On July 12, the New York Times carried an article about a feud between two French Islamologues:
PARIS — What propels Islamist terrorism and attacks against France is more than an academic debate: The answer shapes policy toward blunting the threat.
So it is no inconsequential matter in a culture under attack, and one that so cherishes its intellectual debates, that France’s two leading scholars of radical Islam — former friends — have turned bitter rivals over their differing views.
“Madman,” “thug,” “illiterate,” “paranoid,” “ass,” “not a thinker” — these are just some of the choicer insults the two men have hurled at each other in a peculiarly personal quarrel with far larger stakes that has reverberated through the French news media and society for months.
The two distinguished academics, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, have long lists of books to their name, and years of field work in the Middle East, Central Asia and the troubled French suburbs. They are both eagerly consulted by the French news media and government officials.
But with France on edge and the continued target of terrorist attacks, their clashing analyses of the origins, development and future of jihadism have broken out of academic circles to present an important question for France and for all of Europe: Which man holds the key to understanding the phenomenon?
Mr. Kepel, 61, a professor at Sciences Po, the prestigious political science institute, finds much of the answer inside France — in its suburbs and their dysfunctional sociology — and in the role of Islam, angering many on the left.
Mr. Roy, 66, who as a bearded young man roamed Afghanistan with the mujahedeen in the 1980s and now teaches at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, places greater emphasis on individual behavior and psychology in a jihadism he considers strictly marginal to Islam.
Mr. Kepel sees individuals as cogs in a system — part of a classically French, structuralist tradition that minimizes the role of individual human agency.
Mr. Roy, on the other hand, sees mostly troubled people in the jihadist ranks who act out their fantasies of violence and cruelty.
The terrorists who have carried out recent attacks were mostly marginalized young men and petty criminals, he says, adding that they have used Islam as a cover to pursue extreme violence.
“They haven’t had a militant past,” Mr. Roy said of many of these terrorists, in a telephone interview. The problem they represent, he says, is the “Islamicization of radicalism.”
It is a signature phrase that enrages Mr. Kepel, who leans toward its opposite: the radicalization of Islam.”
Could it be that both of these French Islamologues are wrong, but not in the same way, or to the same degree? Let’s take a closer look.
Olivier Roy doesn’t think that Islam has anything to do with what impels some Muslim men to become terrorists. For him, they are “marginalized young men and petty criminals” who simply “use Islam as a cover” for their violent acts. Is this true? Even if they made a living as “petty criminals” because they had no marketable skills, or disliked working, couldn’t they also be true Believers in Islam? And couldn’t the invocation of Islamic teachings to justify certain behaviors toward Infidels – e.g., robbery as a way of helping oneself to the Jizyah in the absence of an Islamic state that could exact it – be genuine justification, rather than mere “cover” for such acts? Why does Olivier Roy think that Muslims would not consider robbery or, for that matter, the vast array of benefits (free housing, free health care and education, family allowances) supplied by the Infidel state, to be legitimate Jizyah (just as some mainstream Muslims have claimed), rather than mere loot?
And why shouldn’t we believe that Muslim terror attacks are prompted by the Qur’anic call to “terrorize the Unbelievers” in so many places in the Qur’an (start with 9:29 and 9:5), with its 109 “jihad verses” that preach violence? Why does Olivier Roy think we should dismiss all those Qur’anic quotes as if they counted for nothing, invoked by the would-be Al-Baghdadis of France merely as a way to pretend they had some higher goal, when all along they were merely people who liked “violence and cruelty”? What would these “jihadists” have to do, what would it take, for Olivier Roy to admit that their behavior might have been motivated by Islam? What about that Tunisian truck driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, mowing down as many Infidels (a handful of unintended Muslim victims is a fact that changes nothing), on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on Bastille Day, shouting “Allahu akbar” (the Muslim war cry of “Our God Is Greater”) just before being killed? Would Olivier Roy deny the role of Islam in this act of terrorism?
