A new poll conducted by the French research group IFOP has found that 79 percent of French citizens believe that Islamism has literally “declared war on the nation and the Republic.” The poll was conducted in the wake of the beheading of history and geography teacher Samuel Paty on October 16.
Paty was brutally murdered because he had showed students cartoons from the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo featuring the Prophet Muhammad during a lesson about free expression. The killer was 18-year-old Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, a Chechen immigrant, who was later shot and killed by police.
“87 percent of French people say they agree with the fact that secularism is now in danger in France, and 79 percent that Islamism has declared war on the nation and the Republic,” the poll reported.
The poll also showed that the French people have little confidence in their government’s ability to protect them. Only 40 percent of French people have confidence in the government’s ability to fight terrorism. Thirty-seven percent have confidence in President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Jean Castex to conduct a fight against radical Islamism. Marine Le Pen of France’s National Rally — an anti-immigration party — is the politician most trusted by the French people to lead such a fight, but even she garners only a 44-percent confidence rate.
In addition, 78 percent of the public agrees that Samuel Paty was justified in showing his students the cartoons of Muhammad in a lesson on free expression. Seventy-six percent backed a proposal by France’s new Minister of the Interior Gerald Darminin that would disband the CCIF — the Collective against Islamophobia in France.
Since 2015, more than 250 people have been killed in France as a result of radical Islamist attacks. France’s suburbs around Paris and other major cities have become Islamic strongholds and have effectively become “no-go zones” because of the government’s inability to protect people who travel there.
At least one prominent French intellectual has called for reclaiming these suburbs by force. “I think we reconquer by force,” said Eric Zemmour, a French writer who has long argued against unfettered immigration into the country.
“You think that we can bring people around by means of education,” Zemmour told an interviewer on the French news program Face à l’info. “That’s something I don’t believe anymore. I think that from a certain number — you know it is the sentence from Hegel that I say all the time — the quantity becomes a quality. So in this case, it is necessary to reconquer by force or give up.”
In 2015, France, like most of Europe, laid out the welcome mat for refugees ostensibly fleeing oppression, war, and poverty in Africa and the Middle East. But increasingly, that welcoming attitude has been replaced by fear and distrust of France’s new immigrant community. According to the IFOP poll, nearly three-fourths of respondents believe that mass immigration costs the French people much more than they gain from it.
Seventy percent of respondents believe that France no longer has the resources available to welcome any more migrants into the country. The total impact of recent immigration is viewed negatively by 64 percent of respondents. A full 60 percent of those polled believe that welcoming immigrants is no longer possible due to the extreme differences in values and problems of cohabitation.
Two-thirds of French people now believe that immigration has a negative effect on overall security and crime. Fifty-three percent believe that immigration maximizes the risk of more terrorism in the country.
During the so-called migrant crisis from 2015-2018, France took in more than 250,000 people from various hot-spots around the world including Syria, Afghanistan, and Chechnya. But instead of being grateful to live in a place of relative peace and adapting to the country’s societal norms, many of those migrants made unreasonable demands for things such as Sharia Law.
The list of attacks carried out in France since 2015 is long. The beheading of Samuel Paty is only the tip of the iceberg.
Dozens of Islamic attacks in France have included suicide bombers, hostage taking, shootings, stabbings, letter bombs, ramming vehicles into crowds of people, and even machete attacks.
Clearly, many of these so-called asylum seekers are incorrectly named. Instead of asylum seekers, they should be known as an invading army.
