[Editor’s note: Hugh Fitzgerald first published this essay here at Jihad Watch in 2004. Now, in light of the recent jihad attacks in Paris and ongoing threats to France from the Islamic State, it is more germane than ever, and hence eminently worthy of republishing. The names of the politicians have changed; the overall situation is the same.]
Imagine that you are a cosseted member of the French elite. One child is doing the khâgne, aiming for rue d’Ulm. Another is now a politechnicien. You are very comfortable, working for the state. You and your spouse are journalists, or writers, or one of that vast tribe of people conducting “recherches,” and life is comfortable, good, the way it should be. Yes, you do notice more and more Muslims about you as you walk, no longer in the banlieues, but in the center of Paris, or Toulouse, or Lyon. And you remember how uneasy you felt, four years ago, when you happened to be walking on the Canebière in Marseille. You decided, then and there, that you would not return.
And you have friends who live in the south. And they tell you that the beurs — some call them maghrébins — make life hell for everyone. They attack French children on the way to school. They vandalize cars. They threaten, and do more than threaten, anyone who is still foolish enough to walk out wearing a kippah or a cross. Whole areas of cities in the south, as in the north, and east, and west, have become off-limits to non-Muslims. In the schools, the teachers have lost authority. They cannot even cover the subjects of World War II, the Resistance, and the murders of the Jews as the state prescribes; they fear, with reason, the violent reaction of the Muslim students.
And as the schools become more and more dangerous for non-Muslim students and teachers, with more time and resources devoted to discipline rather than to learning, French parents and would-be parents are now silently factoring into their childbearing plans the present value of the future cost of what, they see, will now have to be added: private school tuition. And that means, of course, that those French people will plan on smaller families. And they will also be factoring in the growing cost, paid by them, those French taxpayers, for the whole expanding edifice of security, the guards in the schools, the guards at the train stations and métro stations and airports and at government buildings everywhere, the costs of keeping the gravestones from being vandalized, the costs of protecting the synagogues and the churches, the costs for all those tapped phones and agents in mosques, and subsidies to lawyers and judges to hear charges and try cases against Muslims, and the costs of monitoring da’wa in the prisons (more than 50% Muslim).
But the Muslims are indifferent to expenses incurred by the French state. France is part of the world; the world belongs to Allah, and to his Believers. That doctrine has remained immutable for 1400 years. Imam Bouziane, the one they keep trying to deport, had 16 children by two wives, all living on the French state: a representative Muslim man. Over time, the difference between average family size of Muslims and non-Muslims steadily increases. And, over time, the education system continues to disintegrate. Right now, perhaps, you cannot see it. Your children go to the best schools, followed by the best lycées. You vacation in Normandy, or Brittany, or the Île de Ré. And you do not take the metro often enough, or walk in the right districts, or work in the right factories or offices, to understand what tens of millions of your fellow Frenchmen now have to endure. You, for the moment, are still immune, still willfully unaware. You have spent the last few decades learning about the Muslim world from Eric Rouleau, and his epigones (after they silenced Peroncel-Hugoz, the one journalist who reported the truth) in Le Monde. You are deeply-versed in the constantly reported-upon, endlessly dilated-upon, perfidy of the mighty empire of Israel. You know what we have all had dinned into us: that the Arab Muslims are reasonable people, with clearly-justified grievances, grievances so reasonable and so limited in scope, that justice demands they be satisfied. Everyone agrees on the “solution.” It is called a “two-state solution” and of course it is a “solution” for otherwise, of course, it would not have been called a “solution.”
And everything looks the way it always has looked: the linden trees, the river, the bridges, the réverbères, the étalage in the neighborhood boulangerie. Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance. At the end of the school day, chic mothers still congregate in little towns, or small cities, outside the school — this or that Ecole Jules Ferry — waiting to pick up their children. Here come the littlest ones, from Maternelle, running up now — just look at how small they are. And here are the CE1 group, with those huge cartables on their tiny backs. Run, run, run, to Mommy. Oop-la. And then the years of study, study, study marked by ever-larger cahiers — “cahier” and “cartable” are the words that identify French DNA better than Piaf or gauloises, isn’t that true? And now we will read the books, and study the subjects, set down so completely and precisely by the Ministry of Education. And now we are up to the final year, preparing for the Bac, with copies of blue-backed BALISES, guides to Les Châtiments and La Peau de Chagrin. And just look at the results listed in the newspaper: Claire-Alix has a mention très bien. Fantastic. Everything is fine, everything will always stay the same, whole countries cannot change. It’s not possible.
