Beware of polls that seem bent in advance. If there is a lesson to be learned from this French singularity which consists in electing the President of the Republic by universal suffrage, it is this one. These dear ”refractory Gauls” take malicious pleasure in denying predictions, refusing the idea that the media, analysts or polls – these tools for measuring democratic debate, which they moreover love – can ”impose’ ‘ the fatality of an unavoidable electoral scenario.
Issues related to Islam are at the heart of the presidential campaign. In addition to the growing fears caused by the terrorist threat, since the jihadist attacks of 2015, there has been a widespread awareness of the dangers that can arise from communal and separatist excesses.
The French Ministries of Interior and Economy have created a joint working group to better control the financial circuits linked to travel agencies specialising in the sale of tickets and packages for the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
According to an exclusive poll (IFOP for our monthly Screen Watch), carried out from February 22 to 28, 2022, on a sample of 3,007 people aged 18 and over, on the means of fighting against Islamism, 85% of French support the proposal, put forward by several presidential candidates, aimed at “banning Islamist organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and all the movement linked to it”.
Who would have thought it? The Republic, which nevertheless removed religion from the political field and invented secularism, is gradually succumbing to pressure from Islamists of all stripes, who are trying to test its reaction to the systematic pressure to impose their moral dictatorship by attacking freedom of conscience, and even freedom itself.
The enemies of Western civilisation are working day and night for one goal: to bring down this political modernity and its positive laws and to apply Islamic law first in Muslim-majority neighbourhoods and then throughout Europe. Will Europeans thus become dhimmis in their own land in the coming decades?
For a long time, the international branch of the Muslim Brotherhood has benefited from the benevolence of the authorities and the largesse of the legislation on political asylum in European countries.
For almost half a century, a double aberration prevailed in this respect. First of all, there was the glaring semantic contradiction known as “moderate Islamism”. For how can one be “moderate”, or even tolerant, while claiming a divine truth that is impervious to any criticism or examination of conscience?
The issue of the organisation of Muslim worship in Europe is not new. It is linked to many aspects, including cultural, national and linguistic ones. Since the end of the 1980s, public authorities in several European countries have been urging Muslim leaders to manage their faith. But the institutions designed to organise the Muslim faith remain unstable and unrepresentative.
With the launch of the French Islam Forum (FORIF), whose first session was held on 5 February at the Economic, Social and Environmental Council in Paris, a calamitous parenthesis of nearly 20 years has just closed. By recording the “death” of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) last December, the Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible for religious affairs, finally realised that this Council had become an obstacle to the fight against Islamist separatism, which had been wiped out by the entryism of the Muslim Brotherhood and the internal quarrels known as “consular Islam”, linked to the allegiances of the different federations of French Islam to the countries of origin of their members.
Last September, the new rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Chams-Eddine Hafiz, published a resounding book entitled “Le manifeste contre le terrorisme islamiste”, in which he castigated the supporters of political Islam. He thus established himself as a champion of moderate Islam. No one could have imagined then that, less than three months later, the enlightened rector would make a strange and radical turnaround, to ally himself with the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother house of Islamism, against the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), led by his rival Mohamed Moussaoui.
What could be more natural than that, at the end of the mandate of a president perceived – rightly or wrongly – as the “president of the rich”, purchasing power should be the primary concern of the French? That the reference to the people should once again become (as it should never have ceased to be) the central theme of political debate?
Should the defence of the “little people” have led to this visceral hatred of the elites? That concern for the “weakest” should give rise to a populist drift whose aim is not to come to the rescue of the “left behind”, but to exploit the crowds distress and feed them resentment, to turn it into a destructive force driven by the vilest impulses: racism, suprematism, xenophobia…
