Eric Zemmour, the journalist, writer, and television pundit, has just announced that he will be running for President of France. A month ago he had pulled ahead of his rival Marine Le Pen, by 22% to 16% in the polls, but now his support has decreased to 15%. This drop in his support is the result of bizarre statements Zemmour recently made. First, he suggested that the collaborationists of Vichy deserved credit because even though they did nothing to rescue foreign Jews living in France from the Nazis, they did manage to save three-quarters of French Jews from being murdered. But by 1942 – has Zemmour forgotten? — the Nazis had turned their attention to French Jews, and Vichy did not stand in their way. 80% of the 4,000 Jewish children rounded up at the Vel d’Hiv rafle were French, not foreign, Jews. This attempt to find something to praise about Vichy’s conduct is simply baffling.
Zemmour’s second unacceptable remark had to do with the burial in Israel of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his sons Arieh, 5, and Gabriel, 3, and 8-year-old Myriam Monsenego, who had all been shot to death in Toulouse by a Muslim murderer, Mohamed Merah. Zemmour outraged French Jews – and not only Jews — by claiming that the burial in Israel of the victims of that massacre proved that they were not sufficiently attached to France. Another remark that’s hard to accept.
I admit that on reading those remarks I was both surprised and disappointed. But I still find Zemmour a compelling candidate , and I hope he not only regains his footing but manages to defeat Macron.
Here is the speech he gave announcing his candidacy or the presidency. He delivered It sitting at a desk, with a large old-fashioned microphone of the kind, reporters have noted, that General De Gaulle used when he was broadcasting to France from Free French headquarters in London. I have added a running commentary on what lies unstated behind Zemmour’s words — his alarm at the growing presence of the Muslim invaders:
My dear Countrymen— For years, the same feeling has swept you along, oppressed you, shamed you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession. You walk down the streets in your towns, and you don’t recognize them.
He never mentions Islam, or Muslim migrants, in his speech. He doesn’t have to. Everyone knows he is speaking about that sense of depaysement, of no longer being at home in your own country, of sensing it has changed so much that you can no longer recognize it, because of that Muslim presence. When you walk down the streets of your towns and cities, you now see those large Muslim families, the mothers so often waddling along, pregnant, while holding one baby and pushing a toddler in a stroller, with two or three older children walking by their mother’s side. Time to remember Algerian President Boumedienne’s statement at the U.N., in 1974: “Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.” The shops have started to reflect this new population. Food stores — especially butcher shops — now have halal signs in the window. So do some restaurants. In neighborhoods with large numbers of Muslims, the atmosphere has become that of a North African souk, with Arab sellers of cheap clothes in the open-air markets, hawking their wares to passersby. This is not the France you grew up in, Zemmour exclaims. You no longer recognize it as France. You feel dispossessed. He will repeat this theme many times in this speech.
You look at your screens and they speak to you in a language that is strange, and in the end foreign. You turn your eyes and ears to advertisements, TV series, football matches, films, live performances, songs, and the schoolbooks of your children.
The talking heads on television try to inveigle you into accepting, even celebrating this dispossession that weighs so heavily on you. So you turn away from those pollyannish pundits to the most mindless of entertainments you can find: sports events, songs, television series, even advertisements, movies, anything and everything to keep you from thinking, to keep you from being anxious about the new reality which you must now endure.
You take the subways and trains. You go to train stations and airports. You wait for your sons and your daughters outside their school. You take your mother to the emergency room.
Everywhere you travel on mass transit, you run up against the Muslims, aggressive and menacing. On the buses they grab seats, or if you are a girl, try to grab you. In the Metro groups of young Muslim males rush menacingly through the cars, attempting to steal purses and delighting in the mayhem and alarm they are causing; on trains, when someone is foolish enough to leave his luggage on the overhead rack while he goes to the restaurant car, they cut that luggage open and steal anything of value inside (this has happened to me, and to several friends, just outside Marseille); in the airports, their presence reminds you of why these endless security checks became necessary in the first place.
You wait for your children outside their schools, with greater anxiety than in years past, because you remember what happened to the little Jewish children murdered outside the school in Toulouse. And you know about the drug-pushing Muslims who wait outside schools for their French prey, to lure them into trying marijuana and then hard drugs. You have read about those Pakistani grooming gangs in England, whose members wait outside schools to entice young girls into their cars, to get them high on alcohol and drugs, and then to turn them into sex slaves, passed around like party favors.
The emergency rooms are so often filled with Muslim patients. The whole family accompanies one of its members to the E.R. Muslim husbands audibly cause a furor if any of their womenfolk are to be examined by a male doctor; they will not permit it, and eventually a female doctor or nurse practitioner is found, and a crisis is avoided. The French now know better than to assign Muslim girls and women to be examined by male medical personnel; it’s the only way to head off violence at doctors’ offices and hospital examination rooms.
