France’s ambassador to Poland Pierre Levy has said he was “surprised, even shocked,” by the Polish foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, declaring that “something’s not right” with France, and that was “sad because France is the sick man of Europe, dragging Europe down.” M. Levy went on to make an astonishing statement which only confirmed that the Pole was right.
Talking to the media shortly before Christmas, Mr. Czaputowicz said that the protests in recent weeks and the Strasbourg Christmas market attack by a Muslim reflected France’s overall decrepitude. His reference to the jihadist attack was particularly significant—and irksome to the French ambassador—because it clearly alluded to Poland’s refusal to accept any Muslim refugees from Greece and Italy under EU quotas. That position is shared by the other three members of the Visegrad Group, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
Levy warned that populism and “fringe forces” threatened European interests. As for the Strasbourg attack, he said that “the investigation into its roots and causes had not yet been completed.” Levy further asserted that most of the perpetrators of past attacks were motivated by the same forces of economic inequality that gave rise to the yellow vest riots: “The attacks were acts of . . . people who, for various reasons, found themselves on the margins [of society], and who adopted the badge of Islamic radicals, even though, in reality, they weren’t radicals at all.”
This is reminiscent of any number of old jokes where, by trying to establish his rationality, the patient confirms that he is utterly insane.
Writing in these pages three years ago, I diagnosed the disorder which is on such blatant display in Pierre Levy’s statement: members of the elite class “treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself.”
But M. Levy’s task is to represent his country’s government, which in France’s case primarily means President Emanuel Macron. As it happens, Macron is a paradigmatic pastiche—almost a caricature—of Europe’s postmodern, transnational elite. He is an Islamophile open-borders globalist. Two years ago he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that critics of Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy were guilty of “disgraceful oversimplification.” By allowing over a million aliens into the country, “Merkel and German society as a whole exemplified our common European values. They saved our collective dignity by accepting, accommodating and educating distressed refugees.” He subsequently lampooned Donald Trump’s promise to protect America’s southern border by promising never to build a wall of any kind.
According to Macron, French security policy has unfairly targeted Muslims in the past, and “secularism should not be brandished to as a weapon to fight Islam.” “No religion is a problem in France today,” Macron said during the campaign. Parroting Obama, he assured his followers that the Islamic State was not at all “Islamic”: “What poses a problem is not Islam, but certain behaviors that are said to be religious and then imposed on persons who practice that religion.”
Macron is an evil cretin, and Pierre Levy is his worthy representative. The refusal of the Parisian elite class to protect France from Islam reflects a global problem that is the synthesis of all others. Macron and his ambassador both belong to the same class: rootless, arrogant, and irrevocably jihad-friendly. They will “fight” terrorism without even allowing for the possibility that the killers’ motive may have something to do with Islam’s core teaching, rather than social marginalization, or injustice, discrimination, intolerance etc. They embody France’s loss of the will to define and defend one’s native land and culture and people.
France is the Sick Man of Europe indeed, but unfortunately France is not alone. Ambassador Levy’s assertion that Europe’s jihadist murderers are but marginalized, misguided and confused youths, “who adopted the badge of Islamic radicals, even though, in reality, they weren’t radicals at all,” is idiotic and criminal in equal measure; but it would not be seen as in any way remarkable among the bien pensants of London, Berlin, or Madrid.
The rot is at least two decades old, and Britain is a major culprit. In the aftermath of 9-11 then-Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that “what happened in America was not the work of Islamic terrorists, it was not the work of Muslim terrorists . . . It was the work of terrorists, pure and simple.” They must not be honored “with any misguided religious justification,” because they “contravened all the tenets of Islam”: “Islam is a peace-loving, tolerant, religion . . . We share the same values, and the same respect for the sanctity of human life . . . We know of no specific threat in relation to this country, and it is important that we are not alarmist about it.”
Less than four years later, on July 7, 2005, London’s turn came. The suicide bombers were four young British citizens, Muslim by religion, three of them Pakistani by parentage, born and bred in England, educated in British state schools. They hated England and its people with such intensity that they were prepared to sacrifice their own lives in order to kill 52 of them and injure over 200. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the lead suicide bomber, recorded a video in which he declared, “We are at war and I am a solider.”
The British establishment remained adamant that the perpetrators were by definition not Muslim. When asked if the bombings were the work of Islamic terrorists, the deputy chief of London’s Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick, responded that the culprits “certainly were not Islamic terrorists, because Islam and terrorism simply don’t go together.” He repeated Blair’s assurances on the subject given four years earlier.
In November 2005, Blair himself traveled to Leeds to meet with young Muslims in an attempt to understand how these “born-and-bred Yorkshire lads” could turn on their fellow citizens in such a murderous manner. His reference to the self-described jihadist soldiers as “lads”—an English term of endearment for the youthful male person, derived from Middle English ladde—was as sure a sign of criminal insanity as M. Levy’s assurances that jihadist murderers, “in reality, weren’t radicals at all.”
Monsieur l’Ambassadeur en Varsovie, il n’est pas seul. He’s got allies in every European government cabinet, editorial office, TV studio, and lecture hall. Pierre Levy belongs to a rich and well-established cultural and political ideology and practice. “In reality,” to paraphrase him, both must be broken and eradicated if Europe is to live.
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