According to a new comprehensive survey, 49% of French Muslims want Catholics to convert to Islam, 36% percent want churches to be transformed into mosques, and 25% of French Muslims said that the word "France" is a word they reject. Pictured: Thousands of Muslims arrive to attend the morning Eid al-Adha prayers at the Great Mosque of Paris on June 28, 2023. (Photo by Zakaria Abdelkafi/AFP via Getty Images)January 30, 2024. The French weekly,Le Journal du Dimanche, publishes the most comprehensive and detailedsurveyon what French Muslims think. Not surprisingly, the results are disturbing.
The first question in the survey was about Jews. 17% of French Muslims admit that they hate Jews. 39% say they have a bad, or very bad, opinion of Judaism.
France is the only country in 21st-century Europe where Jews regularly have beenmurderedsimply because they are Jews. Since the kidnapping, torture and murder ofIlan Halimiin January 2006, all Jews murdered in France have been killed by Muslims. Sammy Ghozlan, the president of the National Office for Vigilance against Anti-Semitism (BNVCA), which lists anti-Semitic acts and helps their victims, hasemphasizedyear after year, for more than twenty years, that almost all violent anti-Semitic acts committed in France are committed by Muslims.
When it comes to Israel, the results are even more disturbing. Feelings go beyond hatred. 45% of French Muslims say they want the total destruction of Israel. An equivalent number of French Muslims define the massacre rape, torture, beheadings and burning alive of Jews by Hamas terrorists in Israel on October 7, 2023, as an "act of resistance".
So, almost half of a religious community in a Western democracy openly wants the destruction of a group of people who were just massacred in another country, and in thegreatest numbersince the end of the Holocaust.
19% of French Muslims say they havesympathy for Hamas. That so many French Muslims have sympathy for an organization whose leaderssaythat they will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated, and unabashedly state that they want thegenocidal destructionof the only Jewish state, should sound an alarm that French Jews, and French non-Jews, are in an extremelyperilous situation.
Other figures showed that 42% of French Muslims place respect for Islamic Sharia law above respect for the laws of the French republic (the percentage rises to57%among young Muslims aged 18 to 25).
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2003 thatSharia law is incompatiblewith the values of democracy. Sharia law stipulates that Allah has dictated all the rules that human beings must obey, and that all rules contrary to Sharia law must be rejected. 37% of French Muslims say theysupport the Muslim Brotherhood-- also not surprising: the main French Muslim organization, Musulmans de France ("Muslims of France") is theFrench branchof the Muslim Brotherhood.
Every year, Muslims of France organizes aconferencethat attracts hundreds of thousands of Muslims from all over Europe. The group also invitesradical imamswho speak to the crowd.
The survey further showed that 49% of French Muslims want Catholics to convert to Islam, and that 36% percent want churches to be transformed into mosques. Somechurchesalready have been transformed. The survey also discloses that 25% of French Muslims said that the word "France" is a word they reject.
These figures are best seen and understood in conjunction with other facts.
France is one of the only countries in the Western world where men have been beheaded by radicalized Muslims. (The other is the United Kingdom, where two Muslimstried to beheadBritish Soldier Lee Rigby in 2013.)Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher, was beheaded on October 16, 2020.Herve Cornara, a small business entrepreneur, was beheaded on June 26, 2015 in Romans-sur-Isère, a small town in the southeast of France. AndFather Jacques Hamelhad his throat slit and was beheaded on July 26, 2016 in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy, while saying mass in an almost empty church.
France also happens to be the country in Europe with the largest number of "no-go zones". There are at least 751 designatedZones Urbaines Sensibles("sensitive urban zones"), where Muslim gangs and radical imams are in charge. Non-Muslims can still live there, on the condition that they accept the status ofdhimmi(tolerated second-class citizen), bow their heads, and admit that they live in aterritory ruled by Islam. Members of Muslim gangsno longer respect the police. If an incident between a police officer and a member of a gang breaks out, riots follow, and the police receive orders that if the situation risks escalation, they arenot to arrest anyone.
France is a country where more than70% of prison inmatesare Muslim. According to reports, thecrime rateamong the Muslim population is high.
Three decades ago, Seine-Saint-Denis, a French district in the Paris suburbs, had a large Jewish community. Almost the entire Jewish population of the district, after being subjected to incessant threats,moved awayto live elsewhere. The few Jews who remain hide that they are Jews.
Throughout France, Jewish menconceal their skullcapsunder a hat. Jewish women tuck their Star of David necklaces inside their clothing. Many Jewish familiesno longer place mezuzahsat the entrance to their homes.
For more than 20 years, it has been impossible to talk about the Holocaust in French schools. When Georges Bensoussan, in 2004, publishedThe Lost Territories of the Republic, a book denouncing the Muslim anti-Semitism widespread in educational establishments, Jewish students were already experiencing harassment and discrimination. Today, most Jewish families in France, out of caution, have abandoned the public education system and haveenrolledtheir children in private schools. For years, when a Jewish student isbullied in a public school, the authorities takeno disciplinary actionagainst the bullies; instead, they might ask the Jewish child's parents to place him in another school.
