When I was around sixteen, I spent two successive summers in a city that I fell in love with at first sight, Paris. My hope was to improve my French, but I spent too much time away from my books and lessons gazing enchantedly at the beauty of France’s capital. When my wife and I married some twenty years ago, I was particularly delighted to discover I now had additional family and relations in the city. This was especially so as they lived on the west bank of the Seine in the exclusive 16th Arrondissment.
I have kept an eye on the city of my youthful infatuation ever since, watching the occasional changes and upheavals that are synonymous with France.
On the night of April 19, 2019, I sat at my computer watching in disbelief as one of the city’s (and the world’s) greatest landmarks burst into flames, the 12th century cathedral the French call, Notre Dame De Paris. It was for the French and particularly the Parisians, what 9/11 was to the U.S. and New Yorkers. The comparison was additionally secured when the spire of the cathedral, like the Twin Towers, collapsed at 19:50 p.m. and crashed to the ground.
By the next day, the Paris prosecutor had declared that it was not a deliberate act.
That was something that he could not possibly have known; no one could. Making the risible declaration with such haste, signaled to everyone in France what many already believed. A cover up at the highest levels of the French government had begun immediately and the fire had been an extremist Muslim attack.
If that fact were to be established and revealed it would not have been a surprise. There had and have been scores of church burnings across France by Muslims before and after Notre Dame De Paris.
France officially has a huge Muslim population (10%) and unofficially, a huger one.
The percentage of those holding extremist Islamist and Islamo-Nazi views is unknown (and only a bigot assumes that all Muslims are extremists) but from the Charlie Hebdo attacks to the killing of French priests and worshipers by Islamists, there clearly exists a significant problem.
Whether the epidemic of anti-church/anti-state attacks are coordinated or spontaneous, they combine to achieve a common goal. They fracture the French nation and drive a wedge between good people on both sides of France’s religious racial/divide.
This was chillingly demonstrated in October 2019 when a French Muslim convert drew his gun and murdered four of his colleagues in the Paris Police HQ.
The reason that Notre Dame’s inferno could never be admitted as an Islamist attack, is that the French state (and much of its population) is terrified of its Muslim minority and the consequences of an open clash with it.
Anyone daring to say this will immediately be accused of Islamophobia and racism by the Islamist’s allies among France’s extreme Left. Like the left throughout the west, they are defenders of Islamists through the “Red/Green” alliance. That’s why they were on the streets marching shoulder to shoulder with Islamists the day after the Hamas atrocities. American college professors used phrases to describe the slaughter as, “exhilarating.”
The situation is similar in France’s neighbor, England. The British police have long operated a system of tolerance of low-level antisemitic attacks.
When Suella Braverman took office in 2022 as British Home Secretary, she announced that British police must stop ignoring incidents of UK antisemitism.
The UK’s Jewish Chronicle reported, “The Home Secretary said a culture in the police of treating anti-Semitism as “racism lite” was to blame for the failure to convict thugs who bully Jews, including those who drove in convoy through north London’s Jewish community in 2021. In a pre-Hamas attack portent, they threatened to “Kill the Jews” and “rape their daughters.”
Suella Braverman said officers had been too slow to respond to the convoy because they didn’t take antisemitism seriously enough – and she vowed to change the “outrageous” state of affairs.
At the start of the Hamas War in a convention-breaking attack on the police, Braverman said London’s police force was ignoring lawbreaking by pro-Palestinian “mobs.” She described demonstrators calling for “International Intifada and “Jihad ” as “hate marchers.” Braverman claimed that British Police were “sympathetic” to Palestinian and Black Lives Matter demonstrations and tolerated systematic lawbreaking that they would not tolerate among other groups.
Photographs of smiling London police officers crouching for selfies with children carrying Palestinian flags only confirmed her accusations. That was particularly so when two Manchester police officers were photographed tearing down poster of Jews kidnapped by Hamas.
All this was way too much truth for the British political establishment and even her own Conservative party. Her vow to change the “Outrageous state of affairs” collapsed when she was promptly fired.
In her “Free Press” article entitled “British Police Are Giving in to the Mob,” Rupa Subramanya quoted an ex-London police sergeant, Tim Cruddas who retired from London’s police force four years ago.
“There are 100,000 demonstrators and 1,000 cops, so 100 to one. There’s only so much you can do on the day without causing a lot of disorder.”
Another reason Britain’s police appear to be supporting the pro-Palestinian faction is, according to Toby Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union, which champions free expression in Britain, “They are pro-Palestinian. They’re not impartial. They prioritize protecting the feelings of Muslims over protecting the feelings of Jews. I think that’s pretty indisputable.”
The truth is that the British police, like the British establishment, is simply scared stiff of the 7% of the population that are Muslim. A long history of UK terrorist attacks from suicide bombings, decapitations, violence and Muslims now filling 18% of UK prison places (27% in London) guarantees that they stay that way.
A picture of a plane hitting the Twin Towers on 9/11 appeared on social media recently. Underneath it appeared the question, “How did we move from this…to not offending the Muslims?”
The answer is really very simple, “When we got scared.”
