838 Bastille Day truck massacre in Nice leads to surge in support for Marine Le Pen

Bastille Day truck massacre in Nice leads to surge in support for Marine
Le Pen

Newsletter published on 18 July 2016

(1) Bastille day killing in Nice - JP Desmoulins
(2) Nice Terror Attack leads to surge in support for Marine Le Pen

(1) Bastille day killing in Nice - JP Desmoulins

Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2016 15:58:04 +0200
From: JP Desmoulins <jean-pierre.desmoulins@orange.fr>
Subject: Bastille day killing in Nice

Fresh news. At least 84 dead now. What seem to be the facts are :

- Driver of the truck was a tunisian, 31 yrs old,
- Married, three kids, but wife had asked for divorce because he was
violent with her,
- Had already some trouble with the police for robery, violence with
weapon, including a recent case on a parking with other drivers,
- According to neighbours was not a strict muslim : didn't go to the
mosque, didn't practice ramadan, drank alcohol, had some affairs outside
marriage,
- Had never been targeted as a radicalized moslim, never went to "Jihad"
in the middle east,
- Had his truck driving licence since one year,
- According to a witness, would have stolen the truck near the
"promenade des anglais" where a fireworks was being fired,
- After raming into a protection barrier, drove on 2 km on this avenue,
targeting pedestrians, including women, children,
- Was finally stopped by cops who fired in the tires and through the
windshield, killing the driver,
- Before being killed, he opened fire from inside his cabin with a 7.65
mm gun (small caliber),
- In the cabin were found this gun (real) and one (or several ?) factice
plastic weapons (kalashnikov and a hand grenade),
- Nothing for the moment seems to prove that he was member of a team.

My own conclusion, 12 hrs after the facts, is that he was a lone
psychotic, decided to finish his own life, who brought 84 or more people
with him. Nothing to do with "organized terrorism", except the fact that
this type of psychotic can be influenced by messages sent by real
terrorists pushing them to kill as much of their pretended ennemies as
possible.

Best regards
Jean-Pierre

(2) Nice Terror Attack leads to surge in support for Marine Le Pen

From: Lasha Darkmoon <darkmoon@darkmoon.me>
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2016 13:44:12 +0100

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3692981/How-ve-seen-France-love-torn-apart-hatred-LEO-MCKINSTRY-lived-decade-witnessed-growing-tensions-locals-Muslim-hardliners-despairs-future.html
https://www.darkmoon.me/2016/the-nice-terror-attack-how-ive-seen-the-france-i-love-torn-apart-by-hatred/

The Nice Terror Attack — 'How I've Seen The France I Love Torn Apart By
Hatred'

By Leo McKinstrey

who has lived in France for over a decade
and seen it go from bad to worse as tensions have grown
between the indigenous French population and Muslim immigrants

July 17, 2016

Bastille Day is meant to be a moment of celebration in France. But when
my wife and I had dinner on Thursday evening with neighbours near our
French home in the Loire region, we encountered visceral despair about
the state of the Gallic nation.

The company was charming, the hospitality magnificent, yet parts of the
conversation were profoundly sombre. This was hours before the news of
the Islamist atrocity in Nice emerged, but our friends’ concern for
France’s future was palpable.

Mass immigration, the relentless growth of the Muslim population, the
alarming spread of jihadism and the enfeebled stance of President
Hollande’s socialist government had left them with a feeling that their
country is increasingly under siege.

Their dark forebodings were dramatically confirmed when we returned home
and learned of the carnage on the Riviera. Another part of this
beautiful land had been turned into an arena for butchery.

This week Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s General Directorate for
Internal Security, warned that his country is ‘on the verge of civil
war’ because of growing tensions between Muslim communities and the hard
Right, represented by Marine Le Pen’s insurgent National Front Party.

In remarkably frank language to a French Parliamentary commission, Mr
Calvar said that a serious incident could ‘light the powder,
transforming France into an uncontrollable country, where groups take up
arms and hand out their own justice’.

The massacre in Nice gave a terrible resonance to his words.

This is just latest in an appalling catalogue of recent radical Islamist
violence against the French, including the mass murder at a Jewish
school in Toulouse in March 2012, the Charlie Hebdo killings in January
last year, the Bataclan concert hall shootings in November, and the
execution of a police officer and his wife in June.

It is no surprise that in response to this barbarism, the National
Front, once regarded as an irrelevant if despised fringe group, is
enjoying an unprecedented surge in support.

Its leader, Marine Le Pen — daughter of the party’s founder Jean-Marie
Le Pen — is certain to be a serious contender in next May’s Presidential
Election.
—  §  —

And with the mainstream establishment in disarray and concern over the
threat of militants growing, it is not inconceivable that she could come
close to winning.

