Posted on 02/18/2006 8:53:19 PM PST by dervish
It looks like a political oxymoron, but Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front is poised to strike an alliance with France's large immigrant Muslim community.
A generation after France's right-wing party began its surge with a tough anti-immigration campaign tinged with both racism and anti-Semitism, three factors are coming into play that could spell a strategic realignment.
These factors, which are still little grasped outside political circles in France but will have an enormous impact, include:
* The Islamicization of France is largely a fait accompli. It is assumed that 6 to 8 million citizens or residents of France, 10% to 13% out of a global population of 62 million, are Muslim by now. And that the Muslim community, being more prolific, is much younger than the rest of the population: As much as 25% of French citizens or residents under 20 is Muslim, with the number reaching 40% or 50% in the big cities.
* The National Front is surprisingly popular among Muslim immigrants or second-generation Muslim citizens. For all its campaigning about immigration, Mr. Le Pen's party has always extended support to Arab and Islamic causes abroad, from Saddam's Iraq to Arafat's or Hamas Palestine, and from Al Qaeda to Iran. And it is as firmly anti-American and anti-Jewish as the Muslim community itself tends to be.
* The attraction of the French far left, which accounts for another 20% of the national vote, toward Islam, rabid anti-Americanism, and even anti-Semitism, a phenomenon underscored by the emergence of Dieudonne, a former liberal music-hall humorist who has turned into an enormously popular French equivalent of Louis Farrakhan.
'snip'
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
"Many are turning to Philippe de Villiers, France's chief Eurosceptic, who is quickly reorganizing his own party, Mouvement Pour la France or MPF, into a nativist, Christian-minded, anti-Muslim group."
Comme j'ai dit maintes fois...
(Je ne dois pas dessiner = I must not draw)
Here's a good place to practice, and pick up more tips and techniques:
Enjoy!
Whatever Le Pen's drawbacks, is France's current condition to be preferred to the France Le Pen would have created? There would have been far fewer Muslims in France today. Now the Muslims pose an increasingly dire threat there, to Christians and Jews. Exaggerate the threat from the Right and look where it gets you: a scimitar raised above your neck.
If the Jewish voters had supported Le Pen, they would have been next, and would have been stuck with a powerful Le Pen and National Front party.
What you are describing is realist politics on a national level. It didn't work in the ME and it would backfire in France too.
They would not. But with millions of Islamists around they will have to flee sooner or later to the less "diverse and tolerant" countries.
I agree. No decent or sane people are going to persecute Jews, especially after what happened to them in WWII. Le Pen, from my vantage point, wanted to stop the eventual Islamic takeover of France. Jews and Christians would not have been threatened as they are today if he'd come to power.
The Anglosphere has collectively failed in courage behind the European press. In US The NY Sun (the paper of this post) and the Philadelphia Inquirer have printed it.
LeMonde and Liberation have printed the cartoons.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1570104/posts
The German newspapers Die Welt, Die Tageszeitung, Tagesspiegel and Berliner Zeitung, the Dutch papers Volksrant, NRC Handelsblad and Elsevier, Italy’s La Stampa and Corriere della Sera, Spain’s El Periodico and two Dutch-language newspapers in Belgium were among those that published some or all of the cartoons over the past several days.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/feb2006/cart-f04.shtml
Sarkozy backed the cartoons saying he supports free speech even in excess over censure.
Our State Department(quelle suprise) came out against their publication.
If Jewish voters had supported Le Pen, and he came to power, not only would he have left them alone, he would have been very grateful to them.
From post #47
"No decent or sane people are going to persecute JewsHow do you excuse/explain Le Pen's current alliance?" Convenient proviso which doesn't apply to Le Pen and his followers.
As I said before your brand of realist politics bites you in the rear. Your suggestion is just the Conservative version of useful idiots.
I will have to study Le Pen's "current alliance" carefully before I can pass judgement on it. If Le Pen really does accept a Muslim takeover of France as an inevitability, this will be a complete reversal of his former position, which, to use one of his own colorful descriptions, was that of "Sitting Bull."
The point of the FN seems to me national survival and recrudescence. I do not see how either will be in the cards for an Islamicized France. If the old Le Pen had not been demonized and opposition to Islamic immigration had not been marginalized, France's very future existence would not be in such doubt.
How, may I ask you, is Islamist bellicosity to be dealt with now in France?
Also, how you can imply that the National Front in France is really no different from Stormfront is beyond me.
I stand corrected. Thanks for the information.
It's hard to take anything he writes or says seriously.
He's the French equivalent of Vladimir Zhironovsky, or Pat Buchanan, and will say whatever he thinks will earn him the most publicity.
Le Ping! :)
Do you think that some Front National leaders will begin defecting to Villiers under the thinking that Le Pen is getting long in the tooth?
Also do you think chauvanistic La France is ready for Madame Royale to be President, or do you think she is a flash in the political pan???
Having read the entire article (thanks), I must now eat some crow. If this article on Le Pen is at all accurate, then I must conclude this man has truly gone over the deep end.
Still, I maintain something should have been done about the Islamic immigration flood early on, and it is a fact that, of the major political figures in France, only Le Pen at the time was opposing it. I would have voted for him a few years ago, but today he is on the side of the enemies of France and Europe, it would appear. How sad.
No crow. We are all here to learn.
And this is bad...why, exactly? ;)
Count me in as one of those evil, real (i.e. monarchist) European-style right-wingers, who wants nothing to do with the American so-called "right." I wonder if Goetz, Kjvail and I are the only ones left on FR? (Time to summon the "Crown Crew"?)
I am terribly disappointed in Le Pen. But I shouldn't be surprised. What France needs is a King, not a President. The French Republic is an abomination built on the murder of Their Most Christian Majesties King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, always has been, and always will be.
Vive le roi! Down with Democracy and Republicanism! Out with the Muslims! And long live France--not the phony secular multiculturalist republican France which is hated by the neocons for all the wrong reasons, but the Catholic and Royal France of the ages!
Oh dear!
Well, certainly there is nothing wrong with a properly functioning monarchy. Most of Northern Europe have retained theirs, and they are generally quiet and nice places.
However, European-style right wingers are not monarchists, not anymore. Mostly, they are fascists, not even Bonapartists (there being none of them that have even a modicum of Buonaparte's indisputable genius).
You think France needs a King?
Certainly a monarchy in the modern model, which provides great continuity in ceremonial affairs of state and particularly in philanthropy and patronage is a boon to any nation. But you seem to actually desire a monarch who not only reigns, but rules.
It is difficult to imagine the Duc d'Orleans in this role, and even more difficult to imagine the French ever taking him seriously. And what would the enforcement mechanism be for a King nobody respected or believed in?
France, like America, is past that. There is too much water under the bridge for a restoration.
Besides, the most dramatic difference between a monarchy and a republic is not the head of state, who is ever-powerful no matter the system, but the next tier. Monarchy entails nobility. A restoration of the rule of the nobility would be exceedingly pleasant, for the nobility. I would imagine that the chiefs of grand enterprises, and private landowners, might have a different view of this.
For if we are to restore Catholic and Royal France, we will not be installing Russia and an absolute despotism, but nor will we be retaining a free market. We will, rather, be reinstalling a system of hereditary ownership of the land, one in which you yourself will be a vassal of someone.
We might all serve the King, but you will also serve me.
The idea of serving the King may sound pleasant.
The idea of also serving me as your Lord you might find considerably more disagreeable.
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