The claim propagated in the Western corporate media that the “March for Unity” in Paris on January 11 symbolized a victory of “freedom of speech” over “extremism” is wrong.  The attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, and particularly the aftermath of those attacks, were a victory for militant Islam and a fresh sign of “the West’s” near-terminal inability to defend itself.

French police and security services have demonstrated their inability to keep track of known Muslim terrorist suspects.  The Kouachi brothers had been listed as such, and they were on the U.S. and U.K. no-fly lists, but they were allowed to drop off the radar.  Perhaps the security services wanted to convert them into assets by “turning” them to do their bidding—a favored French technique for dealing with Islamic militants ever since Algeria—but even if this had been the case, the brothers should have been monitored.

It is likely the lapse happened because there are just too many young “Frenchmen” like the Kouachis.  France is home to a large new generation of native-born Muslims, children and grandchildren of North African immigrants, who hate the land of their birth and all things French with a passion.  They are offered the standard fare of multicultural tolerance in the leftist-dominated state school system, and reject that narrative en masse in favor of the simple message of Islam’s prophet.  According to Euronews.com, “an estimated 15 to 25 percent of France’s Muslims are thought to be radicalized to a greater or lesser degree, providing a potential network of hundreds of thousands of sympathizers able to offer logistical aid, shelter, or other forms of support” to the terrorist core.  There are currently 751 “Sensitive Urban Areas” (Zones Urbaines Sensibles, ZUS) all over France.  ZUS is a euphemism for no-go areas over which the French state has no control.

More serious than the operational failure of the security services was the political and media establishment’s immediate, almost hysterical insistence that the attacks were not inspired by Islam.  “These madmen, fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion,” François Hollande, president of the French Republic, declared in a televised address to the nation only hours after the attacks.  “Islam is compatible with democracy,” he announced a week later, “and on this there should not be any confusion.”  Hollande’s assertions were dutifully parroted by lesser officials.  François Bonet of the French Embassy in Belgrade thus told the Serbian daily Blic that

fanaticism and Islam must not be mixed: those two things have nothing in common.  This message must be reiterated again and again, especially after this attack, because the risk of confusing them is much greater when the people are in a state of shock, fear and horror . . . That is the real danger against which we must fight.

Similar statements were made all over the Western world.  President Obama condemned the “terrorists,” while White House press secretary Josh Earnest explicitly refused to describe the Paris attackers as adherents of radical Islam and insisted that they tried to “invoke their own deviant, distorted view of Islam in order to justify” the attacks.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that Islam “belongs to Germany,” condemned anti-immigration protesters in Dresden and other cities as people with “hatred in their hearts,” and praised Muslims for publicly rejecting violence after the Paris killings.  On January 13, Merkel and other German politicians gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate to take part in a solemn vigil called by Muslim organizations to commemorate victims of the twin attacks in Paris.

The leading media on both sides of the Atlantic provided commentary in the same spirit.  The New York Times quoted a professor from Berkeley who claims that Islam is “absolutely not” prone to violence, and that “there is very little empirical evidence that Islam is violent.”  A commentator in the Guardian lamented the fact that social media “abounds with Islamophobes seizing this atrocity to advance their hatred . . . The favored target of Europe’s far-right—like France’s Front National, which currently leads in the opinion polls—is Muslims.”  Remarkably, the Huffington Post saw the carnage in Paris as a jihadist ploy “to strengthen the far-right movements of formerly shunned xenophobic leaders like Marine Le Pen, who have long campaigned against immigration . . . ”  “Charlie Hebdo Paris shooting may deepen normalized Islamophobia,” CBC News warned.  “Right-wing rhetoric in France could ‘destroy’ goodwill among Muslims . . . ”

This is an advanced form of pathology.  It encourages the growth of a vast, unsupervised, and intrinsically hostile subculture all over the Western world, while denying its hostility.  It provides the context of immigration trends in Europe, prompting the conviction among many Muslims that tomorrow belongs to them.  It is exactly what Jean Raspail had in mind when he wrote of a “monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience.”  It is a mind-set that guarantees that similar attacks will happen with increasing frequency.  It encourages Islamic “activists” to treat citizens of Western countries in much the same way as the citizens of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and others are treated.

