I can't read this article without thinking that The New York Times bears some responsibility for this persecution. They helped set it up with their sanctimonious multiculturalism, their anti-Christian bias, their support of Chirac against Bush, and their pro-immigration policies.
And if they can figure out any way to make it happen in our country, they'll do it.
Sure, the French are primarily responsible for what is happening in their own country. But the international press and intellectual establishment have eagerly helped.
You will get no argument from me re your analysis. They've been on the wrong side of history quite consistently for the last 80 years.
Ironically, I think that much of the intellectual energy behind the decades long push toward multiculturalism and high immigration rates was supplied by liberal Jews who believed that they would be safer and more at home in a multicultural nation than in a culturally consolidated, largely Christian nation.
Happily, many, many Jews (who it seems to me are natural conservatives) have come over to our side and realize that the nation needs some cultural coherence, which, in this country, would necessarily be Christian.
This is a nasty little irony and I point it out with no intent to offend anyone. But when there is a major, pertinent aspect of this kind of historical/cultural analysis that political correctness drives underground, I just feel the need to say it out loud.
(btw, I am a cultural (i.e., non-believing) Christian who also could never be one hundred per cent comfortable in a fervently Christian land. But I don’t think we are anywhere remotely near “fervent,” as a nation. And I am certainly not troubled by ANY of the Christian symbolism that gets the loathsome ACLU so worked up. If anything is a threat to non-Christians in this country, it is the aggressive and obnoxious drive to DE-Christianize it.)