France: More Death to Free Speech

“The Extreme Right has got hold of its new Doriot”. 70 years after Auschwitz French Jews can be portrayed as Nazis.

On September 28, a “Convention of the Right” took place in Paris, organized by Marion Marechal, a former member of French parliament and now director of France’s Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences. The purpose of the convention was to unite France’s right-wing political factions. In a keynote speech, the journalist Éric Zemmour harshly criticized Islam and the Islamization of France. He described the country’s “no-go zones” (Zones Urbaines Sensibles; Sensitive Urban Zones) as “foreign enclaves” in French territory and depicted, as a process of “colonization”, the growing presence in France of Muslims who do not integrate.

Zemmour quoted the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who said that the no-go zones are “small Islamic Republics in the making”. Zemmour said that a few decades ago, the French could talk freely about Islam but that today it is impossible, and he denounced the use of the “hazy concept of Islamophobia to make it impossible to criticize Islam, to reestablish the notion of blasphemy to the benefit of the Muslim religion alone…”

“All our problems are worsened by Islam. It is a double jeopardy…. Will young French people be willing to live as a minority on the land of their ancestors? If so, they deserve to be colonized. If not, they will have to fight … [T]he old words of the Republic, secularism, integration, republican order, no longer mean anything … Everything has been overturned, perverted, emptied of meaning.”

Zemmour’s speech was broadcast live on LCI television. Journalists on other channels immediately accused LCI of contributing to “hate propaganda”. Some said that LCI should lose its broadcasting license. One journalist, Memona Hinterman-Affegee, a former member of France’s High Council of Audiovisual Media (Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel), the body that regulates electronic media in France, wrote in the newspaper Le Monde:

“LCI uses a frequency which is part of the public domain and thus belongs to the entire nation … LCI has failed in its mission and lost control of its program, and must be sanctioned in an exemplary manner”.

The journalists of Le Figaro, the newspaper employing Zemmour, wrote a press release demanding his immediate dismissal. Calls heard on most radio and television stations for a total boycott of Zemmour stressed that he had been condemned several times for “Islamophobic racism”.

Alexis Brézet, the managing editor of Le Figaro, said that he expressed his “disapproval” to Zemmour and reminded him of the need for “strict compliance with the law”, but did not fire him. SOS Racisme, a left-wing movement created in 1984 to fight racism, launched a campaign to boycott companies publishing advertisements in Le Figaro and said that its aim was to coerce the management of the newspaper to fire Zemmour. The mainstream RTL radio station that employed Zemmour decided to terminate him immediately, saying that his presence on the air was “incompatible” with the spirit of living together “that characterizes the station”.

A journalist working for RTL and LCI, Jean-Michel Aphatie, said that Zemmour was a “repeat offender” who should not be able to speak anywhere and compared him to the anti-Semitic Holocaust denier Dieudonné Mbala Mbala:

“Dieudonné is not allowed to speak in France. He must hide. That is fine, since he wants to spread hatred. Éric Zemmour should be treated the same way.”

Caricatures were published depicting Zemmour in a Waffen SS uniform. Another journalist, Dominique Jamet, apparently not seeing any problem comparing a Jew to a Nazi, said that Zemmour reminded him of Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. On the internet, death threats against Zemmour multiplied. Some posted the times Zemmour takes the subway, what stations, and suggested that someone push him under a train.

The French government officially filed a complaint against Zemmour for “public insults” and “public provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence”. The investigation was handed over to the police. Someone in France accused of “public provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence” can face a sentence of one year in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros ($50,000).

Whoever reads the text of Zemmour’s speech on September 28 can see that the speech does not incite discrimination, hatred or violence, and does not make a single racist statement: Islam is not a race, it is a religion.

Zemmour’s speech describes a situation already discussed by various writers. Zemmour is not the first to say that the no-go zones are dangerous areas the police can no longer enter, or that they are under the control of radical imams and Muslim gangs who assault and drive out non-Muslims. Zemmour is not the only writer to describe the consequences of the mass-immigration of Muslims who do not integrate into French society. The pollster Jerome Fourquet, in his recent book, The French Archipelago, points out that France today is a country where Muslims and non-Muslims live in separate societies “hostile to each other”. Fourquet also emphasizes that a growing number of Muslims living in France say they want to live according sharia law and place sharia law above French law. Fourquet notes that 26% of French Muslims born in France want to obey only Sharia; for French Muslims born abroad, the figure rises to 46%. Zemmour merely added that what was happening is a “colonization”.

Zemmour had been hauled into court many times in the recent past and has had to pay heavy fines. On September 19, he was fined 3,000 euros ($3,300) for “incitement to racial hatred” and “incitement to discrimination”, for having said in 2015 that “in countless French suburbs where many young girls are veiled, a struggle to Islamize territories is taking place”.