You stand in line at the post office or the employment agency. You wait at a police station or a courthouse. And you have the impression that you are no longer in a country that you know.
Who are these people, these Muslims, so many of whom are at the post office, picking up their government checks? Or at the employment office, going through the motions of “looking for work” so as to continue to receive “unemployment” checks from the generous French government?
At the police station, and at the courthouse, you are overwhelmed by the presence of so many Muslims. 80% of those now imprisoned in France are Muslims, though they make up 10% of the population. They are overrepresented in the criminal justice system at every step, from being booked at the police station, to being tried at the courthouse, and finally, to being sent to prison, where they are so expensive to maintain.
You remember the country of your childhood. You remember the country that your parents told you about. You remember the country found in films and books. The country of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV. The country of Bonaparte and General de Gaulle.
Zemmour appeals to the memory, individual and collective, of a far different France than the one we have today, a France that existed before the Muslim invasion changed so much. A France of saints, like St. Joan, and sun kings, like Louis XIV, the admired subjects of books and films, and all contributing to the deep historic memory of the French. And Zemmour doesn’t want us to forget the military men who were also heroes – Bonaparte and De Gaulle. But Zemmour doesn’t have to spell out his meaning, that none of these people, not Joan of Arc, or Louis XIV, or Bonaparte, or De Gaulle, hold any interest for the Muslims who are living in, but not belonging to, France. These French heroes mean nothing to them. They are not part of the world of Islam. Why should Muslims care about them?
The country of knights and ladies. The country of Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand. The country of Pascal and Descartes. The country of the fables of La Fontaine, the characters of Molière, and the verses of Racine.
The grand panorama of France’s most brilliant philosophers, and its writers of novels, plays, fables, and poetry, have all become part of what makes France France, and they all contributed to enriching the minds of the French. But none of this means anything to the Muslims wrapped, as they are, in their Qur’an and Hadith, unwilling to engage with, or find value in, what the Infidel French offer, the products of what Chamfort described as “the Perfected Civilization.” At state schools, Muslim students have resisted learning about French history — why should they care about the Christian kings, or the Crusades? Many have no desire, either, to read French literature. It does not belong to them, it’s not about them, it’s written by and for Infidels, and good Muslims should not want to have anything to do with it.
The country of Notre Dame de Paris and of village church towers. The country of Gavroche and Cosette. The country of barricades and Versailles. The country of Pasteur and Lavoisier. The country of Voltaire and Rousseau, of Clemenceau and the soldiers of ’14, of de Gaulle and Jean Moulin. The country of Gabin and Delon; of Brigitte Bardot and Belmondo and Johnny and Aznavour and Brassens and Barbara; the films of Sautet and Verneuil.
Zemmour is trying to evoke in this short speech every aspect of French civilization, so alien to the Muslims now living in France, but rejecting what makes the French French. The French may admire their country’s religious architecture, from the most modest village churches to the grandeur of Notre Dame de Paris. There is nothing to interest Muslims in these Christian structures. The country of the Parisian poor – Gavroche and Cosette — depicted as among “les miserables” in the fiction of Victor Hugo, of revolutionary rebels at the barricades, of courtiers at Versailles, of the enlightenment thinkers, of scientists (Pasteur’s medical advances, the doomed Lavoisier’s work in Chemistry), and so on, right up to the film stars and the entertainers of the last half-century: Bardot, Belmondo, Charles Aznavour, Johnny Halliday, Georges Brassens. He’s reminding the French of so many, and so various, illustrious French men and women, for Zemmour wants them to be proud of France, to repossess it, and to preserve it from the depredations of those who he is grimly convinced, take neither pride nor even interest in it.
This country— at the same time light-hearted and illustrious. This country— at the same time literary and scientific. This country— truly intelligent and one-of-a-kind. The country of the Concorde and nuclear power. The country that invented cinema and the automobile.
More praise of many-faceted (“light-hearted and illustrious,” “literary and scientific”) France, a country like no other (“one of a kind”), with its advances in aeronautics and nuclear energy and its inventive genius (the moving picture of the pioneering Lumiere Brothers, the steam automobile of Nicolas Cugnot).
This country— that you search for everywhere with dismay. No, your children are homesick, without even having known this country that you cherish. And it is disappearing.
Your country has not “disappeared” under this foreign invasion, but “it is disappearing.” That means there is still time to defend and rescue it from succumbing to the invaders. Zemmour keeps drumming into his listeners the achievements of the French in so many different areas of human endeavor, so that the disheartened among them can regain their national pride and their determination to return the country to what it once was, not so very long ago.
You haven’t left, and yet you have the feeling of no longer being at home. You have not left your country. Your country left you. You smell foreigners in your own country. You are internal exiles.
