Free Republic

The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, has emerged over the past tumultuous week as one of the West’s most vocal foes of Islamism, though he’s actually been talking about the threat it poses for a long while. During the course of an interview conducted before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he told me—he went out of his way to tell me, in fact—that he refuses to use the term “Islamophobia” to describe the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice, because, he says, the accusation of Islamophobia is often used as a weapon by Islamism's apologists to silence their critics. Most of my...

After radical jihadists murdered their way through Paris in a three-day rampage that left 17 dead, France has declared its own war on terror. Appearing on Saturday in Evry, a town just south of Paris, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the country is at war against radical Islam. “We are at war — not a war against a religion, not a war against a civilization, but to defend our values, which are universal,” he proclaimed. “It is a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity,” Valls continued. “We...