A Le Pen victory in France would be terrible. It would set back during a critical period the respectability and plausibility of those who would like, correctly, to put a complete halt to Muslim immigration — and to find ways not to engage in the hopeless task of large-scale “integration” of a population whose belief-system, a Complete System of Regulation, tells them that they are there to possess, to sweep away obstacles so that Islam will “dominate and is not to be dominated.”
Le Pen is a crude racist and antisemite. Furthermore, he has shown that his antisemitism remains steady while his attitude toward Arabs and Islam wavers. He was a great supporter of Saddam Hussein, and remains anti-American in one of the recognizable French traditions of anti-Americanism, America as the land of thrusting capitalist skyscrapers as opposed to the certain verities of the French terroir, including Jose Bove’s farmers.
What would be the American equivalent? A blend of the late Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish, the late Gerald L. K. Smith (“For Cross and the Flag”), the still-unlate Paul Findley, and, the most respectable of the lot, with his slicked-back hair and Gucci loafers and BMW, Pat Buchanan. That is what Le Pen is and would be. And Islam would then have a chance to triumph, for many who are against it would not be able to bring themselves to be in such a galere, and those most intelligently alert and therefore alarmed about Islam would be painted as Le Penistes.
Think, after all, the way CAIR and others characterize this and other websites, as belonging to some mad-dog right-wingers. The charge is absurd. But in the case of Le Pen, the charge would not be absurd. He will only do damage. He has only done damage to the cause of those who are intelligently alarmed about the presence and spread of Islam and Islamic supremacism in the lands of the Bilad al-kufr, and especially in France.
There is nothing good one can say about Le Pen. In France, and perhaps in Europe, this — well, imagine a movie about Occupied France, and then as you run that movie in your mind’s eye, stop the projector slowly when you get to the most craven and vicious kind of collaborator, the born antisemite who has a line to Gestapo headquarters in rue des Saussaies, and you will have a good idea of Le Pen. He has been the greatest obstacle to sensible and forthright discussion of what Islam is all about in theory and practice, and why “integration” will not work, and why there is no time to waste in learning about Islam and undoing the folly of the corrupt or self-assured but stupid promoters of the Euro-Arab Dialogue and all that it is doing to rewrite European history and the relation of Islam to Europe as to the rest of the world.
The sooner Le Pen dies, the more likely it is that in France those who are aware of the problem, but have been holding back because they do not want to appear to endorse Le Pen. Le Pen (who, by the way, visited Saddam Hussein to offer his support, and has every conceivable anti-American and of course anti-Semitic — that is to say anti-Israel — view of the European left). One hopes that the handful of sensible leaders — Sarkozy comes about as close as, at this point, we can hope for — will step into the breach.
So terrible is the problem, however, that some good people will even vote for Le Pen, as a way of showing how alienated they are. This shows how badly the French politicians have fallen down — not merely the crook Chirac, of whom no one expects anything (and he should not be taken seriously by anyone in the American government), nor the poseur Dominique de Villepin, but a great many others.
How stupid can people be not to realize that the field should not be left to Le Pen or those like him? Each country is different, and Fini is perfectly acceptable, while Alessandra Mussolini, who split with Fini over his denunciation of the antisemitic legislation — the “racial laws” of the late 1930s — is not. In Germany, there is no one called “right-wing” who can conceivably be acceptable; Belgium and the Scandinavian countries, however, each require specific local knowledge to decide where one has a right to worry and where some are labelled “right-wing” or “far right-wing” only because the press is itself propagandizing against them, as it always used to do against the Lebanese Christians. They unfailingly described them as “right-wing Christians” when the epithet made no sense.
Le Pen is not paid by Saudi agents. But if he is not being paid by Muslim agents, he should be.
In attempting to prevent the islamization of Western Europe, Le Pen has been worse than useless. He gets in the way. And his view of the universe, with his hatred of Americans and of Jews, is quite close to that of those he claims to oppose, but he is simply Tweedledum to their Dee.
In “Napoleon Dynamite,” Pedro Sanchez is running for Class President and promises his fellow students that “if I am elected, your wildest dreams will come true.” It’s a good campaign slogan, truthful in its beautiful untruthfulness, and Pedro deserved to win. No one will make our wildest dreams come true in Europe, or in America. But one does hope that in expressing home truths about Islam and islamization, the field will not be left to the likes of Le Pen. The sooner he is gone from the scene, the better.