Again, Zemmour plays on the widely shared feeling that “your country,” France, is being “taken away” from you by others, the Muslim interlopers who see France only as a source of welfare benefits of every kind, not as a civilization that they, too, wish to become part of and contribute to.
For a long time, you believed you were the only one to see, to hear, to think, to doubt. You were afraid to say it. You were ashamed of your feelings. For a long time, you dared not say what you are seeing, and above all you dared not see what you were seeing.
And then you said it to your wife. To your husband. To your children. To your father. To your mother. To your friends. To your coworkers. To your neighbors. And then to strangers. And you understood that your feeling of dispossession was shared by everyone.
France is no longer France, and everyone sees it.
Many people saw what was happening to their country, because of the Muslim invasion, and their anxiety, even dread, steadily increased, but they kept silent for so long because they were fearful of being labelled as “racists” and “islamophobes.” Then they began to share their thoughts, first with their closest relatives, then with friends, with coworkers, with neighbors, And finally with strangers. And they discovered that they had all along shared the same worries, the same fear of a future islamized France. Now they realize that “the feeling of dispossession was shared by everyone” and as a consequence, they were no longer reluctant to acknowledge their fears, and to express their determination to return France to its previous condition.
11B40 says
Bon Jour:
Allons efants de la patrie ???
born saturday says
disgusting muslims must be all deported and the borders must shut hermetically so that none of them is able to cross again, and the countries that helped them invade must be strictly punished….
but who will do this makron?? i doupt even jemour will do it himself…
gravenimage says
Cutting off further Muslim immigration and deporting the worst of the Jihadists after they serve their prison terms would be good first steps.
Kesselman says
France is hit more than most European countries. But it’s a plague, nonetheless to all of Western Europe.
Isolationists suggest “containment” of Muslims as a solution, erecting giant walls, keeping the bad guys “over there.” Isolationism doesn’t work though. For starters, millions of Muslims are already living here among us. More Muslims will figure out ways to sneak in anyway, either in person, ICBM, or nuke on a container ship.
gravenimage says
Kesselman, isolating the Muslim world did indeed keep us largely safe from Islam for centuries. Ending mass Muslim immigration into the West is the first thing to do. President Trump made some motions in this direction.
gravenimage says
Eric Zemmour Announces He Is Running For President of France
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Good news!
john smith says
Zemmour is certainly making all the right noises to appeal to the patriots, but personally I believe he should team up with Le Pen, between them they would have a more solid base of voters.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
But only one can run against Macron. Who is more likely to convincingly describe the problem?
gravenimage says
Great to have such a difficult choice as deciding between two such staunch Anti-Jihadists.
john smith says
That’s the trouble, they are going to be taking votes from each other.
gravenimage says
John, I am no expert, but I have heard several times here from French natives that the French electoral system is different and that it is not possible for similar candidates to split the vote. If this is the case, I hope both run–it will expose the public to actual debates about how to defend against Islam.
LB says
While I appreciate Hugh’s narrow focus solely on the muslims and islam, I’d like to ask all the readers here to take a more broader look at Zemmour’s speech.
Firstly, while yes, when talking about a “disappearing” country, Zemmour is referring to muslim immigrant invasion, but that’s not the ONLY thing he’s talking about. A country “disappears” not only when its people are completely erased and physically replaced by foreign invaders, but also when the country’s customs and culture are erased from the people, and that is a much greater and more immediate threat than being taken over which, while not impossible, is very far down the line. In other words, the French (and all Western people in general) are being spiritually poisoned by godless self-indulging satanic Leftism which is designed not only to induce total apathy in the native (white) population about the trajectory of their country, but also makes them actively contribute to its demise by willingly allowing in the muslims who want to kill them and replace them. If that wasn’t the case and the French had kept their nationalistic conservative Christian values, there would be no muslim threat to speak of in the first place.
Secondly, while they are an overwhelming majority, muslims do not make up 100% of the total immigrant population in France. For the sake of argument, let’s hypothetically assume that every single immigrant to France is a Christian Sub-Saharan black African. Now let me ask you this: if the entire white native population of France was completely replaced with Sub-Saharan Africans, Christian though as they may be, would France still be France? The answer, of course, is NO. So you see, the religion of the immigrants is not the end-all-be-all issue — the IMMIGRANTS THEMSELVES are the REAL issue. As much as some here would hate to admit it, ethnicity matters; in fact, ethnicity is the #1 factor that defines a country. This and the paragraph above is, in my opinion, the writing between the lines Zemmour is trying to express, and I couldn’t agree more.
