France's Dreadful Dilemma

"This is a terrible ordeal which once again assails us We know where it comes from, who these criminals are, who these terrorists are."
French President Francois Hollande

"[The slaughters were conducted by] a group of believers from the soldiers of the Caliphate [choosing Paris since it is] the capital of prostitution and vice, the lead carrier of the cross in Europe."
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant

Tokyo Skytree, the world's tallest broadcasting tower, is illuminated in the colors of the French flag on Nov. 15. © Reuters

A very conservative estimate has it that four percent of poll respondents carried out by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies are sympathetic to ISIL, with a "positive" view of their agenda. Considering the fact that Muslims in France make up ten percent of the population, that number, taken in the context of potential recruits to Islamism's jihad against the West, and in particular France, whose military has been active in its former colonies in Africa and the Middle East, that is hugely significant.

Yet official France is urging its citizens not to close their minds and their hearts, to continue to compassionately welcome refugees who are Muslim to the French experience. The French experience thus far has not been a dreadfully positive one for those refugees, as it happens. They tend to spurn French law, French custom, French values, for Islam-centric ones that run counter to the French experience.

They tend to isolate themselves in hostile ghettos surrounding Paris, in banlieus dark, poverty-ridden and deliberately apart, where opportunities for a rounded education are absent, where employment opportunities are dismal, and where no interest whatever in the French experience is a fact of life there. And this is where festering hatreds are formalized. This is also where French police dare not enter without taking self-protective steps to adequately arm themselves against violence directed against them.

From these banlieues come occasional violent riots, and the symbolism of rejection through the massive burning of vehicles in an expression of wholesale rejection of the French experience. In these ghettoes live the disaffected from France's former colonial days, a kind of obligatory noblesse oblige that France practices in honour of Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty, all of which notions appear to be rejected by French Muslims, even while they complain of its lack on their behalf.

And while official France stands prepared to continue accepting Muslim refugees as a member in good standing of the European Union, it also lectures its traumatized population that the carnage it has experienced most latterly that left 132 Parisians dead and 350 wounded, about a hundred so grievously that the death count may yet rise, has nothing to do with Islam. That the well-armed and militarily-trained jihadists working in three organized teams for maximum success shouted 'Allahu Akbar!' is completely incidental and meaningless to their identity.

France's anguish over the dreadful misfortune of becoming a target time and again for the horrendously malignant Islamist jihadist fascists practising a severely fundamentalist Islam reflecting the original Islam, the Islam that directs its faithful in complete surrender to the larger purpose of Islam, to engage in jihad, while still attempting to preserve its humanitarian, compassionate values represents a dilemma facing the entire Western world.

After the January 2015 jihadist attacks in Paris, France's President François Hollande declared: "We must reject facile thinking and eschew exaggeration. Those who committed these terrorist acts, those terrorists, those fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion."