Islamic supremacists will wreck France’s weak consensus

The French presidential elections are over, and a multiculturalist technocrat who believes in nothing, Emmanuel Macron, has won the race. Macron was the perfect candidate of the liberal consensus and global progressivism. The whole system wanted to save itself by electing him. Macron is the French Justin Trudeau. His party is that of happy globalization and the post-national Europe, in the name of “diversity.” It is the post-political conception of the world.

But Islamic supremacists will shatter and wreck his weak utopia. 25,340. This is the number of active military personnel in Sweden. How many Salafists are in France? 15,000 to 20,000, according to Bernard Godard, the former head of the Bureau of Religion for the Ministry of the Interior. According to the politician Antoine Sfeir, there are 20,000 to 30,000 Salafists in France. The Salafists in France are a force roughly the size of the Swedish military. One out of every two young French Muslims is a Salafist of the most radical type, even if he does not belong to a mosque.

A year ago, the French army set up a “domestic front command” devoted to preparing the country in case of massive civil unrest. In such a scenario, the “war” that outgoing President François Hollande spoke about in November 2015 will not be fought in a foreign theater, such as Raqqa, but inside the French Republic. Barbara Lefebvre, who co-edited the book Une France Soumise (A Subjugated France), asserts that “a world is coming to an end: that of a secular, republican and liberal France.”

The French Jihadist heart of France lies in Seine-Saint-Denis, Vitry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne) and Villeneuve-la-Garenne (Hauts-de-Seine). If 25 Salafist mosques are concentrated in Ile-de-France, Grand Lyon counts 12. Marseille has a dozen. There are many in the north, between Lille and Roubaix. The countryside attracts many Salafists, where they can be isolated.

The magazine Paris-Match visited the neighborhood of Reine-Jeanne in Avignon, a big city in the south of France. “The farther I walked between the buildings, the more I was stunned. A courtyard of Islamist miracles, a Salafist pocket, an enclave that wants to live as during the times of Muhammad. Bakery, hairdresser, building managers, teenagers. All (or almost) overcome with the Koran. Well, their Koran. It’s a mini Islamic Republic. During the sermons, they denounce, they criminalize. A woman who smokes? A degenerate. A woman who does not veil herself? A tease. A man who does not eat halal? He has an express ticket to hell. That female neighbor, the one who is divorced, with three kids, and works with men? She will end up losing her virtue. She should just give up. In order not to pass for an ‘easy woman,’ the unlucky choose the hard life, welfare benefits!”

No serious census was conducted. But there are reports of a population of between 15,000 and 30,000 Muslims in France who preach and are preparing for the clash of civilizations. Who are these jihadists? A report from the Center for the Prevention of Radicalization in Islam, founded by the anthropologist Dounia Bouzar, says that they are not from poor families. 67 percent came from the middle class. Only 5 percent have committed crimes. And 80 percent come from “atheist” families.

They have 120 mosques. There are dozens of schools, such as madrasas, where they educate children to hate Westerners and their civilization. They have publishing houses and “no-go zones,” where sharia is implemented, women are invisible, unmarried people are intimidated, there is only halal food, and so on.

Beyond thousands of Salafists, there is a big “gray zone”: 42 percent of young Muslim people want to implement sharia. There are small groups that practice sports or go to the mountains to prepare for war. They are converting 6,000 French to Islam each year, despite the bad image of their religion. And most of the converts embrace Islamic supremacism. One of the two terrorists who wanted to hit Francois Fillon was a convert.

Two Salafist mosques are created every week, and one of these is unofficial (such as in a garage or in an apartment). And the Salafists are much more popular than the mainstream Muslims. The 80 or 90 percent of young people who go to the mosque belong to the Salafis. They receive money from the Saudis and Qatar, but they are also self-financing.

They are working toward the “partition” of France. The authorities should have closed their mosques, imprisoned their violent imams, entered their neighborhoods and shut down their ideological infrastructure of terror. That would be an act of “war,” but Muslim supremacists think the French are stupid and weak, and noticed that they did not react even after Paris, Nice and Rouen.

The Islamic supremacists feel that France has no future. I talked with Rémi Brague, a famous scholar at the Sorbonne University in Paris, after the terror attacks in the French capital. “Many Muslims feel nothing but disgust for French Malthusianism, the families who give up having children and have dogs,” Brague told me. “And the law that in 2013 allowed gay marriage convinced them that France is a decadent country that has no future.”

A year ago, at a round table, outgoing Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that Salafists were “winning the cultural and ideological battle” in France. Macron has refused so far to address France’s civil war. Meanwhile, Muslim supremacists are winning, and the French authorities have chosen to capitulate to them.

The season of summer is close. As is France’s surrender.

Giulio Meotti, cultural editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author. He is the author of three books: A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism (Encounter Books); J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel (Mantua Books), and La fine dell’Europa, about the Christian and demographic decline in Europe. He is a columnist at Arutz Sheva and his writings have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, FrontPage, Commentary, and The Geller Report.