And thirdly, Hugh starts this essay by immediately pointing out the “flaws” in Zemmour’s speech, which are two things that are seemingly… *GASP!*… anti-Jewish!!! ***SCREAMS OF HORROR*** Heavens forbid that the Jews are not honored and bowed down to in every sentence while also not forgetting to mention the most horrifying event in the history of the universe since the Big Bang — the Holocaust, lest Zemmour be branded with the ultimate slur which gets you cancelled on every social media platform and every bank — an anti-Semite. Alright, hyperbole aside, I fail to see what’s so “wrong” about the two things he said. The first is about the Vichy rule of a part of France during Germany’s invasion in WWII. From the wiki:
“Vichy France (French: Régime de Vichy; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944) is the common name of the French State (État français) headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. At Vichy, Pétain established an authoritarian government that reversed many liberal policies and began tight supervision of the economy. Conservative Catholics became prominent,[4] and Paris lost its avant-garde status in European art and culture. The media were tightly controlled and promoted anti-Semitism and, after Operation Barbarossa started in June 1941, anti-Bolshevism.[5] The terms of the armistice presented certain advantages, such as keeping the French Navy and French colonial empire under French control and avoiding full occupation of the country by Germany, which maintained a degree of French independence and neutrality. Despite heavy pressure, the French government at Vichy never joined the Axis powers and even remained formally at war with Germany.”
I see literally nothing wrong with that, that sounds awesome. In fact, if I had to guess, had the Vichy government remained in power in France to this day, there wouldn’t be a single muslim living in it today.
Zemmour’s second “offence” was mentioning a French-Jewish rabbi whose kids were shot to death by a muslim and he had them buried in Israel. While the event itself is very tragic as no children deserve to be killed, it’s their funeral that was the controversial part. Again, let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario where an immigrant, or even worse — a second (or more) generation immigrant born and raised in a host country, decides not to bury his dead relatives in that country but instead he flies them over to his “home” country from which him or his parents immigrated from. Would you not say that that is a case of disloyalty/treason to the country that raised him? At the very least, it is a case of dual loyalty to a potentially hostile foreign country, and should result in citizenship revocation as the mildest form of punishment. Again, I see nothing wrong in Zemmour’s remarks here.
TL;DR: There is much more to Zemmour’s speech than simply “muslims = bad” as Hugh would have us believe, you just have to broaden your horizons and look at it from all possible angles.
gravenimage says
LB wrote:
As much as some here would hate to admit it, ethnicity matters; in fact, ethnicity is the #1 factor that defines a country.
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No it’s not. What defines a country is its values and culture. The implication that if Muslims so long as they were white invaded and took over France that all would be well is utterly ludicrous.
More:
And thirdly, Hugh starts this essay by immediately pointing out the “flaws” in Zemmour’s speech, which are two things that are seemingly… *GASP!*… anti-Jewish!!! ***SCREAMS OF HORROR*** Heavens forbid that the Jews are not honored and bowed down to in every sentence while also not forgetting to mention the most horrifying event in the history of the universe since the Big Bang — the Holocaust…
……………..
It was Zemmour who was spouting apologia for the appalling Vichy government during the Holocaust–this was not something Hugh Fitzgerald invented as LB here pretends.
And the idea that opposing the murder of French Jews is “bowing down” to Jews could not be more grotesque. Does LB himself oppose this genocidal savagery? Not so he says.
What I have heard of Zemmour so far I generally support–but pointing out troubling positions of any candidate or public figure is perfectly valid.
And note that Eric Zemmour is himself Jewish.
Then, that LB considers Vichy rule “awesome” is sickening in the extreme. He seems fine with their being a puppet state of the Nazis. *Ugh*.
And he seems to have forgotten–or else hopes that we have forgotten–that Hitler actually admired Islam.
More:
Zemmour’s second “offence” was mentioning a French-Jewish rabbi whose kids were shot to death by a muslim and he had them buried in Israel. While the event itself is very tragic as no children deserve to be killed, it’s their funeral that was the controversial part. Again, let’s imagine a hypothetical scenario where an immigrant, or even worse — a second (or more) generation immigrant born and raised in a host country, decides not to bury his dead relatives in that country but instead he flies them over to his “home” country from which him or his parents immigrated from. Would you not say that that is a case of disloyalty/treason to the country that raised him? At the very least, it is a case of dual loyalty to a potentially hostile foreign country, and should result in citizenship revocation as the mildest form of punishment. Again, I see nothing wrong in Zemmour’s remarks here.
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Note that LB only mentions in passing that *murdering children* is wrong–but what really seems to enrage him is burying the victim in Israel. Good lord…
And it is not Jews in France who have to prove they are loyal citizens, as LB pretends–but Muslims who are pushing for Shari’ah law and regularly murdering those they regard as the “filthy French”. Is LB trying to pretend that Muslims are ‘only’ murdering Jewish people in France? Try again…
More:
TL;DR: There is much more to Zemmour’s speech than simply “muslims = bad” as Hugh would have us believe, you just have to broaden your horizons and look at it from all possible angles.
……………..