Roy calls the behavior by Muslim criminals, invoking Islam in order to justify their criminal activity, “the Islamization of radicalism.” But the word “radicalism” is singularly unfitting here. It is a term currently used in the West to describe what we think of as an unusual level of Muslim belief and commitment; the word “radicalized” is applied to Muslims if they take Islam’s most violent and anti-Infidel verses to heart. (Few dare to suggest that this is simply mainstream, and not “radical,” Islam.) But for Olivier Roy to use such a term now associated so closely with discussions of Islam, while in the same breath he insists that Islam has nothing to do with “jihadist” behavior, is jarring. Muslims who support the Islamic State may claim that they are engaged in stabbing, shooting, running over, and bombing Infidels, raping and enslaving Infidel women, because Islam encourages or even commands it, but Olivier Roy knows better. He knows they are stabbing, shooting, running over, bombing and raping just because they want to, and not because of anything to do with what’s in the Qur’an or Hadith. He keeps saying that Islam is merely an excuse for “troubled people” to “act out their fantasies of violence and cruelty,” and he considers “jihadism strictly marginal to Islam.” It’s an extraordinary remark, and alarming, too, because Olivier Roy is regarded in France as one of its foremost experts on Islam.
Of course, what he means by the “Islamization of radicalism” is really the “Islamization of criminality.” Those Muslim criminals, in Olivier Roy’s view, falsely attribute to Islam the justification for their behavior – “they use Islam as a cover.” These are “jihadists” who have nothing to do with “jihad.”
Does any of this make sense?
Why does Olivier Roy insist that we ignore what Muslim terrorists keep claiming as their reasons for doing what they do? Where does the extraordinary violence and cruelty in many of these attacks on Infidels – see, e.g., Paris, Amsterdam, New York, London, Orlando, Moscow, Dhaka, Sinjar, and now Nice — come from, if not from the Qur’an itself? Where does the command to “strike terror” in the hearts of the Infidels come from, if not from the Qur’an itself? These are not the attacks of criminals bent on gain, but murderers following Qur’anic injunctions to “strike terror” in the hearts of Infidels.
On what basis does Olivier Roy claim to “see [in France] a Muslim population that is relatively well integrated” and, since it is only the un-integrated Muslims who constitute a threat, all the French government need do is improve the lot of those (few) Muslims who feel marginalized? The problem according to Roy is not with Muslims, but with the Infidels among whom they live, who must try harder to make Muslims happy so as to achieve their “integration.” But if the problem of non-integration were a result of French policy, what explains the success of all the other, non-Muslim, immigrants to integrate into French society? And if it is French policy that is at fault, what explains the failure of Muslims not just in France, but throughout Europe, even in countries famously liberal and accommodating (e.g., Denmark, Sweden, Netherlands) to “integrate” successfully?
How true is Roy’s claim that Muslims in his country are “relatively well-integrated”? Is he aware of how many Muslims in France have tried to join the Islamic State? Or that 42% of young Muslims in France declare that suicide bombing is always justified? Is he aware of how many Muslims in France are in prison? Or of how many French Muslims have aggressively challenged the laic state’s rules, appropriating public spaces for prayer, blocking sidewalks and streets in many cities? Or aware that Muslim students have refused to follow the prescribed curriculum, especially when it comes to such topics as the Crusades, the Enlightenment, the Holocaust, and evolution? Is that just a question of “criminality? What does Olivier Roy make of the demands made by French Muslims just a few months ago for a doubling of the number of mosques? Or the demands for changes in the cuisine of prisons and schools, to eliminate pork products? Or the constant challenging of the hijab ban in schools and workplaces? None of this suggests a Muslim population that is “relatively well integrated.”
It’s hard to fathom Olivier Roy’s refusal to believe that when Muslims say they are following Islam, when they quote chapter and verse to justify exactly what they are doing, when they commit crimes that could not possibly have any motive other than an Islamic one, that they mean what they say. Now of course it is true that some crimes by Muslims may have nothing to do with Islam. A Muslim bank robber may have been prompted solely by a desire for money, or the robbery may have been undertaken to raise money to buy guns for a future attack on Infidels. But Olivier Roy seems to think whatever the perpetrators claim, these attacks are always of the first, not the second kind, that is never really about Islam. In this respect, he is echoing many family members of terrorists, and such organizations as CAIR, that are quick to assure us after every Muslim terrorist attack that it had “nothing to do with Islam.”
