Europe’s Leaders Continue to Misrepresent the Reality of Jihadism

By David Pryce-Jones

Monday, January 19, 2015

The Kouarchi brothers murdered the Charlie Hebdo journalists and then ran into the Paris streets shouting that they were avenging the Prophet Mohammed. The motivation is all too plain, you might think, but François Hollande, the French president, came up with a startling counterfactual view: “Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with Islam.”

Michel Gurfinkiel, one of the most perceptive commentators in France, has taken up this presidential absurdity. “The question is not so much whether one sees the truth or not, but rather what one is supposed to do once truth has been seen.” Four million French men and women turned out for demonstrations in Paris and other cities, presumably because they already had a good idea of the truth. But marching in the front ranks were personalities from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Palestinian entity, and others who condone expedient violence in practice and continually arrest and suppress journalists whose freedom of speech they were supposed to be defending.

Likewise in Germany. Pegida, the acronym in German for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, is a new and gathering mass movement that has been mounting demonstrations in major cities. “We are the people,” is their popular slogan, first heard when Germany was re-united in 1991, and picked up again now under the shadow of Islamist terror. Chancellor Angela Merkel is as inventive as Hollande when it comes to misrepresenting reality. “Prejudice, coldness, even hatred,” are the characteristics she applies to Pegida marchers, whom she even finds “unsettled perhaps because we don’t know enough about Islam.” She wanted to stop a big Pegida demonstration in Dresden, and the police obliged by discovering at the last moment an Islamist plot to open fire into the crowd.

Fudging the truth, Hollande and Merkel are helping to bring about the very outcome they fear. Polls have long since been showing that over 70 percent in France think that Islam is incompatible with democracy and Western civilization. That proportion is surely higher today. It is timely of Gurfinkiel to warn that our masters are clueless. He is not alone. Roger Cukierman, president of France’s leading Jewish organization, predicts that the choice for the country is either sharia law or fascism. Another thoughtful commentator, Guy Millière, goes further: “The jihad in Europe is just beginning.”