Eiffel Tower Terror Attack Thwarted?

Today the French Senate ratified the ban on face veils passed by the National Assembly in July. A few hours later at 9pm local time the Eiffel Tower and surrounding area were evacuated following a bomb alert. Some 2,000 people left the Tower itself and a further 25,000 vacated its immediate vicinity. The BBC notes that France has been on a heightened state of alert since 2 August following threats from a Maghrebian branch of al-Qaeda, but for some reason its report makes no reference to the ratification of the veil ban. This is the second time this year that the Eiffel Tower has been associated with an Islamist terror plot, for back in June it was reported that plans for an attack using a helicopter and poison gas had been uncovered. The ban itself, notes the Daily Mail, was passed by a huge majority of 246 votes to one in the Senate. There were however, a small number of abstentions.

Hopefully, should a bomb be present the French police will manage to defuse it and no harm will come to anyone or to this iconic Parisian symbol. Once again the threat of Islamist terror has made itself felt in the non-Muslim world, just a little over a week after a coalition of French secularist groups staged a series of anti-Islamisation protests under the banner of the Grand Apéritif Républicain to commemorate the 140th anniversary of the foundation of the French Third Republic. These demonstrations led to the issuing of a Facebook Fatwa against their organiser Christine Tasin, which soon demonstrated its ugly reality through a number of death threats including one from the utterly inappropriately named black Islamo-French rapper ‘Cortex’.

In France, Germany, Holland, the UK, Denmark, and many other European countries, the presence of the Muslim minority is having a disproportionately influential and negative impact upon the lives and liberties of their respective citizenries. We are however beginning to see the crystallisation of popular resistance to Islamisation and a groping towards its political articulation. This process of native European reassertion is most advanced in Holland, but recent headlines connected to the Thilo Sarrazin affair and the creation of Die Freiheit indicate that a similar dynamic is now at play in Germany. In France, this reassertion possesses a secular guise, but is not as yet as powerfully developed as in the two aforementioned countries. In the UK, none of the mainstream parties will acknowledge the issue let alone class it as a problem, and none of the smaller parties are currently in a fit state to provide a viable platform for popular mobilisation, hence the growth of the EDL.

We must watch closely and observe if France manages to successfully assert its sovereign right to determine how it deals with undesirable immigrants following its censure today by the EU Commission for its recent deportation of parasitic Roma elements. France and the other nations within the EU must reassert their sovereignty and cast off the anti-European stranglehold of Brussels. I am pro-European, but anti-EU. That distinction is important. The Islamisation of France and the rest of Europe can only be defeated if we dismantle the anti-European and anti-democratic superstate called the EU. Only once this is achieved, will our peoples truly be free again.

Christine Tasin receives Facebook Fatwa

The Bivouac-ID blog notes that on 6 September Christine Tasin, organiser of last Saturday’s anti-Islamisation protest Grand Apéritif Républicain, discovered that a ‘fatwa’ had been issued against her on Facebook. The threatening message was entitled 'Blasphemy is an offence in Islam!' The text read:

A Fatwa has been pronounced against you. All Muslims of France and Navarre, wherever they find themselves, have the duty to execute the said fatwa. The law of the Qur’an states that whosoever blasphemes against Islam must be hunted down and punished.

This is alarming but hardly unexpected. Tasin notes that such threats should not be dismissed lightly, pointing to the examples of Theo van Gogh and Robert Redeker. Thankfully, unlike van Gogh, Redeker remains alive, but alas leads a far from normal existence having been forced into hiding in 2006 following his publication of an article in Le Figaro in which he wrote 'Islam is a religion that, in its own sacred text, as well as in its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred.'

Tasin however is not cowed by the Facebook fatwa. She writes:

We will never give in to this threat; we are more than ever determined to oppose with all our might the establishment of an Islamic society in France. It is our duty to our children and our grandchildren who have not deserved this.

Unsurprisingly, the fatwa has confirmed her view that Islam and Shariah are incompatible with French law and the French way of life. Following the fatwa, she has already received two death threats within 24 hours and the French police are said to be taking the threats seriously. She will be giving a press conference on the subject of freedom of expression at the Convention Nationale de Rif this Saturday. How will the French Left react to this threat to Tasin’s safety? Will we see MRAP denouncing the ‘fatwa’? Will a French mainstream political equivalent of Thilo Sarrazin step forward to speak out about the dangers of Islamisation? I very much doubt it.

What happened to the Grand Apéritif Républicain?

Reports on yesterday evening’s series of French anti-Islamisation demonstrations planned for Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulon and Toulouse reveal that turnout was disappointingly low, ranging from perhaps 300 in Paris to a meagre 20 or so at other locations (circa 60 in Lyon according to the police). Understandably, the Bivouac-ID blog, which was one of the main backers of the protest, indignantly asked its readers “but where were you?”

Bivouac-ID, resolutely anti-Islamisation and attracting a readership of thousands every day, was quite right to chastise its readers for their apathy despite their vocal cyber-support. This of course is not a phenomenon unique to France. Whereas in the past we had ‘armchair generals’ we now have so many ‘internet warriors’. If this sense of dissatisfaction does not translate itself into some form of practical political action such as protest or support for political parties that oppose Islamisation it is not exactly productive.

