France: After the Third Jihadist Attack

By Guy Millière

• Successive French governments have built a trap; the French people, who are in it, are thinking only of how to escape. The situation is more serious than many imagine. Whole areas of France are under the control of gangs and radical imams.
• Prime Minister Manuel Valls repeated what he already said 18 months ago: "France is at war." He named an enemy, "radical Islamism," but he was quick to add that "radical Islamism" has "nothing to do with Islam." He then repeated that the French will have to get used to living with "violence and attacks."
• The French are increasingly tired of attempts to exonerate Islam. They know perfectly well that all Muslims are not guilty. But they also know that all those who committed attacks in France in recent years were Muslims. The French have no desire to get used to "violence and attacks." They do not want to be on the losing side and they feel that we are losing.

The French army is at the limit of its capacity for action: it already patrols the streets of France and is deployed in Africa and the Middle East. Pictured above: French soldiers guard a Jewish school in Strasbourg, February 2015. (Image source: Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons)

Nice, July 14, 2016: Bastille Day. The evening festivities were ending. As the crowd watching fireworks was beginning to disperse, the driver of a 19-ton truck, zig-zagging, mowed down everyone in his way. Ten minutes and 84 dead persons later, the driver was shot and killed. Dozens were wounded; many will be crippled for life. Dazed survivors wandered the streets of the city for hours.

French television news anchors quickly said that what happened was almost certainly an "accident," or when the French authorities started to speak of terrorism, that the driver could just be a madman. When the police disclosed the killer's name and identity, and that he had been depressed in the past, they suggested that he had acted in a moment of "high anxiety." They found witnesses who testified that he was "not a devout Muslim" -- maybe not a Muslim at all.

President François Hollande spoke a few hours later and affirmed his determination to "protect the populace."

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