But some attacks clearly must have been motivated by Islam. The attack on Charlie Hebdo had only one goal, an Islamic one – to punish those who blasphemed the Muslim prophet Muhammad. That was the same reason why Muslims wanted to kill Lars Vilks in Sweden, and Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller in Garland, Texas. And the murders of Jews in Toulouse and at the kosher market in Paris were not done for gain, but were prompted by Islam, and the belief expressed in the Qur’an that Jews are the most determined enemies of Islam. Similarly, the murders of the policeman and his wife in Mantes-la-Jolie were attacks prompted by Islam, where the targets represented the Infidel state’s authority, and were not examples of “petty criminality.”
Gilles Kepel, once Olivier Roy’s close friend and now his intellectual enemy, is the other most celebrated Islamologue in France, who now dismisses Roy as an “ignoramus” and worse (see the third paragraph of the Times article above). Kepel thinks that “the murderous jihadism that struck France in 2015 [Charlie Hebdo, the kosher market] is the expression of a slow-burning Islamist radicalization that took shape over decades because of a failure of integration.”
What strikes us at once is that Kepel is at least willing to think that Islam has something to do with these attacks of “murderous jihadism.” This distinguishes his analysis from that of Olivier Roy. But he still finds a way to blame the Infidels for the problem of Muslim terrorism. Instead of focusing on individuals, as does Roy, Kepel thinks of Muslims as “cogs in a system” who began to undergo a slow “Islamist radicalization” decades ago because of the “failure of integration.” That “failure of integration” is blamed, of course, not on Muslims, who refuse to accept French laws and customs, and who deliberately create their own Muslim neighborhoods, well aware that they are not, according to the Qur’an, to take “Jews and Christians as friends” or yield to the authority of the Infidel state. No, the problem as Kepel sees it is with the French, who for some unaccountable reason refused to yield to Muslim demands, and have failed to modify their laws or changed their customs as they might have; it is they who prevent the “integration” of Muslims who would be only too happy to be “integrated” if only the non-Muslims would give a little. To implicitly blame the French for the situation is a monstrous mischaracterization, the very reverse of the true situation. If it were a problem to be blamed on the French state, then what explains the failure of Muslims everywhere else in Europe to successfully “integrate”? And why is it that everywhere in Europe, all the non-Muslim immigrants seem to be able to integrate? Kepel doesn’t address either question, for it would spoil his analysis.
But in one important respect, Kepel’s analysis is superior to that of Olivier Roy. For Kepel believes that, over decades, as a reaction to a “failure of integration,” a “slow-burning Islamist radicalization” took place in France. So even if he blames the French for this, he at least recognizes that the result is a greater readiness among young Muslims, suffering from that lack of integration, to adopt a stricter form of Islam, and it is this brand of Islam (“Salafism”), this “Islamist radicalization,” that he claims explains Muslim terrorism. Islam is, for Kepel, not just a “cover for criminality, but he insists it is only an “extremist” version of it – “Salafism” — that explain Muslim terrorism.
And Kepel also seems to believe that Muslim terrorism required a long gestation, decades during which Muslims in France slowly became dissatisfied with their lot in life. Kepel even offers what he identifies as a key year, 2005, with the rioting of Muslims in the Paris suburbs, when Muslim youths felt a “need to dissociate from France, and leave it” (that is, they no longer tried to integrate, but became internal exiles living in the lands of the Infidel enemy). Kepel makes much of a 1,600-page tract, Al-Suri’s “Appeal to Global Islamic Resistance,” that appeared in that year, and which he claims offered a blueprint for the Islamic State. But what is in that tract that is not already to be found in the Qur’an, the Hadith, the Sira? Perhaps the packaging is more attractive, the language and historical references more up-t0-date, but are the essential contents any different from the canonical texts of Islam? Kepel does not say.
