Eric Zemmour is the intrepid Cassandra who has been warning the French, in his appearances on television talk shows, in his newspaper articles, and in his books, about the danger posed by millions of Muslims to their country’s, and their own, wellbeing.
He has declared that he is running for President. Many give him little chance to win. I beg to differ. I think he has the best chance, of all the candidates, including Marine Le Pen and Valerie Pécresse, to defeat Emanuel Macron. “Éric Zemmour: France’s Last Chance for Survival?,” by Guy Millière, Gatestone Institute,
…From September to mid-December 2021, polls showed that in the second round of the election, Zemmour could well be Macron’s opponent. Since mid-December, however, the polls have changed, and Marine Le Pen, Valerie Pécresse and Éric Zemmour are tied. It is therefore possible that Le Pen could make it to the second round. If that happens, the result is the same one expected before Zemmour’s candidacy – and Macron will be re-elected. If Valerie Pécresse makes it to the second round, Macron will also be reelected: her positions are close to Macron’s, meaning that the voters wishing a more conservative policy will probably not vote for her. “Valerie Pécresse has the same ideas as Emmanuel Macron and is unable to defeat him”, said Guillaume Peltier, vice president of The Republicans Party on January 10. “Only Eric Zemmour has a chance”. The day before, on January 9, Peltier left The Republicans to join the Zemmour campaign….
Guy Millière believes that only Zemmour has a chance to defeat Macron by offering something genuinely new to the electorate. Marine Le Pen, who lost to Macron last time, would do no better than she did in that previous election. Valerie Pécresse is scarcely different from Macron in her views, which hampers her ability to criticize him. Many commentators have noticed that she only make public statements in response to what the other candidates have just said; she has yet to present coherent policies of her own. Were Pécresse to run against Macron, political analysts say the similarity of her views to those of Macron will cause her defeat. Having to choose between two very similar candidates, voters will prefer to stick with the more seasoned of the two – that is, with Macron. Even Guillaume Peltier, the Vice-President of Pecresse’s own center-right party, the Republicans, has abandoned her, claiming that “only Eric Zemmour has a chance” to defeat Macron. He’s now joined the Zemmour campaign.
The big news story for now in France, leaving little bandwidth for other stories, remains the COVID-19 pandemic, the efficacy of various vaccines, the value of boosters, he prospect of new variants possibly resistant to existing vaccines, and rates of morbidity and mortality. Macron wants to make the presidential election a referendum on how he’s handled the pandemic. Zemmour has other ideas: he wants to force the discussion, by all the presidential candidates, of Islam and the future of France.
The polls, however, also show that the ideas at the heart of Zemmour’s campaign are widely shared by the French. One polling institute recently asked a sampling of French people:
Some people speak of the great replacement, European, white and Christian populations being threatened with extinction following Muslim immigration from the Maghreb and black Africa. Do you think such a phenomenon will occur in France?”
67% of respondents answered: Yes. The poll then asked whether respondents worry about the possibility of a great replacement. 67% of people answered: Yes. 63% per cent responded that that they thought Islam was a danger for France….
Journalists who commented on the poll said, “The great replacement is a fantasy.” Many French people clearly disagree. And nearly 2/3 think “Islam is a danger for France.” Those poll numbers are devastating for Macron, and heartening for Zemmour. If Zemmour can capture even 80% of those voters, he will defeat Macron.
He also spoke about his own experiences. On October 25, 2021, TV host Jean-Marc Morandini invited him to meet the inhabitants of Drancy, a small town in the eastern suburbs of Paris where Zemmour had spent his childhood. In the 1960s, Zemmour recalled, French middle-class people, and many Jews who had left Algeria in 1962 at the end of the French-Algerian War, had lived there. At the time, he continued, life in Drancy was calm and peaceful. Now, Zemmour said, there is no longer a single Jewish family in Drancy; it is today a predominantly Muslim city, like many towns around, and that in 2017 there had been riots accompanied by claims of “police brutality”. In Aulnay-sous-Bois, a neighboring town of Drancy, a young criminal of African descent, Theodore Luhaka, had violently resisted the police officers arresting him, and accused them of sexual assault. The entire eastern suburbs of Paris were on fire for a week. The police officers were fired, charged, then cleared by the judiciary. Then President François Hollande supported Luhaka, not the police.
Zemmour was only able to walk around the city protected by a dozen armed police officers. He met just a few people, all hostile. A crowd shouting “Zemmour go away” and “Allahu Akbar” followed him. When he entered a Muslim butcher shop and asked the butcher if there was a non-Muslim butcher shop in the city, the butcher replied: “A French butcher shop? I think there is one left in the French quarter”. “There is still a French quarter in Drancy?” Zemmour said.
