It was ironic that the French government’s attack on the right of young Muslim women to observe their religion while pursuing their education met with a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the extreme right-wing Front National. FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen commented at one point that he supported the wearing of the veil … because it meant he didn’t have to look at ugly women: “Le voile musulman: il nous protège des femmes laides” (Le Monde, 22 April 2002). Some on the Left have used the FN’s semi-opposition as an argument in favour of the hijab ban.
However, the following article by FN general secretary Carl Lang, “Vous avez aimé l’immigration? Vous allez adorer l’islamisation” (You liked immigration? You’ll love Islamicisation), from Le Pen’s publication Français D’Abord! (15 December 2003), shows that the main reason the FN failed to throw its weight behind the hijab ban was that the measure failed to deal with what the FN argues is the real problem – the encroaching Islamicisation of French society arising from an influx of Muslim migrants.
It is also worth noting that, as the French press pointed out, the overwhelming majority of FN voters supported the hijab ban. They presumably took a more pragmatic view, reasoning that while the measure fell short of a complete block on Muslim immigration and the extirpation of Islam from France, it was at least a step in the right direction.
You Liked Immigration? You’ll Love Islamicisation
By Carl Lang
The issue of the Islamic veil is only a superficial part of a much more serious phenomenon, the development of a revolutionary Islamic process based on national disintegration, the communalisation of French society due to immigration and the de facto collaboration, active or passive, of the governing class over the course of thirty years.
Should the Islamic veil be banned from schools? For several months our political-media class has been debating and wrestling with its contradictions. Some, in the name of “tolerance”, refuse to “exclude from republican schools” pupils wearing the veil. Others, in the name of “republican secularism”, want to ban any religious symbols from schools.
Whether they are partisans of a ban or not, however, they are all, in the name of the “fight against discrimination”, in favour of the state helping Islam to establish itself definitively in France. They therefore concede to the Muslim minority privileges that have since 1905 been denied, in the name of secularism, to the Christian majority. More and more municipalities are subsidising, notably in the form of long-term leases, the construction of mosques; in numerous school canteens pork is removed and “halal” menus are installed. That is also the political spirit of Sarkozy who, by creating the French Council of the Muslim Faith, has made official the process of Islamicisation of French society, as can be observed particularly in our region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
After thirty years of massive immigration, Arab-Muslim among others, people are, strangely enough, surprised at its consequences. The poor innocents seem amazed to see that these millions of Muslim immigrants wish to live according to the laws of Islam, to build mosques and to force their daughters and wives to wear the veil. It is clear that the questions of the headscarf, of Islamicisation and of communalisation would not have arisen if it were not for the deluded and irresponsible immigration policies that have been implemented for thirty years.
Have they understood this? No. The government does not intend to oppose continued immigration. They want to regularise it, to organise it, which is completely different. Clandestine immigration no, legal immigration yes. That is the meaning of Sarkozy’s politics.
Under these conditions and faced with the flood of immigration, the main question is not the defence of “republican secularism”, but rather the defence of French identity. It is not a question of the veil in schools, but of national disintegration endangering the political and historical rights of the French people. Moreover, how can one fail to see that it is not “republican values” nor the pathetic bulwark of “republican secularism” that will stop the political, cultural and religious pressure of millions of Muslims? Demography, permanent immigration and time work in favour of the Islamists.
Behind the headscarf hides a subversive and revolutionary process of the same character as that whuch has developed throughout the Muslim world. With Arab-Muslim immigration we have imported not only the Palestine-Israel conflict with its daily procession of score settling, but also the political-religious civil war that prevails in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere.
What is at stake in Europe is, first of all, the takeover by the fundamentalists of the Muslim “masses”, using every method of intimidation, racketeering and violence, and, secondly, the use of these Muslim masses for a revolutionary endeavour which has as its aim the establishment of an Islamic republic.
The methods of revolutionary subversion are, since the wars in Indochina and Algeria, well known. In the present case they are used for the purpose of a revolution which is no longer Marxist but Islamic.
So of course it is necessary to oppose the wearing of the headscarf in schools, but above all to be clear and conscious what the real stakes are. Let us not be like the Byzantines of 1453 who, while the Turks were laying siege to Constantinople, debated in their intellectual circles the sex of angels!