For neither Kepel nor Roy is willing to offer the simplest, and truest explanation for why Muslims become terrorists. They become terrorists because, for any number of conceivable reasons, they take seriously what they read in the Qur’an, which tells them all about “striking terror,” and is full of passages promoting the use of violence against non-Muslims and apostates. And they find in the Hadith exemplary examples of such violent, behavior among the earliest Muslims, including that of Muhammad, the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil) and Model of Conduct (uswa hasana). They learn from the Qur’an and Hadith why they should not take Infidels as friends, why they should demand the Jizyah from them or, in the alternative, if the infidels refuse to convert, to kill them, how they should treat women, what they should make of “innovation” (bida), and when they should, as good Muslims, obey the ruler and when disobey. In short, the Qur’an and Hadith and Sira offer a Total Explanation of the Universe and a Complete Regulation of Life. That is all that these Muslim terrorists need; Al-Suti’s gargantuan handbook is not the source of their “radicalism.”
Kepel appears to be in the camp of those who argue that Muslim terrorists are born out of hardship and resentment of that hardship. This is what might be called the Robert-Pape School of Underprivileged Terrorists. But study after study has shown that Muslim terrorists are both better off, and better educated than the average Muslim. What distinguishes them is their readiness to act on their beliefs, their level of commitment. Think of the multi-millionaire Osama bin Laden, or the American army doctor Nidal Hasan, or the German-trained architect Mohamed Atta, or “Mike” Hawash, who was living the ideal American life with an American wife and children in suburbia, and earning $360,000 a year as an Intel engineer. These were not people of deprived backgrounds, nor petty criminals, but Muslims who decided to take to heart the teachings not of “radical” or “extremist,” but mainstream Islam.
Of course, some Muslim terrorists do have backgrounds as petty criminals, but for them, the best way to make amends for such behavior (including such terrible things as eating pork and drinking alcohol) is by engaging in Jihad against the Infidels, winning a place in the Islamic heaven. This appears to be what happened with the allahu-akbaring driver of that truck in Nice, mowing down as many of the enemy as he could. It is still Islam – from dormancy to delirium – that explains his behavior.
The cause of Islamic terrorism is Islam. There is nothing Infidels can do to win over Muslims who take their Islam seriously. And they owe it to themselves not to become confused about causes as, I’m afraid, in their different ways, the two leading French “experts” on Islam have allowed themselves to become. Olivier Roy dismisses Islam as merely a cover for criminal behavior of all kinds. He finds it impossible to imagine that Muslims would take their texts so seriously, nor that even were it true that many terrorists have “criminal backgrounds,” the best way for them to make up for those backgrounds is to do something heroic for the cause of Islam, which is to kill as many Infidels as possible. Gilles Kepel believes that a certain kind of Islam, a “radicalized” Islam, can under certain conditions, develop slowly in the minds of Muslims (replacing the “peaceful” regular Islam), until it boils over into violence. But he can’t see beyond that word “radicalized” to recognize that there is nothing contained in the “radicalization” of Muslims that is not already to be found in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira. It’s merely a question of emphasis.
Kepel and Roy deserve each other. But the people of France, reeling from the latest mass attack, at this point deserve neither. They need to realize that they are not to blame if Muslims claim to feel “alienated” or “marginalized” because the French haven’t changed their laws or customs to suit Muslim demands – demands that have no logical end until the Shari’a is fully imposed. And they need to understand that the “radicalization of Islam” means, in truth, nothing more than a recognition and acceptance, by many Muslims, of what Islam teaches, and a willingness to act upon it. It is not some strange mutation of the faith. It is the faith; it is mainstream Islam.
Let the great “experts” Roy and Kepel continue to fight in their tweedledee-tweedledum fashion. We who are not official experts should ignore their noisy confusions, so as to be able to understand better the menace and meaning of Islam, an understanding achievable as long as we hold on tightly to that most precious intellectual commodity, one no higher degree or prestigious post can confer – which is to say, common sense.

El Cid says
Oh my God, Hugh.
The elephant in the room is what they can say and what they cannot say in France without risking jail.
You people living in a Secure Utopia don’t get it.
the ultimate achievement of terror is people lying not only to others but to themselves.
The historical truth is so evident. How could they and Obama miss it? That’s why I took on the pseudonym “El Cid”.
mr up-side-down says
yep both wrong ..
