France has been thwarted in its destiny of greatness by the English and is now doomed to collapse into civil war between Christians and Muslim “barbarians”.
You might think that such a prophecy — articulated by one of the country’s top thinkers — would banish its author to the lunatic fringe. Yet Eric Zemmour is earning fame and fortune charting his country’s decline, with his latest gloomy book Mélancolie Française flying off the shelves.
This article was prepared by the Islam in Europe blog - islamineurope.blogspot.com
Zemmour, 51, has emerged this spring as the hero of the ordinary bloke, and a villain to the left-of-centre Establishment. Millions tune in to radio and television to hear him breaching taboos over race, immigration, abortion and, his pet subject, perfidious Albion. On Saturday night, two million people watched Zemmour clash with Georges-Marc Benamou, a leftish writer and adviser to President Sarkozy, on France 2 television.
Benamou, who is of Algerian-Jewish background like Zemmour, treated him to the ultimate insult: “You are a fascist. You are further to the right than [Marshal] Pétain.”
The celebrity thinker shrugs off the charge with a laugh. “I say what people think,” he told The Times.
“A lot of people feel, in a confused way, the things that I talk about. They have this fear, but the French elite forbids them to express it. The elites impose a political correctness that the people cannot stand.”
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The thesis that lands Zemmour in the hottest water is his belief that France sealed its fate when it abandoned its tradition of assimilating immigrants, and embraced the concept of ethnic diversity. “French culture is not Muhammad,” he says. “It is François, it is Christian.”
The result is a new “barbarism”, with the emergence of Muslim ghettos that have broken away from society, he argues in his book. To back his thesis, he quotes Charles de Gaulle as saying that mixing Muslims and French Christians is “like blending oil and vinegar”.
While Zemmour is deemed beyond the pale by much of the Establishment, he enjoys public backing.
Two months ago, supporters demonstrated outside Le Figaro, the most conservative newspaper, after Étienne Mougeotte, the Editor, tried to sack him as a staff columnist.
His offence had been to claim on television that the majority of French drug dealers were of Arab or African origin. Mougeotte backed down and Zemmour kept his job.
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Source: Times (English)
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