That LB is now sneering at the idea that Muslims present a threat to the West is just grotesque–but somehow I am not really all that surprised, especially given his recent apologia for Belarus flooding Poland with invading Muslims. *Ugh*.
eduardo odraude says
LB basically wants to say these four items:
1. The darn Jews are griping about the Holocaust again. What’s the big deal about the Holocaust?
2. If the Vichy Allies of the Nazis had stayed in power, the Vichy would have made France a better country than it is today;
3. Ethnicity is the most important thing in the world
4. Ethnicity is much more important than Christianity.
I don’t know. Maybe LB is not a Nazi.
eduardo odraude says
Then again…
gravenimage says
Spot on, Eduardo.
LB says
You know graven, I gotta hand it to you. Strawmanning literally every single thing I said like that takes a lot of skill. You should run for office because you’d make a great politician. I’ll try to explain what I mean.
So you start by ignoring my first paragraph (which is the main point of my post) and go straight into misconstruing my ethnicity argument in the middle of the second paragraph without mentioning anything I said previously about it, which is that if a country’s population gets completely replaced with foreign people of different ethnicity but same religion, it would not be the same country. I never said that ethnicity is ALL that matters, just that it’s a primary defining factor (among many others) when defining a country.
But to that you say “no, no, no, as long as they have the same values it’s all a-okay!” Fine, let’s have it your way. Mexicans and all other Central/South Americans are largely Christian and have conservative traditional values, so why do you oppose them illegally crossing the southern border? Why not invite the entire continent over? Lord knows that no white person is ever going to stoop so low as to do all the dirty jobs, and they have better food too! So what’s the problem? Do you hate brown people? Are you a racist nazi? These people are suffering, graven! Don’t you feel sorry for them? They are just like you and hold the same values!
Also for the record, if all Arabs were ethnically white, they’d be smart enough to never embrace muhammad’s islam in the first place, so that’s not even a valid argument on your part. Need I remind you that, aside from spreading islam as the ultimate goal, a lot of desire for conquest and enslaving the West stems from the Arabs’ (and other muslim ethnic groups) lust for white slaves, specifically women and children. The Barbary pirates weren’t raiding coastal African and Asian villages, instead they opted to go as far as Iceland, I wonder why that is….
Then, you immediately point out my hyperbole (I made it clear right after) which was intended at making fun of the likes of ADL, SPLC and other Jewish orgs and pundits who prowl the internet scouring for anything that can be alluded to as “anti-semitic” and using that as leverage to get people banned from the internet. You can joke about everything, except the Jews. Funny how that works (no pun intended), isn’t it? After using ADL and SPLC tactics against me, you accuse me of approving genocide and being a Hitler lover which is not only the polar opposite of my actual position, but also not even a point of discussion. Way to put words in my mouth and prove my point above in the process.
As far as Vichy is concerned, I’m not an expert in it and only know the basics that it was an independent state under French rule during WWII that historically opposed the central rule of Paris — this goes back to the kingdom of Aquitaine in the Middle Ages before the unification of France. Unless the Vichy actively hunted down every single Jew and turned them over to the Nazis to genocide them (which wasn’t the case from what I know), then I see no problem with it since what they were doing was, in my opinion, basically geo-politics. I could be wrong on this and someone with more in-depth knowledge of the area in that time period can correct me, but that is how I see it and that’s the extent of my argument; if someone proves me wrong, I’ll admit that I’m wrong.
Then comes my (and also, Zemmour’s) biggest sin of all — questioning the loyalty of someone who was born and raised in France, but decided to bury his tragically killed children in his real home country. Now if I (and Zemmour) said that it was a French-born Pakistani muslim who went out of his way to bury his French-born muslim children in Pakistan, and that it’s a bad thing, neither you nor Hugh would have a problem with it. And there comes another one of your amazing strawmen where you make me out to have a problem with it SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE the person in question is Jewish which, again, is not what I said. I don’t care what he is — if he and his parents and his grandparents and his children were all French-born, there is no excuse to NOT be French and having ties with any other country, that’s simply disloyalty (in worst case, it’s treason) to France. End of story.
Finally, another strawman to cap it all off, because why not I guess. You accuse me of “sneering” at the muslim threat to the West. First of all, if I genuinely believed that muslims aren’t a threat to the West, I wouldn’t still be here on Jihad Watch all these years reading every single post. If you read my first paragraph which you so conveniently skipped over in your “takedown” of my post, I said that “being taken over [by muslims], while not impossible, is very far down the line” and that there are much more immediate threats to the West that need to be addressed. You would know what I meant by that had you not already pre-decided that I’m some Hitler-loving nazi and therefore needed to be taken out at all costs, even if it meant distorting literally everything I said.