But it is changing, coming apart, quietly, slowly – let’s not look too closely, we mustn’t pay too much attention — the streets, the schools, the hospitals, the ability to speak the truth about things, about life as it is lived, la vita vissuta, as they like to say in a neighboring country. Dominique de Villepin always knew there was nothing to worry about; he was born, after all, in Salé, next to Rabat, even spent a few years of his infancy there; of course he knows his Arabs, his Muslims. And surely Eric Rouleau, who for decades in Le Monde was the resident expert on the Middle East (he was so knowledgeable that he never had to so much as mention the teachings of the Qur’an and Sunna), surely he knew everything, didn’t he? And those French translations of Edward Said that denounced with such passion the Islamophobia, and those vicious cliches with which the blind and rotting West has always caricatured the Arab Muslim world. Oh, we have been so terrible to the Arabs, we colonialists, we French, we Westerners. And then there is the never-ending outrage of Israel, that running colonial sore. Of course, they have every right, those Muslims, to come here to France. We went to their countries once, now they come to ours. And they have every right to hate us, don’t they?
So now we have decided not to understand, and to cut all ties of sympathy to, Israel — and how did we ever have any sympathy for it in the first place, the way some of our parents did back in 1948 or 1956 or 1967? How could they not have seen what the “Palestinian people” had to endure? Hanan, Yasser, Said, Saeb, Aziz, Walid, Rashid, Mohammed — you have won our hearts and minds. Take us, do with us what you will.
No one will mention what is happening or what kinds of things we must begin to think about doing to save ourselves. No one of any decency. And whatever Le Pen and Megret say, we must say the opposite (except, of course, when they show their hostility to “the Jews”). Do not say those things, do not think them. Free thought is all very well in theory, but really — consider the consequences. Don’t dare to think outside that box brimming with idées reçues. Défense de penser au dehors du box.
No, everything will be all right as you stroll down the Avenue Paule-Anne. Those Muslims will never be a match for us. Why, just look at those legionnaires marching à pas lent down the Champs-Elysées, think of that string of desert victories. Inside our heads, it is 1930 and over here is the Exposition coloniale. You remember, tu t’en souviens, that painting by le Douanier Rousseau, don’t you, with the burnoosed Arab standing next to the black Senegalese? I have it right, don’t I? France will always be France. Nothing will ever change.
At a certain point, and despite everything that causes you not to see what is staring you in the face, you realize that something has gone irreparably wrong with your country, and you, and your children, are in danger of losing that country, down to every village and house, qui m’est une province et beaucoup davantage. And you do not know what to do, or how to explain this feeling to others, or in whom to confide your secret fears, or what can be done. It is so confusing, and so upsetting. You cannot vote for Le Pen. You cannot endorse “cowboy” Bush or those ridiculous Americans. You have no place to go.
And then you learn what Jacques Chirac — who now has a Muslim grandchild himself — and Dominique de Villepin, do not wish you to learn. For if you did, you might be very angry. You discover that 1 out of every 3 babies born in France today is a Muslim baby. And that means, in 20 years, one of every three 20-year-olds in France will be a Muslim twenty-year-old. And that means, twenty years after that, at present rates of reproduction, France will have a majority Muslim population. Where shall we hide the statues from Marly-le-roi? And the Venus de Milo? And what about all those paintings of animated life — all those portraits in the Louvre, and the Grand Palais, and the Musée Guimet down there in linden-lined Aix, and everywhere else in art-filled artful France, mère des arts, des armes, et des loix — that are absolutely forbidden according to the immutable strictures of the Qur’an. Should they be sent for safekeeping to those Americans across the seas? By then most of the Jews in France will have left, gone across the oceans for their own safekeeping, to Israel or to English-speaking Canada (they were worried about the Muslim population of Quebec, you see, which had been allowed to grow under the Province of Quebec’s policy of encouraging francophone immigrants, preferring North Africans to potential immigrants from Italy, Greece, Spain), and above all, to America. What luck those Americans have had. No more bequests to France by the likes of the Rothschilds, or Nissim Camondo. No more Donations from another Pierre Lévy. Enjoy the Kufic calligraphy; some find it endlessly fascinating.
