France

Two video clips did the rounds in the French media at the weekend. One went global, that of the heart-warming heroism of Mamoudou Gassama, a migrant who rescued a small boy dangling from a balcony in Paris; the other, being more feel-fear than feel-good, didn’t capture the world’s attention in quite the same way. This film was shot in the south of France, in a suburb of Avignon, and showed a group of men surrounding a newspaper kiosk. They were there to protest at a large poster advertising the latest edition of the current affairs magazine, Le Point, the front cover of which was adorned with a photograph of the Turkish president

Gaza has a galvanising effect on Europeans. Jeremy Corbyn, for example, appeared to have no consolatory words for France after last week’s Islamist knife attack in Paris, yet on Monday he posted messages on Twitter and Facebook expressing his disgust with Israel. Likewise in France, the far-left, curiously quiet whenever there’s a terrorist attack on their patch, have this week staged protests in Lyon, Marseille, Rouen, Paris and Bordeaux to voice their opposition to Israel’s killing of 62 Palestinians, the victims including several children and fifty members of Hamas, an EU-designated terror organisation. But what do the protestors in France hope to achieve? Emmanuel Macron reportedly “condemned the violence and underlined

The French have an expression to describe far-left citizens who identity more with Islam than the Republic: ‘Islamo-Gauchiste’, a term coined by the French philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, who explained in 2017 that many on the far-left regard jihadism as: “…a legitimate social revolt…they look at jihadists through a distorting lens of victimhood. This compassionate approach sees Islamic terrorists only as lost children, abandoned or rejected by unwelcoming and hostile countries, victims of ‘institutional’ or ‘systematic’ racism”. The symbiosis between the Western far-left and Islamism has been ongoing for decades, and stems from the left’s realisation of their failure to win the hearts and minds of the white working-class. In his book ‘Radicalisation’,

Imagine if the 1,200 hoodlums who rampaged through Paris on May Day had been members of a far-right organisation. Imagine the reaction in the media, the endless cliched references to the 1930s and dire warnings of the rise of a new generation of fascism in Europe. The fascists are here, all right, and on Tuesday they firebombed a McDonald’s (the footage below is frightening), torched a car showroom and damaged or destroyed thirty other business premises. But because they vandalised in the name of the far-left, reaction has been muted across Europe. In a few reports, one can even detect a grudging admiration for the perpetrators of the violence. 🔴Le McDonald’s

Twenty-one years ago the sun finally set on the British Empire with the handover of Hong Kong. Now, the sun is setting on what is known as the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. It would be easy to blame Brexit for London’s increasing irrelevance in Washington. After all, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has been rapidly pro-European Union since Henry Kissinger supposedly said that Americans needed to know who to call if they wanted to call Europe. Since then, when a president wanted something from the Old World the British prime minister was their helpmate. There is no question that France has manoeuvred to fill

Why has the refusal of France to grant a passport to an Algerian woman who declined to shake the hand of a state official at her citizenship ceremony because of her “religious beliefs” made the BBC website? Picked up by other news’ outlets, including the New York Times, it’s not unreasonable to infer that the subtext is: there go the French again, discriminating against Muslims. If it’s not the burka or the burkini, it’s a handshake. But why would any western country welcome a woman who shuns one of its oldest and most courteous customs? If she finds shaking hands with a man beyond the pale, one is entitled to suspect she may not look

There is something fundamentally rotten at the heart of the European far-left. In Britain it manifests itself in institutional anti-Semitism, whereas in France the loathing is aimed at the police. On Saturday, hours after Arnaud Beltrame lost his fight for life following his heroic gesture during the Islamist attack in Trebes, a gentleman called Stéphane Poussier tweeted his pleasure at the news of the police officer’s passing. Poussier isn’t just any old troll eaten up with hate; last year he stood as a candidate for the far-left’s La France Insoumise party in the parliamentary elections. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Insoumise, moved swiftly to distance himself and the party from Poussier’s

There’s one word you may not hear in connection with the death of Lt-Col Beltrame who died last night, the fourth victim of the 25-year-old Islamist gunman, Redouane Lakdim. And that word is chivalry. The reason why the police officer died from wounds he sustained in the shootout, in which Lakdim was killed, was that he volunteered to take the place of a woman hostage. When the gunman took over the Super-U supermarket in Carcassonne, he held one woman back to use as a human shield. And remarkably, Lt-Col Beltrame offered to take the woman’s place. Surprisingly, the gunman allowed him to do so. He left his mobile phone with an

Islamist terror returned to France this morning with at least three people reportedly killed when a Moroccan man, reportedly claiming allegiance to Isis, opened fire on police and then ran into a supermarket in Trebes, shouting ‘Allah Akbar’ and vowing to avenge his “brothers in Syria”. The gunman is now believed to have been killed by police, but there were media claims that the terrorist, apparently known to intelligence services for radicalisation, had asked for the release of Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor from the Islamist cell that killed 130 Parisians in November 2015. The attack, the first against French civilians since the murder of two young women outside Marseille