How telling was that visit to Drancy, the city on the outskirts of Paris where Zemmour grew up, and now has a Muslim majority. Zemmour is not safe anywhere on his visit; he has to be guarded by a dozen armed police officers, protecting him from being set upon, beaten, or even killed by angry Muslims. And the halal butcher’s comment about a “French quarter” was also revealing: it puts the diminishing number of French in Drancy In their place, and circumscribed space. What will that “French quarter” be called in a few years by the inhabitants of Drancy? The “French ghetto” where the indigenous French huddle anxiously from their encroaching Muslim neighbors? Or will Drancy be emptied out of its French inhabitants, who will sell their houses and businesses at a loss to the local Muslims, as they flee from the city that was once their home and in which they now feel like foreigners?
On November 26, 2021, Zemmour tried to visit Marseille. Everywhere he went he was greeted with cries of “Allahu Akbar”. Young Muslims verbally threatened him. The restaurant where he was to have lunch was totally ransacked. The police did not try to protect it. Marseille’s population is now 40% Muslim. Analysts predict that in less than a decade, Marseille — the second-largest city in France — will be predominantly Muslim.
The public meeting Zemmour organized to launch his campaign on December 5, 2021 was protected by hundreds of police officers. The people who came were greeted by groups shouting, “Allahu Akbar” and “Zemmour the fascist”. A man in the large hall where the meeting took place assaulted Zemmour and tried to strangle him. Zemmour’s bodyguards handed him over to the police; he was charged with intentional bodily harm. Thirteen thousand people were present. In his speech, Zemmour told them, “They hate me because they hate you.”
When he launched his campaign at a rally, Zemmour required the presence, and protection, of hundreds of police officers. In fact, he can no longer go anywhere in France without a contingent of at least a dozen heavily armed guards. Such is the state of fear that Muslims have created. His supporters, too, those brave enough to come out to hear him, have had to run a gauntlet of Muslims shouting at them the war cry “Allahu akbar” (Our God is greater than your god) and “Zemmour the Fascist.” How many of those who would have wanted to attend one of Zemmour’s appearances have been scared away by the threat of Muslim violence? Zemmour himself, despite all of his security, was attacked by someone who at one of his rallies managed to grab him around the neck. Does anyone doubt that as he campaigns, there will be attempts on Zemmour’s life? He’s risking his life to preserve what De Gaulle called “a certain idea of France.”
Journalist Ivan Rioufol wrote in Le Figaro, “What is the candidate saying except that it is urgent to try to save dying France and listen to the concerns of the despised French people?”
“If Macron is re-elected,” Zemmour said on television on January 13, “civil war is almost certain. Many French people know it.”…
This is the kind of comment that drives Zemmour’s critics wild, not because It is false, but because they suspect it is true. What he means is this: If Macron is reelected, nothing will be done about the Muslim menace to the French and to France. Macron will continue to insist that a “handful” of “radicalized extremists” are responsible for the trouble; they do not represent Islam; rather, they have “betrayed” Islam. This sounds like Pope Francis’ fatuous remark that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence.”
If Macron wins, during the next five years two million more Muslims will enter France. Muslims will feel steadily more emboldened; every kind of violence will be let loose: increasing attacks on Jews, on churches and Catholic processions, on the symbols of the state. There will be more attacks on the police and firemen who dare to enter the no-go areas where Muslims rule. Now there are 750 such areas; in five years that number will be closer to 1000, while Macron — continuing throughout to blame a “small handful” of “extremist” troublemakers — looks the other way. Muslim crime – the epidemic of muggings, burglaries, torching of cars, rapes – will continue to rise. Already 70-80% of those imprisoned in France are Muslims, though they make up only 6% of the population. Non-Muslims are forced, for reasons of safety, to move away from areas that are being demographically islamized. Macron doesn’t see this, doesn’t want to talk about the problem that Zemmour keeps focusing on. Whistling in the dark as he claims that “Islam is part of France,” Macron refuses to look steadily and whole at the problem. His schooling at the Ecole nationale d’administration, his comfortable years as an inspector of finance and then as an investment banker, did not prepare him for this kind of assault from within on the civilization of France.
