Averting France’s Civil War

[Chiram]

From the Wall Street Journal:

By John Vinocur

If democracy can’t respond vigorously to terror threats, less savoury elements of society will fill the breach.

Patrick Calvar is France’s director general of domestic intelligence. Hedging seems not to fit in with his notion of the job.

“You will have a confrontation between the extreme right and the Muslim world—not the Islamists but, actually, the Muslim world,” he told a closed-door parliamentary hearing in May. His remarks were disclosed last week, two days before the Bastille Day terrorist truck attack that killed 84 people celebrating in Nice.

“The confrontation is inevitable,” said Mr. Calvar, who has referred to France as the Islamists’ central target but considers Europe in great danger. As reported by French media, he said the “radicalization of society and the deep movement it pulls along with it” is a greater threat than the terrorism he maintains will be defeated.

“One or two more attacks, and it will happen,” Mr. Calvar said, talking about “the confrontation between communities” that “all these groups . . . would like to set off.” This official horror scenario dwarfs in scope the three murderous attacks since January last year that have disabled France.

Excessive? Look at the Salafists (an estimated 15,000 among France’s five to seven million Muslims) whose radical-fundamentalist creed dominates many of the predominantly Muslim housing projects at the edges of cities such as Paris, Nice or Lyon. Their preachers call for a civil war, with all Muslims tasked to wipe out the miscreants down the street. At the same time, the right-wing extremists singled out by Mr. Calvar would be ideologically capable of shooting any Muslim.

Here is despair on top of despair. But the response of most French politicians reflects opportunism, evasion and petty finger pointing. The context is their dominating, intraparty squabbles leading to presidential primaries before the end of the year for the May 2017 elections.

The Nice attack contains a unique point of agreement: It represents the end of an epoch and the start of one in which France must come to terms with the near certainty of new tragedy and new victims. Socialist President François Hollande was quoted as saying over the weekend that, “Never since World War II have democracies been so threatened.” It’s reasonable today to add that France hasn’t appeared this dysfunctional and politically riven since 1939.

Hours before the Nice attack, on the afternoon of July 14, Mr. Hollande said new procedures now in place would allow the national state of emergency to be lifted by the end of the month—a clear electoral gesture to his left wing, which labeled the parliament-approved emergency period antidemocratic, hysterical and Islamophobic. At 3:45 a.m. the next morning, the president was on television to talk of France battling—attn. the White House—“Islamist terrorism” and “Salafism,” and to say the state of emergency would be maintained.

But Mr. Hollande hasn’t gotten around to explaining what everyday France continues to ask: how a 19-ton battering ram of a truck, driven by a Tunisian immigrant with a criminal record, got onto the seafront Promenade des Anglais, supposedly sealed to traffic by national and local police during a fireworks show.

Instead of urging national unity, typical calls by legislators from Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Republican Party have branded the government “autistic” and said the national police should have been armed with rocket launchers. The government has countered that it was in fact Mr. Sarkozy, during his five years as president, who reduced police forces under his control by 12,500.

Apropos, and targeting the entire French political class, the tabloid Le Parisien begged in a headline, “Please, A Little Decency.”

In a sense, none of this went to the biggest issue. Mr. Hollande has now climbed the ladder of reality to where he no longer describes France’s resident holy warriors as “obscurantists.” But he has done nothing to break the Islamic radicals’ hold, both psychic and practical, over the French Muslim communities where jihadism has taken root.

Following 18 months of terror, a big-bang compromise—a trade-off of job and educational advantages against a compact swearing Muslim adherence to the rules of French society—is inconceivable. Mr. Sarkozy, who once promised an affirmative-action program, but backed away from it while president, now demands Muslim “assimilation” rather than “integration.” As for the French Council of the Muslim Religion, a national Islamic grouping, it condemned the Nice attack without using the word terrorism.

France is in a bad place. Its uncertainty is palpable, its divisions knife-edged. And, as Mr. Calvar, the chief of domestic intelligence, has warned, its potential for violence is worse than its bloody present.

The country needs palpable help from its friends, including military support so that its troops in Africa can be reassigned at home.

Most of all, to right itself, France must deploy all the authority its democracy can tolerate for what Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls three months ago called the “reconquest” of the Republic “in the battle over culture and identity.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/averting-frances-war-of-all-against-all-1468870986