Carmel says
Olivier Roy , I thinlk, maried an Afghanistan woman . Kepel is no narcissic , I can,t smell him even on tv. In december 2015, he came on french tv shows for many days . He had a new book to talk of. He was even several times at BFM -TV. Once with the 7pm o’clock regular anchor man , at 9 pm with the woman etc…So, at one time , to change his look , he was wearing a scarf around the neck with a studied falling on his chest . From time to time , we could see him saying his usual recording and checking on monitors if the scarf was doing a good look . Then he would correted it not even looking at the host of the show . He is there for himself. There are better ones than him.
Jack Diamond says
lol, you sure it wasn’t Bernard-Henri Lévy? The scarf has to be just right….
maghan says
All three are just silly foppish fools. Have they read the Islamic trilogy–Qur’an, Sirah and Hadith? Such perfect fools speaking perfect French. Helas!
Angemon says
This, of course, begs the question: why is it that’s always islam? They could simply carry out their violent acts. Likewise, while one may find criminals who profess to be Christian, or Jew, or Hindu, or Buddhist, or Sikh, or atheist, one does not find that they use their religion to justify their crimes. Why always islam?
eduardo odraude says
Yes, how is it that precisely Islam provides such a convenient “cover” for so many crimes? Could it be that Islam is somehow very much like the thing it supposedly “covers” for?
The canonical Islamic texts themselves show that Muhammad had hundreds of unarmed Jewish men beheaded; that he had a man tortured in order to get hold of a treasure; that when a man stabbed someone to death for criticizing Muhammad, Muhammad said there was to be no punishment for murdering the critic; that Muhammad for years almost constantly went on violent jihad expeditions; that even in the early so-called “peaceful” period, he was enticing Meccans to join him by telling them they would then be able to subjugate the Persians and Byzantines; that he had people burned up in their houses for not coming to prayer; that he said any Muslim who left Islam should be killed; that Muhammad permitted his soldiers to rape captive women; that he said that people’s lives and property were not safe from him unless they became Muslim; that those who did not follow him would be slaughtered; that he had been helped by terror, was entitled to spoils of war, and was on a mission to all mankind.
The two pseudo-scholars highlighted in this article are just some daintily educated pablumists taking the safe conformist path of avoiding any criticism of Islam (look what happened to Hebdo). It was a path which the French establishment up till now felt to provide a smooth, comfortable berth to sleep in while Europe was gradually taken over by Islam’s violent expansionist totalitarian energies.
eduardo odraude says
For proof that the canonical texts say what I claimed in the comment above (5:52 pm), look at the links on the right side of the page here — the links go to a university database of canonical Islamic texts, and to the earliest Muslim biography of Muhammad:
http://quotingislam.blogspot.com/
eduardo odraude says
oops, not the right side of the page “here” at jihad watch — I meant the right side of the page here: http://www.quotingislam.blogspot.com
DHazard says
Since it’s inception, Muslims have used Islam as a “cover” for their violence, greed and lust. If being a good Muslim means emulating Muhammad then committing violence for Allah is part and parcel of Islam. There is no incompatibility with being psychopathic and being Muslim. They enable each other. Any scriptures that would suppress the urge to rape and kill are contradicted, outnumbered and preempted by other “divine” instructions that extol violence, especially against the “other” (all non-Muslims, real or perceived).
Allah is a God who takes sides and not only grants license to murder, but encourages it by offering a reward. Allah is the mob boss and Muslim terrorists are his murder loving hit me. The reward of Paradise may even be less motivating then the rush of power a psychopath feels when he is busy destroying lives.
Mental illness and Islam are not mutually exclusive motivators for terrorism. They go hand-in-hand.
Mockingjay says
“Mental illness and Islam are not mutually exclusive motivators for terrorism. They go hand-in-hand”.
How very right you are, DHazard!
Islamic culture – and upbringing – breeds massive numbers of PSYCHOPATHS, who are at the same time given an ideology that not only condones, but actively encourages ACTING on, – instead of suppressing,- these psychopathic tendencies.
So, as you so rightfully say: “There is no incompatibility with being psychopathic and being Muslim”.