I’m probably many years your junior, but allow me to give you one piece of advice: tunnel-visioning something for the sake of approving your own constructed worldview can have lethal results. If you want to participate in a discussion, you should approach it in good faith with an open mind (steelmanning instead of strawmanning), because otherwise all you’re doing is (character) assassinating anybody who does not agree with you. Sounds a lot like muslim behavior, doesn’t it?
eduardo odraude says
I’m glad you are not a Nazi, LB, but you are responsible for giving the impression that you are a Nazi or at least a flirter with Nazism. You said several things that, taken together, strongly suggested that mentality. You said
1. “ethnicity is the #1 factor that defines a country”
2. “I see literally nothing wrong with [the description of the Vichy gov’t, that sounds awesome”. Specifially, you said a paragraph containing the following was “awesome”:
“…At Vichy, Pétain established an authoritarian government…The media were tightly controlled and promoted anti-Semitism…”
That sounds “awesome” to you, LB? Well then pardon us for seeing in you a Nazi or a flirter with Nazism.
You also wrote:
3. “…if all Arabs were ethnically white, they’d be smart enough to never embrace muhammad’s islam in the first place…”
Based on the above three statements you made, LB, it is clear that you adhere to racist-authoritarian assumptions. Or else you are so careless in what you write that we should all just ignore you. You can gabble on as much as you want and try with a veneer of reasonability to dress up your racist and authoritarian views in civilized clothes, but you can’t reasonably complain when people ignore the thin veneer and treat you as a racist-authoritarian. When you emphasize biology and ethnicity over the spirit (assuming you acknowledge the spirit at all), you end up removing the possibility of free will and free government. Free will is not a biological category. That’s why materialists often insist that free will is an illusion. In reality, they claim, we are all nothing more than unfree concatenations of chemical and physical processes. The materialists tell us that when the brain is gone, nothing is left of the self, the consciousness, the “I”. But if, on the contrary, you are convinced that your self, your “I”, is not an illusion, that your self is indeed more than a mere brain secretion, then biology and race can only be understood as a part, and not the main part, of what makes us human. What makes us human is the free spirit, to the extent one achieves it. And the free spirit is not a racial category. Individuals of any race can work their way ever closer to the ideal of inner freedom and to something approximating to self-causation, self-creation.
gravenimage says
LB wrote:
You know graven, I gotta hand it to you. Strawmanning literally every single thing I said like that takes a lot of skill. You should run for office because you’d make a great politician. I’ll try to explain what I mean.
So you start by ignoring my first paragraph (which is the main point of my post)
……………………..
Actually, your first paragraph in that post was this:
While I appreciate Hugh’s narrow focus solely on the muslims and islam, I’d like to ask all the readers here to take a more broader look at Zemmour’s speech.
……………………..
This appears to be mostly a precursor to the main points you made. (correct me if I am wrong here).
So I presume you meant your *second* paragraph, which is here:
Firstly, while yes, when talking about a “disappearing” country, Zemmour is referring to muslim immigrant invasion, but that’s not the ONLY thing he’s talking about. A country “disappears” not only when its people are completely erased and physically replaced by foreign invaders, but also when the country’s customs and culture are erased from the people, and that is a much greater and more immediate threat than being taken over which, while not impossible, is very far down the line. In other words, the French (and all Western people in general) are being spiritually poisoned by godless self-indulging satanic Leftism which is designed not only to induce total apathy in the native (white) population about the trajectory of their country, but also makes them actively contribute to its demise by willingly allowing in the muslims who want to kill them and replace them. If that wasn’t the case and the French had kept their nationalistic conservative Christian values, there would be no muslim threat to speak of in the first place.
……………………..
This is quite contradictory in many respects–you do refer to a country’s “customs and culture”, but then appear to confuse the cultures of those migrants with that of native leftists, and then confuse things further with your reference to race. I thought there was little point in wading through this, but there you go.
I agree that there are other migrants whose culture may not work well with that of the civilized West, like some of those from, say, non-Muslim sub-Saharan Africa. Islam seems like the greatest immediate danger, though, and certainly Islam opposes every aspect of civilized French culture.
As for my “strawmanning”–(is this recognized as a verb at this point? I can only find it in the Urban Dictionary). But certainly the habit of using nouns as verbs dates back at least to “partying”, so I suppose you can coin your own terms–you give no examples of my doing so.
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and go straight into misconstruing my ethnicity argument in the middle of the second paragraph without mentioning anything I said previously about it, which is that if a country’s population gets completely replaced with foreign people of different ethnicity but same religion, it would not be the same country. I never said that ethnicity is ALL that matters, just that it’s a primary defining factor (among many others) when defining a country.
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Actually, you said “ethnicity is the #1 factor that defines a country”–I did not make that up–this is something you actually wrote:
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But to that you say “no, no, no, as long as they have the same values it’s all a-okay!”
