January 30, 2024. The French weekly, Le Journal du Dimanche, publishes the most comprehensive and detailed survey on what French Muslims think. Not surprisingly, the results are disturbing.
The first question in the survey was about Jews. 17% of French Muslims admit that they hate Jews. 39% say they have a bad, or very bad, opinion of Judaism.
France is the only country in 21st-century Europe where Jews regularly have been murdered simply because they are Jews. Since the kidnapping, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi in January 2006, all Jews murdered in France have been killed by Muslims. Sammy Ghozlan, the president of the National Office for Vigilance against Anti-Semitism (BNVCA), which lists anti-Semitic acts and helps their victims, has emphasized year after year, for more than twenty years, that almost all violent anti-Semitic acts committed in France are committed by Muslims.
When it comes to Israel, the results are even more disturbing. Feelings go beyond hatred. 45% of French Muslims say they want the total destruction of Israel. An equivalent number of French Muslims define the massacre rape, torture, beheadings and burning alive of Jews by Hamas terrorists in Israel on October 7, 2023, as an "act of resistance".
So, almost half of a religious community in a Western democracy openly wants the destruction of a group of people who were just massacred in another country, and in the greatest number since the end of the Holocaust.
19% of French Muslims say they have sympathy for Hamas. That so many French Muslims have sympathy for an organization whose leaders say that they will repeat the October 7 attack time and again until Israel is annihilated, and unabashedly state that they want the genocidal destruction of the only Jewish state, should sound an alarm that French Jews, and French non-Jews, are in an extremely perilous situation.
Other figures showed that 42% of French Muslims place respect for Islamic Sharia law above respect for the laws of the French republic (the percentage rises to 57% among young Muslims aged 18 to 25).
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2003 that Sharia law is incompatible with the values of democracy. Sharia law stipulates that Allah has dictated all the rules that human beings must obey, and that all rules contrary to Sharia law must be rejected. 37% of French Muslims say they support the Muslim Brotherhood -- also not surprising: the main French Muslim organization, Musulmans de France ("Muslims of France") is the French branchof the Muslim Brotherhood.
Every year, Muslims of France organizes a conference that attracts hundreds of thousands of Muslims from all over Europe. The group also invites radical imams who speak to the crowd.
The survey further showed that 49% of French Muslims want Catholics to convert to Islam, and that 36% percent want churches to be transformed into mosques. Some churches already have been transformed. The survey also discloses that 25% of French Muslims said that the word "France" is a word they reject.
These figures are best seen and understood in conjunction with other facts.
France is one of the only countries in the Western world where men have been beheaded by radicalized Muslims. (The other is the United Kingdom, where two Muslims tried to behead British Soldier Lee Rigby in 2013.) Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher, was beheaded on October 16, 2020. Herve Cornara, a small business entrepreneur, was beheaded on June 26, 2015 in Romans-sur-Isère, a small town in the southeast of France. And Father Jacques Hamel had his throat slit and was beheaded on July 26, 2016 in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy, while saying mass in an almost empty church.
France also happens to be the country in Europe with the largest number of "no-go zones". There are at least 751 designated Zones Urbaines Sensibles ("sensitive urban zones"), where Muslim gangs and radical imams are in charge. Non-Muslims can still live there, on the condition that they accept the status of dhimmi (tolerated second-class citizen), bow their heads, and admit that they live in a territory ruled by Islam. Members of Muslim gangs no longer respect the police. If an incident between a police officer and a member of a gang breaks out, riots follow, and the police receive orders that if the situation risks escalation, they are not to arrest anyone.
France is a country where more than 70% of prison inmates are Muslim. According to reports, the crime rate among the Muslim population is high.
Three decades ago, Seine-Saint-Denis, a French district in the Paris suburbs, had a large Jewish community. Almost the entire Jewish population of the district, after being subjected to incessant threats, moved away to live elsewhere. The few Jews who remain hide that they are Jews.
Throughout France, Jewish men conceal their skullcaps under a hat. Jewish women tuck their Star of David necklaces inside their clothing. Many Jewish families no longer place mezuzahs at the entrance to their homes.
For more than 20 years, it has been impossible to talk about the Holocaust in French schools. When Georges Bensoussan, in 2004, published The Lost Territories of the Republic, a book denouncing the Muslim anti-Semitism widespread in educational establishments, Jewish students were already experiencing harassment and discrimination. Today, most Jewish families in France, out of caution, have abandoned the public education system and have enrolled their children in private schools. For years, when a Jewish student is bullied in a public school, the authorities take no disciplinary action against the bullies; instead, they might ask the Jewish child's parents to place him in another school.
French Christians visibly wearing a cross on the street receive insults. Every year, dozens of French churches are desecrated and ransacked.