That is precisely why islam is so dangerous. It combines the two – and they then mutually reinforce eachother.
Mockingjay says
Check this:
http://www.wikihow.com/Identify-a-Psychopath
– and find the similarities between so many muslim’s (including muhammad’s) behaviour – and that of psychopaths.
Mockingjay says
GOOD GOD.
If these two men are the go-to “experts” on islamic terrorism in France, then I can FULLY understand the dire situation France finds itself in.
Mr. Roy “sees mostly troubled people in the jihadist ranks who act out their fantasies of violence and cruelty”.
Even if this was true, one might want ask the question WHERE EXACTLY these sick, violent and cruel fantasies come from, and why they are so prevalent in islamic youth?
Might it not have something to do with the FAMILY and CULTURAL system they were brought up in – the ISLAMIC FAMILY and CULTURAL system?
Mr. Roy doesn’t really bother himself with questions concerning the origin of these violent tendencies in so MANY (young) people of islamic background.
He simply claims that “they have used Islam as a cover to pursue extreme violence” – and treats these violent tendencies in muslim youths as a given.
BUT THEN H O W C O M E ISLAM IS SO VERY, VERY, VERY USABLE AS A “COVER” TO P U R S U E EXTREME VIOLENCE?
Never thought about that either ey.
Thinking about these questions would only disturb Mr. Roy’s whole theory.
Can’t have that.
Jack Diamond says
Look, Jacques Ellul said in 1983, (1983!) “In France it is no longer acceptable to criticize Islam or the Arab countries.” Roy and Kepel have clearly absorbed this into their being. Roy, especially, is patronizing. Doesn’t matter what those “marginalized young men and petty criminals” have to say of their motives, he know their real motivation.
Having read Al-Suri, an al Qaeda analyst who was a big influence on al Qaeda in Iraq and the present Caliphate, he most certainly would agree with Hugh Fitzgerald and not Roy or Kepel. It is just canonical Qur’an and Sunnah and Sira. It is Pure Islam that motivates and should motivate.
Btw why are so many jihadis middle class, upper middle class, and engineers and doctors? In other words, financially successful yet turning to Allahu-Akbar murder?
Mubarak says
When the hearts and minds have been prepared by lawlessness, resentment and existential failures and thereby ready – and readiness is all as Hamlet says – the wonderful quotations from the Quran inciting violence inch’Allah, and locked in the Muslim brain by endless and mindless recitations, present themselves as a God-given gift from Allah and his mouthpiece to be acted upon – islamic traditions giving structure to evil. Isn’t that the dialectic?
dumbledoresarmy says
On Australia’s SBS broadcaster the denial is orders of magnitude worse.
They’ve published the following article, which all the people who don’t want to believe Islam has got something to do with San Bernardino, Orlando, Brussels, Paris Paris Nice, etc etc etc etc etc, are eagerly seizing upon and circulating on social media as if it were some kind of ‘gotcha!’ riposte to all those evil and stupid Islamophobes who just. don’t. understand.
You see, lots of mass killers didn’t like women/ were domestic abusers before they went off and killed lots of people. And this ‘proves’ that Islam hasn’t got anything to do with it…. nothing at all, nothing at all (of course, the author of the article carefully omits to mention that the founding text of Islam – unlike the founding texts of Judaism and Christianity – contains an explicit injunction to BEAT wives, wives whom the beater merely *fears* ‘might* rebel., and that Islamic texts are saturated with misogyny of a peculiarly distinctive and all-pervasive kind, and that Islamic countries are (and always have been) uniquely destructive and repressive of women and girls; *the* worst country, by all objective measures, in which to be a woman is, at the moment, Islamo-addled Afghanistan).
Read it, and see just to what lengths modern writers will go in order to protect and defend Islam and deflect attention and scrutiny away from it, at all costs.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/thefeed/article/2016/07/17/what-mass-killers-really-have-common
17 JUL 2016 – 8:48PM
“What mass killers really have in common”.