The hypocrisy of the entire “Je suis Charlie” campaign was on par with the absurdity of politicians and journalists turned theologians.  Noam Chomsky noted that after NATO’s bombing of Radio Television Serbia, which killed 16 Serbian TV journalists and technicians in April 1999, “there were no demonstrations or cries of outrage . . . On the contrary, the attack on the press was lauded.”  And France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls reminded us that there are stringent limits on what passes for free speech in France:

There is a fundamental difference between the freedom to be impertinent and anti-Semitism, racism, glorification of terrorist acts, and Holocaust denial, all of which are crimes that justice should punish with the utmost severity.

Only days after the attack, French police arrested the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala for writing on his Facebook page, “Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly.”  He was charged with “incitement of terrorism” for allegedly making a gesture of solidarity with Amedy Coulibaly, the killer at the kosher grocery store.  Lest we forget, Brigitte Bardot was convicted four times by French courts for speaking her mind: in 1997, for complaining of “foreign overpopulation”; in 2000, for writing that “my country, France, my homeland, my land is again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims”; in 2004, for arguing that immigration was leading to France’s Islamization; and in 2008, for sending a letter to Nicolas Sarkozy (then France’s minister of the interior) in which she referred to “this population which leads us by the nose and destroys us and our country.”

After Charlie Hebdo, resistance to elite claims that unceasing immigration on a vast scale is normal and desirable will be even more shrilly demonized.  There will be demands to outlaw political parties who assert that free citizens must not submit their destiny, and that of their progeny, to an historicist fallacy.  At the same time, France’s young Muslims are becoming ever more observant.  That is unsurprising: France cannot inspire loyalty to and love of the country for as long as she preaches a mix of neo-Marxist inclusivist bile and Masonic cosmopolitanism.  The greatest favor France can do to her Muslim community is to make their young more French.  The task is hard but not impossible if there is the political will.  Bring back Corneille, Molière, and Racine to the classroom.  Play them the madrigals.  Take them to Verdun.  And of course, stop all immigration, now, totally.

“You can feel that this can’t continue,” Michel Houellebecq declared last December, following the publication of his novel Soumission, which imagines a Muslim-ruled France a decade from now.  “Something has to change.  I don’t know what, but something.”  The carnage in Paris on January 7 has the potential, slim yet real, to trigger that “something.”  The angst is real, it is well founded, and the establishment’s multiculti platitudes can no longer keep it in check.  A new paradigm on Islam, immigration, and Western identity is badly needed.  The Paris attacks should spell the beginning of the end of another kind of extremism: the criminal insistence of the Western elite on misrepresenting Islam and pretending that the Koran is a pacifist tract.

As I wrote in The Sword of the Prophet 13 years ago, Islam should not be blamed for being what it is, nor should its adherents be condemned for maintaining their traditions; but Westerners should blame themselves for refusing to acknowledge the facts of the case and failing to take stock of their options.

The Koran’s exhortations to annihilate nonbelievers, to confiscate their land and property, to take their women and enslave their children are frank, and the fruits visible through the centuries.  In the present state of Western weakness, this firmness may appear attractive to the legions of cynical nihilists and lead further millions to the conclusion that we should all become Muslims, since our goose is cooked anyway, spiritually and demographically.  Those of us who do not cherish that prospect should at least demand that our rulers convey this reality fairly and squarely.  To pretend, as the ruling elite does, that Islam is a benign “religion of peace,” rather like Episcopalianism, is stupid and deeply dishonest.

The problem in France and elsewhere in the Western world is not prejudice toward Islam, but the criminal folly of the elite class in the face of Islamic violence and cruelty.  The willingness of some moderates to be objectively bad Muslims because they reject key teachings of historical Islam may be laudable in human terms, but it does nothing to modify Islam as a doctrine.  Ernest Renan, who started his study of Islam by praising its ability to manifest “what was divine in human nature,” ended it a quarter of a century and three long tours of the Muslim world later by concluding that “Muslims are the first victims of Islam,” and that, therefore, “to liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.”  To save herself, France needs a leader—Marine Le Pen in 2017, perhaps—capable of grasping this truth and acting accordingly.