Unprecedented demographic changes are currently taking place in France. In one word, immigration from the Islamic world, both legal and illegal, is reshaping the country and turning it into a 21st century Lebanon. Conservative estimates in the absence of reliable race or religion-related statistics, which are not allowed under French law, put the current Muslim population of France at 6 million (almost 10% of France's 62-million population). There is some reason to think that the actual Muslim population may be closer to 8 million (about 12%). Over 50% of the Muslims are French citizens rather than aliens, either by naturalization or by birth: the French Republic bestows full citizenship to every child born on its soil, whatever the nationality of the parents (Jus Solis).

The non-Muslim population is aging and declining: its actual fertility rate is said to be close to 1.4 children per woman, just like in most neighboring European countries (Germany: 1.3; Italy and Spain: 1.2). The Muslim population is young and rising: its average fertility rate is said to be of 3 or 4 children per woman and is reinforced by the practice of polygamy and importation of foreign-born women. When it comes to the youngest age bracket, residents under the age of 25, the overall ratio of Muslims rises significantly (25 to 30%). Muslim influence is accordingly bound to strengthen in education, in the economy, in the professions, in the Civil Service, in the police and the military forces, in politics. The Muslim vote is likely to be an important factor in coming elections.

There is evidence that intermarriage is common between non-Muslims and Muslims and that most interfaith families tend to associate with Islam rather than with Christianity. There is evidence that conversion to Islam in rising all over France, whereas Christian faith and practice is plummeting. Several of the French Islamist militants involved with terrorism over recent years are converts. Islam may thus develop soon into a fully all-French religion and culture, and replace Christianity as the main religion of the land.

Anti-Semitism is politically incorrect but robust in old, non-Muslim, France. It is politically correct and virulent in the new, Muslim, France. Both brands of anti-Semitism are reinforcing each other. Many authors see this development as the key to the present crisis.

Radical anti-Semitism, the philosophy according to which Jews are intrinsically unreliable or evil and should be either marginalized or annihilated, has been a strong minority opinion in traditional French culture and politics for the last two hundred years. It was the background to the Dreyfus case under the Third Republic and was turned, with comparatively little effort, into a State policy under the pro-German Vichy regime, from 1940 to 1944. Even after it was suppressed as thoroughly politically incorrect in the post-Holocaust era, it has retained tacit or not so tacit acceptance in many milieus.

General de Gaulle, the man who headed the French Resistance against the Germans and Vichy, and then founded the Fifth Republic, shockingly described the Jewish people in 1967, in a public speech delivered in the wake of the Six Day War, as an elite, self-conscious and domination-oriented nation. One year later, he alluded to noteworthy Israeli influences in French public life. All his successors are reported to have resorted to similar radical anti-Semitic cliches, albeit in private. This includes Francois Mitterrand, the socialist president of France from 1981 to 1995, who was close to radical anti-Semitic circles as a young man and then remained for all of his life a close (and devoted) friend of Pierre Bousquet, the head of the Vichy police during the war and as such one of the main organizers of the Holocaust in France.

It comes as no surprise that the lesser ranks of French politics and public administration routinely engage in radical anti-Semitic discourse or practice of one sort or the other. Vilification of Israel as an illegitimate rogue state or even as a 'little shitty state' is common among senior civil servants, especially at the Quai d'Orsay, France's Foreign Office. Compliance with the secondary Arab boycott of Israel, a blatantly racist and anti-Semitic operation, was forbidden by law in the 1970s but nevertheless upheld by special provisions issued by the conservative Prime Minister Raymond Barre.

Immigration from the Islamic world, both legal and illegal, is reshaping the country and turning it into a 21st century Lebanon.

There are two subcurrents in French radical anti-Semitism. One is rightwing and rooted in a conservative Roman Catholic or Protestant tradition: its classic exponents were the royalist authors Viscount Louis de Bonald and Edouard Drumont in the 19th century and the neo-royalist author Charles Maurras in the 20th century. The other one is leftwing and secular: its most famous (and most extreme) exponent was the 19th century socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who advocated either sending the Jews back to Asia or exterminating them. They frequently overlap. In fact, both subcurrents trace back to a single vision of France as a continental, disciplined, and centralized society, immune from capitalism and Anglo-Saxon influence. Opposition to anti-Semitism is usually stronger in more Atlantic, pro-Anglo-Saxon, milieus.

Leftwing anti-Semitism was very strong throughout the 19th century, if not even stronger than rightwing anti-Semitism. The Dreyfus case brought about a significant change in this respect, however: Left and Right were instantly redefined in terms of either siding with a Jew in the name of justice or rejecting him in spite of justice; and the Left had henceforth a vested interest in keeping with its pro-Jewish stand. Still, leftwing anti-Semitism gained ground again in the 1930s, both among the Communists and the socialists, and was an essential catalyst in the

November 2003               - 5 -               Outpost