni Islamist terrorism predates Afghanistan by a few centuries.

The west’s stupid foreign policy may have energised it somewhat in recent decades, but Islamic supremacism and expansionism started with Mohammed, or whoever put together the religion of Islam.

norman.nicoll
norman.nicoll
4 years ago

The writing is on the wall. Wake up politicians and people who treasure the West’s way of life. Heard very few railing, against the beheading of the schoolteacher and more recently worshippers within a French church. Islam is not a religion of peace. Erdogan typifies their barbaric dark ages mentality.

Janetta McGuigan
Janetta McGuigan
4 years ago
Reply to  norman.nicoll

Samuel Paty. The Frenchman brutally beheaded in the street for teaching his students. Thank you Norman Nicoll for remembering him.

David Jory
David Jory
4 years ago

And Alexandre Pigeard was the waiter who served me at Borough Market 3 days before he was murdered by another Muslim terrorist who tried to decapitate him.
As the knife cut his throat his last words were to a woman who wanted to help. He told her to get back.
That was the difference between that Frenchman and that muslim.
I remember many others, but today I think of Alex and Samuel.

aelf
aelf
4 years ago

Socialism & Islam are both totalitarian ideologies. The ‘Anglo media’ is largely left-wing &, therefore, has no more interest in conveying the truth about Islam than it does in conveying the truth about socialism.

Derek M
Derek M
4 years ago

The New York Times and Washington Post are no more representative of the US and its people than the Guardian and Observer are of Britain and the British.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Reply to  Derek M

True. But they have inordinate power.

James Pelton
James Pelton
4 years ago

There is more than a little irony here. The NYT and WaPo along with many of the people who populate the humanities faculties at most NorthAmerican Universities have for decades been marinating their brains in the thinking of Foucault, Derrida, Lucan, Deleuze, Badiou and Althusser among others. These malignant intellectuals weren’t all French but many (most?) were. The drivel they dumped out has rendered the intellectual classes in the west incapable of seeing the lines on the highway and the dump truck headed their way at speed. It all has a feeling of “what goes around, comes around”.

Julia H
Julia H
4 years ago

I can’t help feeling that an army is growing within France and waiting for its moment to strike. I can see how an Islamic republic could be established there by violent revolution once the numbers stack up.

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  Julia H

Nowhere near that. The french have a loyal army and police force. The worry is erdogen.

peterdebarra
peterdebarra
4 years ago
Reply to  Eugene Norman

… and what are the names of those MPs who wanted Turkey to become an EU member – sharia division, of course ?

Eugene Norman
Eugene Norman
4 years ago
Reply to  peterdebarra

Dunno, mate. Many Conservatives in there no doubt. It’s hubris really. The idea that the west can absorb another culture unaffected.

dikkitikka
dikkitikka
4 years ago
Reply to  Eugene Norman

Not to mention the UK becoming a source of Jihadists intent on furthering a French Islamic Republic

peterdebarra
peterdebarra
4 years ago
Reply to  Julia H

… France, seared by two centuries of National humiliation ” from 1812 to the occupation (sic) of 1870 to WWI to the Fall of France in 1940 ” is in no psychological position to resist the new islamic push towards their yearned for tipping point. Look at Paris – ringed with high rise so called sharia cities with halal slaughter in the streets, stratospheric birth rates and : the next cathedral to go will be ?

henrysporn
henrysporn
4 years ago
Reply to  peterdebarra

1812 was no humiliation. perhaps you mean 1814-1815, when Napoleon was defeated (twice). As for WWI, there was no national humiliation, quite the opposite.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Reply to  Julia H

Yep, that’s the plan.

sheybby
sheybby
4 years ago
Reply to  Julia H

An army implies a well-defined structure and a centralized command chain. No such things exist in France. The heterogenous Muslim community simply lack the educational and organizational skills required to wage a successful insurrection.

The islamization of France is simply the result of lax immigration policies enacted by left-wing AND right-wing governments combined with the freedom of movement inherent to the Schengen area.

What exist though are former French soldiers and police officers who are arming themselves to the teeth (AK-47, shotguns…) waiting for the upcoming “racial war.”

angelosnyktos
angelosnyktos
4 years ago
Reply to  Julia H

Not only in France, same applies to Germany.