After Eric Zemmour announced his presidential candidacy at the end of November, he at once was leading his main rivals in the race to succeed Macron, Marine Le Pen and Valerie Pécresse. But an anti-Zemmour campaign was launched to focus attention on several bizarre and inexcusable remarks he had made in the past. Zemmour had maintained that the Vichy government had rescued French Jews by sacrificing foreign-born Jews, a claim that is palpably untrue: more than 72,000 French Jews were murdered by the Nazis, handed over to them by Vichy. He also said that it was not unreasonable for the French general staff to suspect Captain Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer wrongly convicted for espionage, then exonerated, because — Zemmour said — he was a “German.” This was a reference to his Alsatian background; Alsace had close cultural and linguistic ties to Germany and, in 1871, became part of Germany (but Dreyfus’ parents moved to Paris that year precisely to avoid becoming subjects of Germany). The press has, misreported Zemmour, claiming he said that Dreyfus may possibly have been guilty. That is not what Zemmour said; he said only that it was understandable that the French general staff might have thought he was guilty, given his Alsatian background that connected him to Germany.
With these remarks constantly being brought up to sully Zemmour, his support dipped. But now it is again on the rise, with a leading member of the Republicans, Guillaume Peltier, abandoning Pécresse, who is seen as “Macron lite,” and joining with Zemmour because, as Peltier claimed, “Zemmour is the only candidate who can defeat Macron.” Two leaders of the National Rally faction in the European Parliament, Jérôme Rivière and Gilbert Collard, have also now joined the Zemmour campaign. They, too, are convinced that only Zemmour has a chance to prevent another term for Macron, in which nothing will be done about the menace of Muslims in France, save a few largely symbolic expulsions of “extremist” imams, while each year another 400,000 Muslims — economic migrants — enter the country. These migrants, like the Muslims who came before them in the last four decades, settle in the cities and suburbs – the banlieues — among their own; they make no attempts to integrate into the larger population, but even as they pocket the cornucopia of benefits the French state offers, they regard the French – who are, as Infidels, “the most vile of created beings” – with contempt and hatred.
The question is: should Zemmour’s remarks about Vichy and Dreyfus, however wrongheaded they may be, disqualify the one candidate who has focused laser-like on the effect wrought on France and the French by a large Muslim population? If Macron is reelected, that population will continue to increase by nearly half a million a year, while Macron as president will no doubt do as he did in his first term, whistling in the dark about that “handful” of Islamic extremists who with their violence have “betrayed Islam.” What is at stake far outweighs the foolishness of a few ill-considered remarks. It’s nothing less than the future of France.
Michael Copeland says
Zemmour tells it the way it is. Zemmour, unlike almost all the other politicians, knows Islamic doctrines and its source texts. Contrast this with the repeated denial and publicity theatre, such as the contrived photo opportunity of gathered politicians appearing to walk along the street after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. They had been gathered in a cordoned-off street away from the crowds, and were obligingly taking a few steps forward for the camera.
Zemmour’s assessment, that a Reconquista is needed, and that a civil war is the imminent alternative is correct. Other politicians lack the spine to express it. Islam is hostile.
Siddi Nasrani says
The politics a la Macron = France continues to lead the world in whitewashing Muslim terrorism as mental illness.
born saturday says
mass deportattions starting with the perpetrators!!! to every last one of them that does not assimilate and convert!!!!
complete closure of borders and pushbacks as the main practice!!!
STOP islamization now!!!
gravenimage says
Eric Zemmour and the Future of France (Part 3)
…………
So glad to see that Zemmour is being taken seriously as a candidate.
Michael says
IMO the Muslim population in France increases by AT LEAST 500k pa. The birth rate of Maghrebi mothers in France is appx double that of native mums, and is higher than the rate back in Algeria. I reckon that’s an extra 100k pa (2% of 5m), plus economic immigrants.
Z’s defence of Petain’s pact with the devil (Hitler), may have limited the genocide compared to Holland etc.
But I could not understand his defence of Petain offering better protection to French Jews over Jewish immigrants from Germany. And nor did Alain Finkielkraut.
I regret that as a Berber Jew, he does not acknowledge the protection of Jews by Muslim Berbers and Arabs in WW2, against German and French regimes in Tunisia and Morocco,
JimJFox says
If only le pen would join with and support zemmour, macron would be history.
maria says
You are right, but she and her family especially her father are real bad antisemites. She will prefer to support macron against Mr. Zemmour
OLD GUY says
Mr. Zemmour is correct the millions of Muslim/Islamic migration invaders have changed France and NOT for the better. Sadly most political leaders in the west have learned nothing from what is happening in Europe from the islamic migrations.