For the moment, you allow yourself to believe that something will come up. Most likely, all those Muslims will simply convert. I mean, they do that, don’t they, quite easily I’m told. Of course, why didn’t I think of it, that is exactly what will happen. The situation is always saved in time. Just like during the war. Nothing to worry about. Nothing.
Cicero says
What a well written and prescient article. Even though it was written.eleven years ago it resonates most pointedly today in the hearts and minds not just of the discerning French but also in the hearts and minds of the rest of the Western world.
It makes the reader want to weep! Even our kind, good hearted good natured relatives are recoiling from what is a growing visible foreboding presence in all the towns of Western Europe . Even though they are apolitical and full of Christian compassion they too are unable to avoid that which must be called by any other name staringthem full in the face as they go about their daily lives.. They are firghtened and puzzled. They wonder why the Leaders of the West. Are not takng decivsive action.
emma says
This is heartbreaking.
I feel this could apply to every european country with a huge muslim population like france. What to do??? I feel there are 2 most pressing issues: immigration control of muslims, and increasing birthrate of europeans themselves. The countries have to stop being politically correct and stop muslim immigration. And the european women should be given extremely attractive conditions to have more children, and this means again, being politically incorrect, because that would mean to give financial backing to women who have european ancestry, so as not to encourage again the muslims to take advantage of paid birthrate increase. If islamic clerics and leaders have been saying all along that the future of islamic conquest lies in their women’s wombs, then european leaders would have to shake off their own complacency and tell europe that the future of the existence of europe’s culture lies in their women’s wombs.
Mike says
Only Russia seems to be doing this, to a degree. It’ll be a scary day when the Russians are more representative of Western civilisation than France.
Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if when everything shakes out, ethnic Europeans move East towards Eastern Europe for refuge, under Russian protection pf sprts. as less bad than living (dying?) under Islamic rule. This is highly disturbing.
It’s time to make changes, changes which can possibly be made nominally in a non-targeted way:
1) After 5 years on public benefits, if you have another citizenship, get offered 20,000 EUR to renounce citizenship and ship out.
2) If you’re on public benefits, and have additional children, benefits will be cut to ZERO unless you put them up for adoption.
3) If you have a job or have a spouse with a job, and have a new child, you get massive support not to lose income. The French Republic already does this part fairly well, so no need for major changes here.
4) Re-introduce military service, in a way highly irritating to Muslims, again with an option to take 20,000 EUR to ship out. The stupidest of the stupid will be tempted by the money.
? says
Ironic huh…
Raja says
From whatever little I understood from the article I am really saddened. To me the reading was more like obituary of France…. Woe to those leaders who sold out their nation for votes and cheap labor !!!!! Their corrupt leaders have brought wholesale corruption to the France to compete with Arab nations..Sad indeed.
Not I said the sparrow says
For many years in the West it was just un-cool for cool people to have children.
And look:
Angela Merkel has none (and yet has opened her arms to hundreds of thousands of fecund young Muslim men).
Germaine Greer has none (although she actually wrote a book called “Boys”).
Naiomi Wolfe wouldn’t have have any.
Dave Bowie?…can’t imagine…
Then recently a man called Bruce Jenner (?) was (post-operation) named Woman of The Year. Even Germaine was appalled-that ain’t no woman was the gist of it. There’s no place for the usual offspring in all this -severed bloody genitals and a man’s fantasy about multiple orgasms.
But there has been a slight change. Now it’s relatively cool to have an ornamental child or two by a tortuous process involving basting some semen in a rinsed mayonaisse jar and sending it to a female friend.
Yes there is no hope, it seems, if it’s all just a question of being conquered by jihadists’ wombs. Cool?
No, not cool, not OK.
And, you ask, have I been cool?
Yeah, I’ve been cool (haven’t we all) and now the unintended consequences…
Katnis says
This would probably get more readers / comments with a different title. Interesting article and still holds true.
Clearsighted says
Now, I truly understand by Hugh is so revered. This is one of the most brilliant essays that I have ever read. His interweaving of language which has special meaning to the French, both linguistically and culturally, was deft and precise. It brought tears to my eyes. Then, I read about the idiot at Columbia who was “traumatized” because she had to read books written by and about white people and realized that we have allowed venomous termites to eat away the pillars of the greatest civilization ever wrought by humanity and bring us to the brink of another Dark Ages even more dark than the original.