Other than apathy, some have speculated that many potential protesters may have been deterred from participating by fear of leftist counter-demonstrators and the police. In Toulouse, as can be seen in the video below, circa 100 demonstrators from ‘MRAP’ (Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples) forced the 20 or so anti-Islamists to cut short their protest. MRAP is very much in the mould of UAF in the UK, sharing ideological positions and strong links to communist parties. As in the UK, French anti-Islamists are thus routinely smeared as ‘racist’ and ‘far-right’.



This photograph from Lyon shows a small group of demonstrators in the centre of the city.

The following report from Paris features an interview with protest organiser Christine Tasin of Résistance Républicaine.



Although yesterday evening’s protest yielded disappointing numbers, it at least demonstrated that there are many dedicated people in France who are determined to stem and reverse the tide of Islamisation that threatens to engulf their country and culture. Hopefully, next time that such protests are held, those who had lent their vocal support to the Grand Apéritif Républicain but stayed at home will make an effort to show their solidarity to the cause and take to the streets.

Grand Apéritif Républicain Protest Grows

The French Grand Apéritif Républicain anti-Islamisation campaign is growing. Originally it had been intended to hold its composite apéros républicains in five locations: Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Strasbourg and Toulouse, but now Toulon has also been added to the list. As you can see from the poster above, it looked as if Aix was also to host a protest, but this now appears to have been cancelled.

For English speakers holidaying in France, why not turn up at 6pm on Saturday 4 September and join the locals in condemning the Islamisation of France. The protest’s organiser, Christine Tasin of Résistance Républicaine, lists the rendezvous points as follows, but warns that locations may be subject to change if the local authorities so decree:

Paris, place de la Bourse.

Bordeaux, attention, changement de lieu. Devant le 1, Cours Xavier Arnozan (Angle du Cours Xavier Arnozan et du Quai des Chartrons) - Et non plus place Gambetta comme prévu.

Lyon, place Bellecour, à côté de la statue de Louis XIV

Strasbourg, Parc de l’Orangerie (face au Conseil de l’Europe)

Toulon, place de la Liberté

Toulouse, Prairie des Filtres (Près du Pont-Neuf et du Cours Dillon).

French anti-Islamists plan Demonstration: Grand Apéritif Républicain 4 September

Following the success of the apero in Paris on 18 June, the website Riposte Laique and a coalition of twenty other groups and bloggers is planning another apero that they have dubbed the Grand Apéritif Républicain which will take place on 4 September to mark the 140th anniversary of the founding of the proclamation of the Third Republic. This time, protests against Islamisation will be held in a number of cities across France: Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Strasbourg and Toulouse. If Riposte Laique were operating in the UK, mainstream pundits and organisations/campaigns such as UAF, Searchlight and the SWP would be attempting to stigmatise it as ‘far right’, whereas in fact it represents a voice that is alas all but absent in the UK: that of the traditional rationalist patriotic Left.

In its article 'Number 159' the Riposte Laique website makes its political stance clear, outlining all that is positive that has been won by the French Left and needs defending (any errors in translation are entirely my fault):

For us, the spirit of the Left is embodied in its social achievements. We know that it was through the struggles of our forebears that we won the possibility of organising in the labour market, to form trade unions, obtained the right to strike, wrested the 40-hour week and paid holidays in 1936, not forgetting Social Security after the war, 5-week holidays and retirement at the age of 60 after the victory of Mitterand.

We know that these achievements have never issued from the Right, and still more so from the extreme Right, often complicit with the employers against the working class.

For us, the spirit of the Left inheres in the values of solidarity, humanism, egalitarianism, feminism and the social sphere, and we absolutely do not renounce these ideas.

But for us, the Left is also the Republic, and the defence of the Nation. Our conception of the Nation is absolutely not ethnic; it is founded upon the basis of acceptance of a contract. The rules are clear: one accepts the rules of the receiving country, then one becomes a citizen, has equal rights and duties. This is called assimilation.

Whether you agree or disagree with everything in the above statement, it is clear that the position of Riposte Laique (RL) is one of a very robust defence of distinctly French and secular positions; it is the voice of the unapologetically patriotic Left. Its sentiments are noble, and whilst I admire its organisational efforts to confront and check Islamisation, I do think that its implicit position on (mass) immigration is somewhat naive. Whilst I do believe that it is perfectly possible for relatively small numbers of immigrants to be successfully assimmilated into a receiving society, I am not of the opinion that this is possible or indeed desirable on a mass scale or with people from a radically different cultural background. Having said this, the RL article makes it clear that it is not in favour of ‘unrestrained immigration’, so I may be doing its writers a disservice and would welcome a clarification.

RL has been attacked by the conventional French multiculturalist Left and political Establishment which have tried to brand it ‘racist’ and ‘xenophobic’. RL’s retort to such smears seethes with a justifiable indignation, referring to this ‘Left’ as “gôche” rather than “gauche” which one can only guess is an understandably pejorative description. RL states:

This ‘Left’ dares to put the Republic at the centre of its projects: it defends street thugs (racailles) against honest people, delinquents against the police, unrestrained immigration against integration, Europe against the Nation, communalism against the Republic one and indivisible, Islam against secularism, the veil against the rights of women, globalism against popular and national sovereignty! It has not been the Left for a long time.

It is this sense of disgust with the multiculturalist Left that provides the impetus for RL to work with a variety of groups, campaigns and bloggers from right across the political spectrum, all united by their opposition to Islamisation. It will be interesting to see whether the recent unrest in Grenoble prompts a larger turnout for these demonstrations than was the case in Paris in June. RL deserves to be congratulated, and I shall eagerly await news of what I hope to be successful demonstrations across France on 4 September. Vive la France !