Nice will almost certainly prove a great recruiting sergeant for her.
‘Security’ is now a favourite word among ordinary French people,
encapsulating their fear that their society is collapsing because of
bitter divisions.

I have had my own direct experience of this ever-growing tension, which
threatens to tear apart the country I love.

More than a decade ago, long before we moved to the Loire region, my
wife and I bought a 19th-century house in the heart of Carpentras, a
Provencal market town with a population of 30,000, little more than a
two-hour drive north of Nice.

The place had a rich history stretching back many centuries, the
architectural legacy of which included a triumphal Roman arch and a
magnificent gothic cathedral.

Our new home needed a lot of work, but the task seemed worth it because
we could spend part of the year enjoying life in southern France. And at
first our times in Carpentras seemed idyllic, wandering through market
squares or sitting in a cafe under a cloudless blue sky.

But gradually, shadows began to creep across our retreat. What we had
thought was a classic Provencal existence turned out to be something
very different. Over the years, Carpentras underwent a dramatic change
as the Muslim population grew and the town became ever more Islamified.

Although ethnic monitoring is illegal in France because it is seen as
divisive and offends the concept of Gallic solidarity, it has been
conservatively estimated there are at least 13,000 Muslims in the town,
making up more than 40 per cent of the population.

Some have put the figure as high as 60 per cent. Two mosques, one of
them a massive new block, have been established to meet the changing
religious demographic. Inexorably, the streets were becoming filled with
figures in Islamic dress, along with halal butchers and kebab shops.

In response to this transformation, the owner of the internet cafe
opposite our house grew increasingly fervent in his support for the
National Front, putting up large posters for Jean-Marie Le Pen in his
windows, which were regularly smashed.

Throughout all this, we could sense that the gentleness of Provence,
scented by grapes, lavender and sunflowers, was giving way to a mood of
suspicion and latent threat.

One night I woke up to the smell of acrid smoke in the air. Looking out
from my bedroom window, I saw to my astonishment that five cars had been
set on fire in our street.

On another occasion, while out in the countryside with my wife, I was
menaced by a Muslim armed with scythe.

When, slightly shaken, I told this to a neighbour, who was a French army
veteran, he recounted how a local Muslim had one day threatened to slit
his throat.

Let’s be absolutely clear: most of the Muslim population were thoroughly
decent people who wanted nothing more than to live their lives in
harmony with other peaceful French people.

That said, the religious and racial tension in Carpentras was palpable
in everyday life.

Carpentras has the oldest synagogue in France, and the town’s Jewish
roots were another source of this tension.

My wife and I went one night to a choral concert at the town hall by a
renowned Israeli choir, but because of Islamist threats of violence,
security was as tight as it might have been for a visiting foreign
leader, complete with guard dogs and armed troops.

It was partly because of the death of our Provencal dream that we sold
our Carpentras house three years ago and moved further north.

At the very moment of our departure in 2012, there was another
indication of the rising local discord when Marion Marechal-Le Pen,
niece of Marine, was elected the local deputy for the National Assembly,
ousting the long-serving centre-Right incumbent Jean-Michel Ferrand, for
whom I had done occasional work as a speech-writer.
—  §  —

Last year, she headed the poll for Provence in the first round of the
regional elections, though she failed to win the seat.

‘I’m not afraid of Marion. I’m afraid of terrorism,’ said one of her
voters when explaining the rise of this far-Right politician. ‘We’ve had
enough immigration. It’s time to close the borders.’

And this sort of sentiment echoes across France. ‘Things fall apart, the
centre cannot hold,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats of the Irish conflict in
the early 20th century.

His words could also be applied to modern France, where there is a
widening chasm between the indigenous, intensely nationalist French and
the detached, often hostile, Muslim community, which is estimated to
number anything between 4.5 and 7 million people, about 10 per cent of
the total.

Thanks to the high Muslim birth rate, massive immigration from North
Africa and the EU policy of open borders, that population is already the
largest in Western Europe and growing all the time.

In response to the Nice atrocity, President Obama declared that ‘we know
that the character of the French Republic will endure long after this
devastating and tragic loss of life’.

But how can he be so sure? The truth is that France, as many of us know
and love it, may not endure because the very fabric of

At the heart of the potential confrontation is a clash of two different
cultures. On one side, there is the French tradition of a powerful
national identity and strong secularism, stretching back to the late
18th-century revolution.

On the other is the increasingly self-confident Muslim minority that
refuses to accept the French ethos of assimilation. As we have seen in
Nice, that spirit of often aggressive detachment is reflected at its
most extreme in the growth of Islamic radicalism and terrorism.

Many commentators talk grandly of Isis and jihadism as if they were
foreign problems that can be dealt with by military action in the Middle
East. But the reality is that Islamic extremism in France is largely
home-grown.