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This is *truly bizarre*–actually, I said no such thing. The above is a false quote–why would you have to make up something like this?
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Fine, let’s have it your way. Mexicans and all other Central/South Americans are largely Christian and have conservative traditional values, so why do you oppose them illegally crossing the southern border? Why not invite the entire continent over?
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Illegal immigrants from Latin America include such horrors as MS-13 and the Latin Disciples and other drug gangs–having the Madonna of Guadalupe tattooed on your chest does not make you a conservative Christian. But no–the problem with Hispanic drug gangs is not that they are not white drug gangs.
And I believe in secure borders in any case–every nation has the right to defend its borders against unvetted invasion. Overall Muslim invasion is the most harmful, but it is not the only incursion that is dangerous.
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Lord knows that no white person is ever going to stoop so low as to do all the dirty jobs, and they have better food too! So what’s the problem? Do you hate brown people? Are you a racist nazi? These people are suffering, graven! Don’t you feel sorry for them? They are just like you and hold the same values!
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Firstly, this is claptrap. When I was first on my own as a teenager I worked as a custodian and room-cleaner, and doing low-level jobs at a restaurant. My husband before I met him worked in a pub. We are both white.
And, for the umpteenth time, this is not about race. Would I rather have Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Jihad Watch’s own Christine Douglas-Williams–Anti-Jihadists who are black–as neighbors than American Taliban John Walker Lindh, who is white? Yes, I would. I realize this may be difficult for you to grasp.
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Also for the record, if all Arabs were ethnically white, they’d be smart enough to never embrace muhammad’s islam in the first place, so that’s not even a valid argument on your part.
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I never made the claim that Arabs are white–although I realize that they are characterized in this manner in the US Census.
Then, I never once said that if Arabs are white they would be smart enough to reject Islam–what a bizarre claim.
And the fact is that there are quite a number of caucasian converts to Islam–and they are just as apt to be violent as are black converts to Islam, or as Arabs born into Islam.
Really, *Islam is not a race*–it is an ideology, and there have been Jihadists of all ethnicities. This *should* be obvious.
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Need I remind you that, aside from spreading islam as the ultimate goal, a lot of desire for conquest and enslaving the West stems from the Arabs’ (and other muslim ethnic groups) lust for white slaves, specifically women and children. The Barbary pirates weren’t raiding coastal African and Asian villages, instead they opted to go as far as Iceland, I wonder why that is….
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Actually, your idea that Muslims never enslaved Africans is truly odd–in fact, Muslims ran the massive African slave trade for many centuries. Really, this information is not at all difficult to find.
It is true that at many times Muslims have prized white–especially blonde–sex slaves. That Muslims preferred raping certain women is of note–but it doesn’t really tell you anything of substance about the victims, as you appear to believe. I don’t want to see *anyone* fall victim to slavery.
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Then, you immediately point out my hyperbole (I made it clear right after) which was intended at making fun of the likes of ADL, SPLC and other Jewish orgs and pundits who prowl the internet scouring for anything that can be alluded to as “anti-semitic” and using that as leverage to get people banned from the internet. You can joke about everything, except the Jews. Funny how that works (no pun intended), isn’t it? After using ADL and SPLC tactics against me, you accuse me of approving genocide and being a Hitler lover which is not only the polar opposite of my actual position, but also not even a point of discussion. Way to put words in my mouth and prove my point above in the process.
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Of course you can joke about the Holocaust as much as you like–but you have no reason to demand that civilized people laugh along with you. And I have not tried to get you banned–this is utterly false.
Part of freedom of speech is being able to reply to speech that you disagree with–which is what I was doing. Many people seem to miss this key aspect of freedom os speech–and many, of course, just hope that others have missed it.
Then, the implication that Jews control the internet is of course quite false. Nice try, though…
con’t
gravenimage says
con’t
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Unless the Vichy actively hunted down every single Jew and turned them over to the Nazis to genocide them (which wasn’t the case from what I know), then I see no problem with it since what they were doing was, in my opinion, basically geo-politics. I could be wrong on this and someone with more in-depth knowledge of the area in that time period can correct me, but that is how I see it and that’s the extent of my argument; if someone proves me wrong, I’ll admit that I’m wrong.
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*Good lord*–so you are fine with a “government” that allows a foreign power to come into their nation in order to murder their own citizens? *Just horrifying*–the first role of any government is to protect their citizens.
But this is also untrue–Vichy France did not “merely” allow Nazis in to round up Jews and others undesireable under Fascism–the government of Vichy France and the French police organized and implemented the roundups of Jews *themselves*.