More than 120 knife attacks take place in France every day and can happen anytime, anywhere. Most of these attacks are committed are by Muslim men who then tell the police that they did it because they hate infidels and hate France. Only the knife attacks that result in death appear in the newspapers; the others are passed over in silence. In the main French cities, muggings and beatings have become commonplace. There are also more than two hundred rapes every day in France, most perpetrated by Muslim men who entered France illegally. Only 7% of illegal immigrants ordered to leave France are ever actually deported.
The poll in Le Journal du Dimanche received little comment.
Only one French political leader, former journalist Éric Zemmour, has dared to say that the situation is increasingly alarming and that a growing Islamic danger is threatening France. His comments have led to his being sentenced to pay heavy fines several times for "provoking discrimination and hatred towards the Muslim community". In the May 2022 presidential elections, he receivedonly 7% of the vote; his message was apparently either not widely heard or not widely accepted.
The president of the National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, has limited herself to denouncing the presence in France of an "Islamist ideology totally distinct from Islam", and insists on saying that only a tiny minority of Muslims adhere to this ideology. She adds, perhaps wishfully, that Islam is "fully compatible" with the French institutions.
La France Insoumise ("France Unsubmitted"), the main left-wing political party in France, is violently anti-Israel. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, calls Hamas a "resistance" movement. He received 21.9% of the vote in 2022, but 69% of the Muslim vote.
Several members of the French National Assembly have denounced the positions of La France Insoumise and Mélenchon, but only one, Meyer Habib, has spoken out about the leftist and Muslim anti-Semitism, as well as the increasingly serious threats weighing on French Jews and on France itself. As a result, he has received death threats by the hundreds and his family and he now live under 'round-the-clock police protection.
French President Emmanuel Macron said, in October 2020, that he wanted to fight what he called "Islamic separatism", but seemed not to want to see that Muslims tempted by Islamism do not want to "separate" themselves from the rest of the population, but to conquer others and have them submit. "Islam," Macron added is "in crisis". His statement provoked vehement protests from all of the French Muslim organizations, and demonstrations in several countries of the Muslim world. Since then, he has avoided talking about Islam altogether.
No Islamic organization appears to have called anyone to come to the demonstration against anti-Semitism that took place in Paris on November 12, 2023. The only reaction from the imam of the Great Mosque of Paris, Chems-Eddine Hafiz, to Hamas's massacre on October 7 was, "With all these bombs, these deaths, and this frustration generated over the years there, what are we creating? Hate of the other" – which was not exactly a ringing condemnation of the massacre. He then accused Israel of attacking the civilian population of Gaza: "Islam totally condemns the attack on civilians in an armed conflict."
French Muslim online magazines were more virulent. Evidently basing what they publish on Hamas propaganda, they accuse Israel of committing "genocide" in the Gaza Strip. They never say that Hamas uses Palestinian Arabs as human shields or that the Israel Defense Forces do their best to avoid killing civilians while often putting their own lives at great risk.
The French journalist Ivan Rioufol, in his book The Coming Civil War, published in 2016, wrote:
"The question of the Muslim presence in France must be posed without artifice.... the rise of strict Islam in France would imply emergency decisions. If decisions are not taken very quickly, and if the almost generalized voluntary blindness of the country's leaders does not cease, the future of France will be tragic and violent."
France is the country in Europe with the largest number of Muslims: around 10% of a population of 67.75 million. By 2050, the figure is expected to increaseto 17%, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.
A similar situation to that of France can be found in other Western European countries, where the Muslim population may be smaller but is quickly growing.
In Londonistan, a book by the British journalist Melanie Phillips published in 2006, she noted the existence of Sharia-controlled zones in London, and that "sixty percent of British Muslims would like sharia law to be established in Great Britain". In 2019, she wrote in the UK's Jewish Chronicle: "A frighteningly high number of British Muslims subscribe to extremist or anti-Semitic views".
In Germany, Sharia-controlled zones have begun to appear. They have also been emerging in Belgium, Sweden and the Netherlands. The recent victory of Geert Wilders in the Dutch elections could be the sign of a turning point and an awakening in Europe. It is too early to draw conclusions, and almost three months after his victory, Wilders has still not succeeded in forming a government.
In 2015, the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, in the novel 2084: The End of the World, described a totalitarian future in which Muslim extremists establish an oppressive caliphate where freedom of thought and action is abolished. When a television journalist asked him what, in his opinion, France will be in 2084, his immediate response was: "France will be Islamist". "Europe too," he added.
The former head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maaßen, said in a recent interview that "Europeans will succumb to Islam".
If Europeans wish to avoid such a future and keep their culture, they need to start making that outcome unmistakably clear to everyone, not just by words but by actions. If not, what we are seeing could well mean the end of the European civilization as we know it.
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.