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I've been trying to locate this article since I read it last year. There is much more to be said for the impact of the Muslim presence on the French psyche.

Ten years ago there were graffiti in Arabic spray-painted on walls and courtyard fences in the neighborhood around Mitterand's private apartment where his wife and daughter lived. My friend had arranged to have the wall around her building coated with a substance that repelled spray paint. Her windows were broken in the night for her trouble, over and over again.

In the eighties the French intellectuals and entertainers (difficult to know which is which) mugged their way across tv screens or looked sternly from huge billboards chiding French citizens to "Dites non a rascisme." Say no to racism.

The billboards could be seen only by the workers going to their jobs at the Renault works and other factories that ringed Paris, and again when they returned home to the "projects" in the "zones" which increasingly were flooded with North African non-workers, their many wives and children, and the "cultural diversity" of all-night music, of men gathered around fires in rusted oil-drums on the sidewalks, of thievery, and of constant menace, which the "Nouvelles Citoyens" inflicted on the weary French workers.

No attempt was made to insist on cultural assimilation as that would imply that the Muslim North Africans were inferior, and it would have horrified the elites who lived in the leafy suburbs and white/white neighborhoods like the Ile St. Louis and were made sleepless at night only by the smug chattering of their guests, graduates of the grandes ecoles and thus, annointed to adumbrate the destinies of the lower orders in the French hierarchy.

But now the Muslims come from the former Soviet satellites and the Muslims from North Africa, emboldened by a police force weakened by political correctness, look out at the leafy suburbs and the chic city blocks, with the eyes of the possessor. But the unease has always been there, even among the most ardent, guilt-ridden multi-culturalists.

I asked a few teenagers, school-mates of my friend's son, "What will you do when your guests decide that it is your houses, your schools, your culture, they wish to own? Where will you go then, to the "zones?"

"That is so typically American," they said. "Americans are all racists. We French are more civilized."

"Yes, but it is a civilization despised by your guests. Liberty, equality, brotherhood are meaningless to them. There are eight million of them here now, and their birthrate surpasses that of Europeans. How does 'say no to racism' affect the outcome for you."

That was twenty years ago. I use the 8 million figure, because it was generally accepted then that that was the approximate number, though now the official figure is 5 million.

Jean Raspail used immigrants from the Ganges in his book "Camp of the Saints" because even in the seventies it was politically incorrect to appear to slight Muslims. Of course, he was trashed as a racist, anyway.

Thanks so much for posting this article. I am making copies to insert in the pages of the copies of "Camp of the Saints" I plan to send out at Christmas. A holy day approaching extinction.
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