The awful truth says
Good article. Part of the problem is democracy (politicians have to agree with everybody especially Muslims) and free money for Muslim men to breed with multiple women (who can legally marry 4 wives) unlike non-Muslims. Quelle-herreaux! I have no real practical solutions apart from avoiding buying ME hydrocarbons (not in a hurry), cutting welfare to over 2 kids, prioritising history, culture and shared values at the expense of breakaway tendencies.
Wellington says
Fine article. True then. Truer now.
Angemon says
Indeed.
Jay Boo says
What a contrast between the civilized French society and the Muslim invader.
EU take note
Myxlplik says
It’s sad that it had to come to this. On the eve of it basically being too late, heck similar information and analysis has literally been there since the mid 90’s. What a freaking train wreck.
occupant 9 says
The point that Mr Fitzgerald makes that is so hard for my Leftarded acquaintances to understand and imagine is that while Muslim immigration *may* be benign for the first while, the plan to conquer us is generations deep. We, with our too few children are not generations deep.
How many times have you heard the mantra that “I wouldn’t want to bring a child into this world because the world is a mess” from our culture? So we end up with a world that is worse because not enough of our children were brought into it … to positively influence it. It looks “a mess” on our side because after a party it always looks this way. Too many of us think what we have is forever and the more we leave it unprotected, the longer it will last, which runs counter to the “world is a mess” anti-child message … but that’s Leftism.
Having children means MAKING an investment in the future. Muslims understand this but we have been told children are the ultimate expensive drag on good times, mobility and “finding oneself.”
Nothing says you have no skin in the game better than having chosen to have no children.
dumbledoresarmy says
But what do Muslims *do* with their children, once they have them?
They fill their heads with hatred of infidels…and the boys with hatred of all females, as well. The boys are taught to view women with contempt and disgust; Ayaan Hirsi Ali noticed, in Saudi Arabia, when she was a child, that the spoilt little Muslim boys bullied and ordered around their own mothers, and treated their *sisters* badly.
Girls are systematically degraded and abused, often sexually abused, from a very early age; once they reach puberty they are frequently disposed of in ‘honour’ murders carried out by their male kin and/ or female kin. In large swathes of the dar al Islam their clitoris and often other external genitalia is sliced out.
Many are married off before puberty, to men old enough to be their grandfathers, who then proceed to rape and beat them, even during pregnancy. A Muslim lady doctor in the UK actually broke ranks enough to comment upon the sky-high rate of wife abuse among the Muslim couples she saw in her practice…and *pregnant women* were specifically targeted for the worst abuse….She saw women with bruises on their pregnant bellies.
They are brood mares, force-bred from puberty or even from before they get their first period; but they are not valued or loved…instead they are hated, despised and often killed, even as they are used. They are ’tilth’, not people. Every Muslim female is essentially under a sentence of death that may be ‘activated’ randomly at any moment, by any male Muslim around her, on the flimsiest of pretexts. Wafa Sultan, ex-Muslim from Syria, has written extensively about the systematic abuse and degradation of women and girls in an Islamic society…and in her book ‘A God Who Hates’ she says flatly, ‘allah hates women”.
Islamic societies have – so anthropologists have found – one of the highest incidences of anal intercourse **among heterosexual couples** in the world. Not among gays. Among men using their wives.
Boys are also abused…the incidence of sexual abuse of prepubescent boys by adult men is horrifying, remarked upon by most astute persons who have had occasion to visit the lands of the dar al Islam anytime within the past five centuries.
Muslims breed, yes…but they breed in order to have children whom they will proceed to sacrifice wholesale to Thanatos.
Muslim force-breeding, and the rampant degradation, humiliation and human sacrifice (honour murders, and sending children to become ‘Shaheeds’, ritually immolating themselves in the process of mass-murdering other – Infidel – humans) are not any kind of honouring of life or of the future. They breed children for death…their own death and in order to annihilate others and drag the world down into the Void.
*Their* breeding is in the service of Death.
John Stefan Obeda says
I quote from the Bible, Romans 8: “. . .those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh. . . to set the mind on the flesh is death. . . For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law, indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
Raj says
Hugh Fitzgerald’s observation about the problems caused by the fertility of Muslim women is right on the point. He made this observation 10 years ago. Today, the situation is worse as more fertile child bearing age Muslim women have come of age. While the non-Muslim population is hardly growing, Muslim population is growing a breakneck speed. In India, in a census that is carried out event 10 years, the most recent report showed the same trend: Muslim population grew close to 30% in 10 years whereas the rest of the ethnicities were either stagnant or grew barely 2%. This high Muslim growth rate, I believe, is occurring all over the world.
