A British Journalist Looks At France

A reader sent in a great article from the Daily Mail. I have little to add since I talk about these issues regularly, but how refreshing it is to know that Britain has at least one realistic journalist: Richard Waghorne. The opening paragraphs:

France still looks like and feels like France in the centre of Paris. You do not have to travel very far from the usual tourist sites, however, to start to understand the French ban on the full Islamic face-veil, which saw the first token conviction this week.

One tourist site that has quietly slipped off the traditional itineraries, for very good reasons, is the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Resting place of French kings and queens for more than a thousand years, the cathedral will see the interment next year of recently rediscovered remains of Henry IV. Ask Parisians if they have ever been to visit and they will say, almost uniformly, that they have not.

France’s equivalent to Westminster Abbey sits is today a forsaken Christian island in a surrounding Islamic sea. The population is 70% Muslim. French police publicly list much of the district as a no-go area. Walking through the area, one wonders not only whether one is really in France but whether one is even in Europe.

Saint-Denis requires a short trip from central Paris to be seen but the increasing Islamisation of France is visible even within the confines of central Paris proper. Within minutes of the tourist district of Montmartre, locals have had to put up with the police-assisted shutdown of public streets each Friday to facilitate Islamic prayers. Quite literally, the streets have been handed over weekly to French Muslims, complete with cordons preventing locals from passing through. The area also grows ever more unsafe for non-Muslims. A gay acquaintance of mine has been attacked three times in the neighbourhood while travelling to visit friends.

A new law has recently addressed public prayer but it remains to be seen whether the French authorities will take it any more seriously than their niqab-ban – because, notwithstanding the Europe-wide wave of condemnation from human rights lawyers and deluded feminist organisations when the face-veil ban was first passed, it has long since become clear that the French state is not even remotely interested in enforcing it or in responding to growing French anger at the erosion of their culture and the outright surrender of tracts of their country.

Despite being passed in April, the ban on the veil has been more or less completely ignored by French Muslims and French police alike. Not even a hundred women breaking the law have been stopped by police since its passage. The police can in any case do no more than send on a file. Of these, ‘fewer than ten’ are considered active by the French Ministry for Justice. Even by the febrile standards of the routinely hysterical multicultural left, the alleged-wave of persecution against French Muslims is an exceptionally extravagant fantasy.

Read more.

Note: The only error I found was in his outdated statistic on the number of Muslims in France. He says five million, a figure from the late '90's. It cannot be less than twice that number today.

Five million was the official figure issued by the Interior Department over a decade ago. Babies have been born, thousands of new legal immigrants have entered, and then there are the illegals, the descendants, the children of mixed marriages, etc…

The readers' comments are also very revealing.