The political class is so wedded to political correctness, which it expresses in language of almost Soviet woodenness, that people are now inclined to assume that it is lying even when it speaks the truth. And since 1200 young French Muslims gone to Syria to kill for Islamic theocracy, which is more fun than working for a living or long-term unemployment in a soulless and soul-destroying HLM (Habitation a Loyer Modere, rent-controlled housing), there are certainly enough Islamists in France to commit three acts of terrorism in quick succession. At the very time these attacks took place, the writer and journalist Eric Zemmour, a ferocious opponent of what he believes to be the creeping Islamisation of France (with the connivance, willing or unwilling, of the political and intellectual elite), was sacked from the television program on which he had appeared for several years because of an interview he gave to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Having evoked the dangers of Muslim separatism in France, he was asked whether he thought Muslims could or should be deported from France. He replied: “I know it’s unrealistic but history is surprising. Who would have said in the 1940s that, 20 years later, a million pieds-noirs (French colonists) would have left Algeria to return to France? Or that, after the war, five or six million Germans would have left central and eastern Europe, where they had lived for centuries?” While Zemmour (who is of Berber Jewish origin) could claim that he was not actually advocating the kind of violent ethnic cleansing that the pieds-noirs and Germans suffered, his words could certainly be construed as encouraging or at least as wishing it. Nor is it true that his dismissal by the TV station was censorship, as he and many supporters claimed. A man’s right to free speech does not entail the duty of any particular publisher or broadcaster to disseminate his views; and in practice his dismissal has led to more publicity for his views than if he had not been dismissed. Millions of people have now read his interview who would not have read it otherwise. In France on the one hand there is a cowardly denial that there is any problem; on the other more and more people dream of a radical or even brutal solution to it. I am reminded of the description by the Tsarist minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, of the situation in Russia in 1915: The paralytics of the government are struggling feebly with the epileptics of the revolution. Theodore Dalrymple is the author of more than 20 books and a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 01:13:35 +0000