Indeed, the Nice mass murderer is a typical case. Though of Tunisian
origins, the 31-year-old behind the massacre was a French national.

Muslim disaffection is displayed in other trends, like low participation
in the jobs market — unemployment in Carpentras is double the French
average — and the high rates of criminality that invariably go with
joblessness.

Incredibly, more than 60 per cent of the French prison population is
estimated to be Muslim, with the result that jails are now serving as a
breeding ground for radicalisation.

But there are wrongs on both sides. The rising tensions are further
reflected in the surge in hate crimes across France. While terrorism
worsens, more than 400 anti-Muslim incidents, including assaults,
harassment and criminal damage, were reported to the authorities last
year, up from 133 such incidents in 2014.

Meanwhile, in just the first five months of 2015, 508 anti-Semitic
crimes were recorded, an increase of 84 per cent on the same period the
year before.
—  §  —

Until recently, violent anti-semitism in France was largely seen as the
preserve of the far Right, a dark legacy of Vichy France’s collusion
with the Nazis during the war, but today it is another weapon of
Islamist intimidation.

It is common — particularly among the Left — to blame these mounting
social problems on discrimination, poverty and the aftermath of French
colonialism in North Africa.

One of the most repeated theories for Muslim alienation in France is
that immigrants from North Africa in the Sixties were ‘dumped’ in poor
housing.

Vast concrete estates known as Les Banlieues (the suburbs) exist on the
edges of cities throughout France, from Paris in the north to Marseille
in the South. Dominated by Muslim communities, they have become symbols
of Islamic grievance, and are seen as breeding grounds for disillusion
and extremism.

But it is more complicated than this. Throughout the history of mankind,
immigrants have had to put up with difficult conditions in their new lands.

Their success in overcoming their tough backgrounds — as with the Irish
who came to Britain after the potato famine in the late 19th century, or
the Italian migrants to New York in the early 20th — is part of their
inspiring narrative.

Moreover, the provision of social housing and welfare were gestures of
generosity towards newcomers, not rejection.

 From my experience of living here, there is no institutionalised
discrimination against Muslims in France. Why, otherwise, would Muslims
star in the French national football team or at the top of French politics?

In the 2012 National Assembly elections, five MPs of Maghreb — or North
African — origin were victorious.

Indeed, the whole thrust of French national culture is against
discrimination, and there is considerable integration of successful Muslims.

Tellingly, statistics show France has the highest number of mixed unions
between people of different religions and ethnic groups of any country
in Europe.

But crucially, the country is also unashamedly patriotic as well as
secularist, in the sense that ever since the Revolution in 1789,
religion has been held to be a matter of private conscience rather than
the state involvement.

This is why the French refuse to bow to the demands of uncompromising
adherents of Islam who want special treatment. Why they ban the burka
and insist that schools should be allowed to serve pork.

Inevitably, this approach inflames a sense of grievance among some
Muslims, particularly those of North African origin who hark back to the
country’s colonial period and the savage Algerian war for independence
in the Fifties and Sixties.

But I believe that if too many Muslims feel excluded from French
society, it is because of their own decision to reject France’s values
and identity. Instead, they wish to pursue their own theocratic,
separatist agenda.

To be fair, this is not a problem unique to France. Britain may have
only 600 jihadists fighting in the Middle East, compared with France’s
1,200, but that highlights the numerical truth that France’s Muslim
population is double the size of Britain’s.

The fact is that, because of the nature of modern, militant Islam,
wherever there is a significant Islamic population anywhere in the
world, whether it be in Boston or Bali, there will be tension.

The decision by Germany’s Chancellor Merkel last year to invite more
than a million Syrian refugees to Europe, combined with the EU’s
ideological but self-destructive obsession in abolishing border
controls, has only made the problem worse.
—  §  —

A report this week by the U.S.-based Pew Research Centre showed that, in
eight out of ten European countries surveyed, more than half of the
population believe the influx of immigrants has increased the terror threat.

In fact Ronald Noble, the former head of Interpol, has said that the
EU’s open-door approach is ‘like hanging a sign welcoming terrorists to
Europe’.

With militant Islam now flourishing in France’s midst, there are no easy
answers. The sheer scale of the problem is daunting.

After the last Paris terror attacks, the police carried out more than
3,500 raids in Muslim-dominated areas, but that is probably just
tackling the tip of the iceberg.

And the truth is the French intelligence services cannot cope. It would
take 30 officers to provide comprehensive surveillance of each suspected
radical, far beyond the resources of the French state.

Nor is there any sign of immigration abating. In our village in the
Loire, some of the locals talk ominously of a social breakdown.

Once a bulwark of civilisation, France today is a tableau of tragedy —
and it’s one that sadly, in the short term, appears to herald a bleak
future for our continent.