Drastic problems require drastic solutions: We need a moratorium on democracy and elections for 10 years in all free nations. This way politicians would not need to pander to Muslims for their votes and thus they would have the courage to take the needed actions to roll back Muslim population growth. If the politicians don’t need Muslim votes for survival, they would be able to bring in legislation that forces one child policy upon Muslims and limit government food stamps and such to only one child.
Vast majority of Muslim fast breeders sponge off the government – they get free housing, free food, free medical care, etc. for their ever increasing brood. If all this were to stop, their population will soon come in line with the rest of the world. Aid to Muslim countries with increasing population need to be stopped. Today, despite extreme poverty, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim population is growing at one of the highest rate in the world. These counties are beneficiaries of Western largesse which enables them to sustain the high population growth. They don’t care about anything else: they know that they can create lebensraum for breeding more Muslims merely by sending off their people as refugees to Western nations who are foolish enough to welcome them with balloons and other displays of affection.
dsinc says
Too true Raj, Good comment.
Mitch says
“We need a moratorium on democracy and elections for 10 years in all free nations.”
I can’t think of a stupider idea.
Jack Diamond says
There are some interesting exceptions to the general commonplace, Muslims breed like rats,
Europeans don’t want children (or a future).
Some more modern Muslim countries with higher standards of living are having declining birth rates comparable to the West. Iran where the total fertility rate plunged to about 1.6% in 2010 (Europe’s rate 1.5 children per female) where before 1979 the average woman bore seven children. Turkey (apart from the Kurds) has a fertility rate around 1.5 children per female, about the same as Iran’s. Higher than 2.1 per woman is required for any population growth. David Goldman, “Spengler”, relates the decline to literacy levels. He also argues the trend for Palestinian Arabs is a decline in fertility rates (they have the highest standard of living of Arabs outside the Gulf) while Jewish fertility rates in Israel are increasing.
So while it is mostly bad news, it’s not all bad news. Except for Europe.
If Europe, if the French, had not chosen the path of Eurabia, had not, as the Spanish fellow put it ‘exchanged 6 million Jews for 20 million Muslims’… well, it was decades ago, not the day before yesterday Jacques Ellul wrote how in France “it is no longer acceptable to criticize Islam or Arab countries” and about the reinvention of Islam and the rewriting of history by the prominent opinion shapers. The whole history of dhimmitude is massacres preceding it and underscoring it, followed by da’wa. Safe from the ongoing, everlasting jihad war if you submit to Islam and its requirements. Bat Ye’or once summarized dhimmitude as fear disguised as respect. Islam behaves as it has always behaved when it has the upper hand. Will France choose to remember Charles Martel and forget Jacques Chirac? (Chirac: “Europe’s roots are as much Muslim as Christian”).
Gary says
Good article, despite not being able to understand half the words in it.
RonW says
Douche France?
kinley says
Not much has changed over the millennia! The descriptions in this essay could have been written by the Byzantine liberal intelligentsia in Constantinople around 1380-1400, before that glorious wonder of the ancient world became Istanbul. Travelers from the Western half of the Roman Empire were awed by the magnificent buildings and wealth of Constantinople and the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. The later Crusades, fought to protect the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, were manned by the Western half of Roman empire. The emperor of the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, with provinces under Islamic siege, pleaded with the Western half of the empire to help protect them. The Western half raised and sent an army to Constantinople, but when the army arrived in Constantinople, the Byzantines refused to join that army to protect their own provinces. Later that army turned on the Byzantines and sacked Constantinople. Pampered liberals refusing to protect themselves, but expecting others to do it. History repeats!
The most frustrating aspect for authors such as Hugh Fitzgerald and Robert Spencer is that they write to deaf liberal ears. In blogs such as this they are preaching to the choir.
RC says
The Godless French have brought this upon themselves–by rejecting God in favor of Secular Humanism and Cultural Marxism. They have repeatedly acted against Israel–and now the ancient enemy of Israel, i.e., Arab dregs–are wreaking havoc in France. And yet they keep spitting in God’s face. It will become much worse for France.