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Then comes my (and also, Zemmour’s) biggest sin of all — questioning the loyalty of someone who was born and raised in France, but decided to bury his tragically killed children in his real home country. Now if I (and Zemmour) said that it was a French-born Pakistani muslim who went out of his way to bury his French-born muslim children in Pakistan, and that it’s a bad thing, neither you nor Hugh would have a problem with it. And there comes another one of your amazing strawmen where you make me out to have a problem with it SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE the person in question is Jewish which, again, is not what I said. I don’t care what he is — if he and his parents and his grandparents and his children were all French-born, there is no excuse to NOT be French and having ties with any other country, that’s simply disloyalty (in worst case, it’s treason) to France. End of story.
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As I said, I consider someone’s behavior while living *far* more important than where they decide to be laid to rest.
By the way, I arranged to have my nostalgic English mother interred in the churchyard of the town she grew up in the Severn valley where her parents are buried–and believe me, this is *not* because I hate America or am disloyal to her.
As I noted, Jews do not have to prove they are loyal to France–can you point to any incidents where they are instigating terror in France as Muslims regularly do? Can you point to Jews screaming about the “filthy French” as Muslims do? Of course not–that is why you ignored my citing this–you clearly have no answer for it.
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Finally, another strawman to cap it all off, because why not I guess. You accuse me of “sneering” at the muslim threat to the West. First of all, if I genuinely believed that muslims aren’t a threat to the West, I wouldn’t still be here on Jihad Watch all these years reading every single post. If you read my first paragraph which you so conveniently skipped over in your “takedown” of my post, I said that “being taken over [by muslims], while not impossible, is very far down the line” and that there are much more immediate threats to the West that need to be addressed. You would know what I meant by that had you not already pre-decided that I’m some Hitler-loving nazi and therefore needed to be taken out at all costs, even if it meant distorting literally everything I said.
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Your implication is that Islam is not an immediate danger–I suppose Jews would have that role, or some random non-white people–you don’t specifically say.
I consider Muslims murdering French people and imposing aspects of Shari’ah to be a threat *now*, even if they have not taken over completely yet.
Then, you recently took me to task when I said that Russia via Belarus had no right to push Muslims into Poland. You obviously have no problem with enabling Jihad in this instance.
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I’m probably many years your junior, but allow me to give you one piece of advice: tunnel-visioning something for the sake of approving your own constructed worldview can have lethal results.
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Ah, yes–if only I was open to considering the Vichy government’s rounding up Jews to be “awesome”…actually, I oppose the horrors of the Holocaust and Fascism for the same reasons I oppose the horrors of Islam.
The idea that being open to genocide and totalitarianism is “open minded” is actually quite grotesque–but it does not surpise.
And “lethal results”–is this a threat? Or do you just mean that if I miss out on living under a Fascist puppet-government that I’ll feel like killing myself? I think I’ll take that chance…
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If you want to participate in a discussion, you should approach it in good faith with an open mind (steelmanning instead of strawmanning), because otherwise all you’re doing is (character) assassinating anybody who does not agree with you. Sounds a lot like muslim behavior, doesn’t it?
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The “steel man” argument involves helping an opponent construct the strongest version of their argument. In other words, LB believes that I not only have to agree with him, but to actually make his argument for him where it is weak.
*Good lord*.
And the idea that if I don’t do so–that I don’t find a way to make LB’s apologia for Fascism palatable to others that I am acting like a Jihadist is just risable. It is not character assassination to point out aspects of another’s argument one disagrees with, whatever LB might wish for us to believe.
Yogi says
He will clean up this country from this parasites!!, same with La Pen , but I doubt it they will be elected, Antifa, Gates , Soros , Schwab they will take care of this , We are screw like all civilize countries…so sad
Yogi says
Germany is I the same patch , Germans start not recognize own country, they all want to go to Germany, Germany is no Germany anymore with rich culture exactly like France..
Infidel says
Marine Le Pen has never served as president of France before. I see no compelling reason to reject her in favor of someone else whose only advantage is being more acceptable to the French political aristocracy
Northern Virginiastan says
The irony of Zemmour’s anti-Semitic comments is that he is Jewish.
gravenimage says
Grimly true, I’m afraid. Concerning.
Anjuli Pandavar says
“The French now know better than to assign Muslim girls and women to be examined by male medical personnel; it’s the only way to head off violence at doctors’ offices and hospital examination rooms.”
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So Muslims have imposed their sexist norms on a civilised society. Why not tell them, ‘There’s the doctor. If he’s a bigger problem than your illness, then good bye!” And that’s that. They were offered qualified medical treatment. No one else expects anything more, especially those who have paid for it throughout their long working lives. The only valid change to be made here is to get tougher security guards and rigorous enforcement.
De-Islamisation is urgent!
gravenimage says
Spot on, Anjuli. To try to *normalize* Muslims physically attacking medical personnel trying to help their patients is simply grotesque, and something that France and other civilized nations should *never* allow. Civilized people don’t act like this if they don’t like the doctor assigned them, for whatever reason.