Thread by @JewhadiTM

In France, Even Muslims Have Had It With Radical Muslims realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/…

They call themselves Les Resilientes, the Resisters, and they meet every week in a couple of modest rooms in the immigrant neighborhood of Saint-Denis, on the northern outskirts of Paris.

Their main purpose is to provide a refuge for women who have been victims of violence, but they are fighting another battle as well.

Though most of the Resilientes are Muslims of North African heritage, they are resisting other Muslims -- the growing influence and strength of a conservative, fundamentalist Islam in their neighborhood.

“What worries me is that it's developing; it's not retreating,” the group’s founder and president, Rachida Hamdan, told me during a visit in June to the Resilientes center, located on a charmless avenue lined with public housing estates.

“More and more, for example, you see little girls wearing the veil, which I oppose because I see it as a symbol of female submission. But it's also an act of open defiance against the Republic,” she said.

“If they force us to close our doors, they will have everything,” she said, “they” being the conservative imams and elected officials who, she says, depend on the Muslim vote in her immigrant neighborhood.

“They'll have the city hall, the cafes, the movie theaters, the schools, the money. If we go, there will be nothing in the way of their radical program.”

But four years ago France was profoundly jolted by two terrorist attacks carried out by extremist Muslims ‒ one at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo where 12 journalists were gunned down,

...and a series of three coordinated attacks a few months later in which 130 people were killed, including 90 during a concert at the Bataclan theater. Over the months and years since then, the worry about Islamization has clearly gone mainstream.

“We're totally past the point where it's the fascist far right and the National Front electorate who are standing up against Islamization,” Marie-Laure Brossier, a city councilor from the Paris suburb of Bagnolet and an ally of Hamdan’s, told me.

“The Islamo-left labels us fascists and right-wingers, but that's just an effort on their part to discredit us. Practically all of the activists that I work with and who are fighting against the Islamist effort to push religion into the public space are on the left.”

“It's clear that there is a big change,” Pierre Manent, a political philosopher at the prestigious School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris.

“We've had a substantial immigration, the major part of which consists of Muslims coming from North Africa, Afghanistan, Syria, and other places.

The doctrine of successive governments has been to minimize the changes that this has brought about and especially to say that any worries about it are exaggerated. The policy has prevented us from having clear statistics, because of the idea that the republic is open to all.

So the tendency has been to prevent a calm discussion of the question. But a growing part of the culture is Muslim, much of which resists assimilation. That's a fact.

“When you reach a certain critical mass,” he continued, “integration becomes impossible. It isn't even desirable any more for any of the parties in question. We may already be there.”

Perhaps the statistic most talked about in France in 2019 is 18.8%. That, according to Jérôme Fourquet, director of the mainstream French public opinion firm IFOP, is the percentage of children currently being born in France whose parents are giving them Islamic or Arab names.

His evidence suggested that, culturally speaking, France is no longer a continuous cultural domain but, as suggested by the title of his book “The French Archipelago,” it is a conglomeration of separate and distinct cultural islands.

We are in “the terminal stage of the deChristianization of France,” Fourquet wrote, meaning that the cultural-religious cement that once held France together has evaporated.

“There is no common culture any more. Every group has its own references. Each is big enough to pretend to live, produce, and consume its own culture.”

Ironically, some Muslims have the opposite concern.

“The dark fear [of Islamic fundamentalism] is that in its contact with France, its secularism and hospitality, Islam will be secularized and will disappear,” the magazine Marianne, wrote in a similar vein earlier this year.

“Copiously financed by Arabian countries, the Islamists are mobilizing to prevent this dire evolution. ... The operation has succeeded in France.”