French Christians visibly wearing a cross on the streetreceive insults. Every year, dozens of French churches aredesecratedand ransacked.
More than120 knife attackstake place in Franceevery dayand can happen anytime, anywhere. Most of these attacks are committed are by Muslim men who then tell the police that they did it because they hate infidels and hate France. Only the knife attacks that result in death appear in the newspapers; the others are passed over in silence. In the main French cities, muggings and beatings have become commonplace. There are also more than two hundredrapesevery day in France, most perpetrated by Muslim men who entered France illegally. Only7% of illegal immigrantsordered to leave France are ever actually deported.
The poll inLe Journal du Dimanchereceived little comment.
Only one French political leader, former journalist Éric Zemmour, has dared to say that the situation is increasingly alarming and that agrowing Islamic dangeris threatening France. His comments have led to his being sentenced to payheavy finesseveral times for "provoking discrimination and hatred towards the Muslim community". In the May 2022 presidential elections, hereceivedonly 7% of the vote; his message was apparently either not widely heard or not widely accepted.
The president of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, has limited herself todenouncingthe presence in France of an "Islamist ideology totally distinct from Islam", and insists on saying that only a tiny minority of Muslims adhere to this ideology. Sheadds, perhaps wishfully, that Islam is "fully compatible" with the French institutions.
La France Insoumise ("France Unsubmitted"), the main left-wing political party in France, is violently anti-Israel. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon,callsHamas a "resistance" movement. He received 21.9% of the vote in 2022, but69% of the Muslim vote.
Several members of the French National Assembly havedenouncedthe positions of La France Insoumise and Mélenchon, but only one, Meyer Habib, hasspoken outabout the leftist and Muslim anti-Semitism, as well as the increasingly serious threats weighing on French Jews and on France itself. As a result, he has receiveddeath threatsby the hundreds and his family and he now live under 'round-the-clock police protection.
French President Emmanuel Macron said, in October 2020, that he wanted to fight what he called "Islamic separatism", but seemed not to want to see that Muslims tempted by Islamism do not want to "separate" themselves from the rest of the population, but to conquer others and have them submit. "Islam," Macron added is "in crisis". His statement provoked vehementprotestsfrom all of the French Muslim organizations, and demonstrations in several countries of the Muslim world. Since then, he has avoided talking about Islam altogether.
No Islamic organizationappears to have called anyone to come to the demonstration against anti-Semitism that took place in Paris on November 12, 2023. The onlyreactionfrom the imam of the Great Mosque of Paris, Chems-Eddine Hafiz, to Hamas's massacre on October 7 was, "With all these bombs, these deaths, and this frustration generated over the years there, what are we creating? Hate of the other" – which was not exactly a ringing condemnation of the massacre. He thenaccusedIsrael of attacking the civilian population of Gaza: "Islam totally condemns the attack on civilians in an armed conflict."
French Muslim online magazines were more virulent. Evidently basing what they publish on Hamas propaganda, theyaccuseIsrael of committing "genocide" in the Gaza Strip. They never say that Hamas uses Palestinian Arabs ashuman shieldsor that the Israel Defense Forces do their best toavoid killing civilianswhile often putting their own lives at great risk.
The French journalist Ivan Rioufol, in his bookThe Coming Civil War, published in 2016,wrote:
France is the country in Europe with thelargest numberof Muslims:around 10%of a population of 67.75 million. By 2050, the figure is expected toincreaseto 17%, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.
A similar situation to that of France can be found in other Western European countries, where the Muslim population may be smaller but is quickly growing.
InLondonistan,a book by the British journalist Melanie Phillips published in 2006, she noted the existence of Sharia-controlled zones in London, and that "sixty percent of British Muslims would like sharia law to be established in Great Britain". In 2019, shewrotein the UK'sJewish Chronicle: "A frighteningly high number of British Muslims subscribe to extremist or anti-Semitic views".
InGermany, Sharia-controlled zones have begun to appear. They have also been emerging inBelgium,Swedenand theNetherlands. The recentvictoryof Geert Wilders in the Dutch elections could be the sign of a turning point and an awakening in Europe. It is too early to draw conclusions, and almost three months after his victory, Wilders has stillnot succeededin forming a government.
In 2015, the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, in the novel2084: The End of the World, described a totalitarian future in which Muslim extremists establish an oppressive caliphate where freedom of thought and action is abolished. When a television journalist asked him what, in his opinion, France will be in 2084, hisimmediate responsewas: "France will be Islamist". "Europe too," he added.
The former head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, said in arecent interviewthat "Europeans will succumb to Islam".
If Europeans wish to avoid such a future and keep their culture, they need to start making that outcome unmistakably clear to everyone, not just by words but by actions. If not, what we are seeing could well mean the end of the European civilization as we know it.