And yet… if France hadn’t invited into their midst a very large and dangerous Fifth Column of Muslims, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, and Nice *would not have happened*. I do not think there has been *any* case of a non-Muslim Frenchman, any time *during peace-time* (I exclude the period of the wars) in the past 100 years, carrying out, as an individual or with the help of a number of actively-assisting associates, such a spectacularly mass murderous attack of the kind that Muslims have done, or plotted to do. Let alone the other incidents – Mohammed Merah deliberately murdering police **and a rabbi and Jewish children at a Jewish school*. Or the kidnapping and torture-murder of Ilan Halimi, with the thugs reciting *Quran verses* while they slowly destroyed their Jewish victim. Or the throat-slitting of the Jew Sebastien Selam by a *Muslim* who, after the killing, declared “I shall go to paradise. I have killed my Jew. Allah made me do it”.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
Islamicization of radicalism.
Oh this is rich. So now they’re radicalism and it gets attached to the corpus of a belief system. Forget that the belief system, Islam, is itself radical, as least in comparison to civilized standards. This is the historical equivalent to catching a dose of clap by sitting on a questionable toilet seat in a truck stop. Always use those sanitary covers cut in the shape of a toilet seat, otherwise you may suffer.
What is the equivalent of a cover seat sanitary napkin to keep us from infection of Islam?
linnte says
Why is is so difficult and seemingly mysterious to these “learned” men to discern and say Islam is the problem with Islam? I have not time for eejits like this. And of course, Hugh Fitzgerald, this is an excellent article! Thanks!
islam the religion of killers says
“such organizations as CAIR, that are so quick to assure us after every Muslim terrorist attack that it had “nothing to do with Islam.””
it proves that the terrorist act has everything to do with Islam ..
If terrorists didn’t exist, CAIR would have nothing to do ….
TH says
Didn’t Mahommed begin his criminal career in Medina by looting caravans? Such willfully ignorant “experts” are legion. I live in Spain and I hear them interviewed on the radio.
Smart guy says
France is not just a nation state. France is also a Revolution. liberty. Fraternity, Equality. These words are the slogans of the French Revolution. Islam is completely divorced from all three. The rich French
such as the Aristocrats were sent to “Madame Guillotine” for assuming that they were superior to other
French men. Eventually France will have to send Islam and all those that have supported it to “Madame Guillotine” The socialists are capable of exterminating an entire class of people and not feeling guilty
about it !!. Those in France who do not support Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty are traitors to France.
Kiel says
When all the above is said and more to it, and Mr. Fitzgerald has really dug into the matter, the action is needed. We have all the intellectual discussions we need. I’m waiting for substantive action on behalf of the Westerners. Soon we are in a situation of no return.
We’re not required to consider Islam a religion or tolerate it simply because a 7th-century psychopath said so. In fact, Islam is a criminal enterprise, with Sedition and Conspiracy to Murder right at the top of the list: A list including scores of other crimes. All that’s necessary is an honest and long overdue reclassification of Islam from “the religion of peace,” into Capital Felony. Then impose capital punishment on those practicing or promoting Islam. We can do that within our own borders, and force every Muslim government on Earth to do the same.
The West has all the technical remedies needed to complete isolate unwanted elements. Nicholas Sarkozy has criticised President Hollande for doing too little too late. Those Muslims without citizenship have to leave France. Petty Muslim criminals or would-be criminals have to wear an electronic foot-gear, says Sarkozy. – I’m waiting for the total extraction of Muslims from the Western soil.
Louise says
Thank you for this article. In england there is only fear of Islam so nobody dare speak its name. I am fearful of the future.
Mladen Andrijasevic says
But France is waking up. Here is what Alexis Brezet wrote in Le Figaro:
‘Merah, Charlie, Bataclan , Magnanville, and now Nice. How long before our eyes are opened ? How many wild attacks, indiscriminate massacres before our leaders admit that Islamist fanaticism initiated a fight to the death against our country and our civilization?
” We are at war ! ” Now it is said. After much procrastination, the term is now on everyone’s lips. But really, who really believes it? ” To arms, citizens,” we shout lustily, but our weapons are those of peace candles, hashtags , processions and subtleties of our Code of Criminal Procedure’
Le Figaro: A ruthless response
http://madisdead.blogspot.co.il/2016/07/a-ruthless-response.html