In a society where freedom of speech exists, it would be possible to discuss the use of these statements, but in France today, freedom of speech has been almost completely destroyed.

Writers other than Zemmour have been hauled into court and totally excluded from all media, simply for describing reality. In 2017, the great historian Georges Bensoussan published a book, A Submissive France, as alarming as what Zemmour said a few days ago. Bensoussan, in an interview, quoted an Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher, who had said that “in Arab families, children suckle anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk”. Laacher was never indicted. Bensoussan, however, had to go to criminal court. Although he was acquitted, he was fired by the Paris Holocaust Memorial, which until then had employed him.

In 2011, another author, Renaud Camus, published a book, The Great Replacement. In it, he talked about the decline of Western culture in France and its gradual replacement by Islamic culture. He also noted the growing presence in France of a Muslim population that refuses to integrate, and added that demographic studies show a birth rate higher in Muslim families than in non-Muslim ones.

Immediately, commentators in the media accused Camus of “anti-Muslim racism” and called him a “conspiracy theorist”. His demographic studies were omitted. He had never mentioned either race or ethnicity, yet was nonetheless described as a defender of “white supremacism” and instantly excluded from radio and television. He can no longer publish anything in a French newspaper or magazine. In fact, he has no publisher at all anymore; he has to self-publish. In debates in France, he is referred to as a “racist extremist,” and credited with saying things he never said. He is then denied the possibility of answering.

The difference between Eric Zemmour and Georges Bensoussan or Renaud Camus is that Zemmour had published books that became best sellers before he talked explicitly about the Islamization of France.

Those who have destroyed the careers of other writers for stating unfashionable facts have been doing their best to condemn Zemmour to the same fate. So far, they have not succeeded, so they have now decided to launch a major offensive against him. What they clearly want his personal destruction.

Zemmour is not only risking a professional ban; like many other writers being silenced by an intolerant “lynch mob”, he is risking his life.

Almost no one shows any interest in defending him, just as no one defended Georges Bensoussan or Renaud Camus. Defending someone accused of being a “racist” implies the risk of being accused of being a “racist” too. Intellectual terror now reigns in France.

A few days ago, the writer and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said that suggesting that “Islamophobia is the equivalent of yesterday’s anti-Semitism” is scandalous. He said that “Muslims do not risk extermination” and that no one should “deny that today’s anti-Semitism is Arab Muslim anti-Semitism.” He added that France is moving from a “muzzled press to a muzzling press that destroys free speech”.

France, wrote Ghislain Benhessa, a professor at the University of Strasbourg, is no longer a democratic country and gradually become something very different:

“Our democratic model which was based on the free expression of opinions and the confrontation of ideas is giving way to something else … Relentless moral condemnations infect the debates and dissenting opinions are constantly deemed ‘nauseating’, ‘dangerous’, ‘deviant’ or ‘retrograde’, and therefore the elements of language repeated ad nauseam by official communicators will soon be the last words deemed acceptable. Lawsuits, charges of indignity and proclamations of openness are about to give birth to the evil twin of openness: a closed society.”

On October 3, five days after Zemmour’s speech, four police employees were murdered in Paris police headquarters by a man who had converted to Islam. The murderer, Mickaël Harpon, had gone every week to a mosque where an imam, who lives in a no-go zone ten miles north of Paris, made radical remarks. Harpon had been working at police headquarters for 16 years. He had recently shared on social networks a video showing an imam calling for jihad, and saying that “the most important thing for a Muslim is to die as a Muslim”.

Harpon’s colleagues said that he had been delighted by the 2015 jihadist attacks in France in 2015, and said they had reported “signs of radicalization” to no avail. The government’s first reaction had been to say that the murderer was “mentally disturbed” and that the attack had no connection with Islam. French Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner simply stated that there had been “administrative dysfunctions,” and acknowledged that the killer had access to files classified “secret”.

A month before that, on September 2, an Afghan man who had the status in France of a political refugee, slit the throat of a young man and injured several other people in a street in Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon. He announced that the fault of those he killed or injured was that they did “not read the Koran”. The police immediately stated that he was mentally ill and that his attack had nothing to do with Islam.

Soon in France, no one will dare to say that any attack openly inspired by Islam has any connection with Islam.

Today, there are more than 600 no-go zones in France. Every year, hundreds of thousands immigrants coming mainly from Muslim countries, settle in France and add to the country’s Muslim population. Most of those who preceded them have not integrated.

Since January 2012, more than 260 people in France have been murdered in terrorist attacks, and more than a thousand wounded. The numbers may increase in the coming months. The authorities will still call the attackers “mentally ill”.