Raymond Ibrahim/FrontPage Magazine: Reuters: ‘Muslim Grievances’ Responsible for Terrorism in France

After the Nice, France terror attack—where approximately 84 people were killed and hundreds injured—Western “mainstream media” is again in full damage control trying to rescue “the narrative,” namely, that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism.

Take one Reuters report by Tom Heneghan, titled “Foreign and domestic policies make France ‘most threatened country.’”  Its very first opening sentence cites terrorist propaganda:

After two militant attacks in Paris killed 17 people in January last year, Islamic State’s French-language magazine Dar al-Islam appeared with the Eiffel Tower on the cover and the headline “May Allah curse France”….

Why Muslims would call on Allah’s wrath against France is the theme of the entire report, and here Heneghan leaves no stone unturned—even managing to invoke the Crusades—in his attempt to portray France as “aggrieving” Muslims:

The reasons that make France a prime target for radical Islamist groups range from its present-day military operations all the way to – at least in Islamic State’s propaganda – the Crusades from the 11th to 15th centuries when Christians battled Muslims in the Middle East.

Regarding France’s foreign policies, Heneghan writes:

After the Paris attacks [Nov. 2015, 130 killed], Islamic State said France and other countries fighting alongside it would remain threatened as long as they pursued “their crusader campaign” in Syria and Iraq….

“France is gripped by an irrational and deaf hatred against Islam and Muslims that pushed it to the head of the coalition against the caliphate,” Dar al-Islam wrote last year, referring to the territory controlled by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Aside from the fact that Heneghan almost entirely relies on and spreads ISIS/Islamic propaganda, the purport of all this is that Muslims are angry with France because it is warring against ISIS.  Here we encounter the first conundrum: if, as we are repeatedly told by mainstream media, ISIS—that terrorist organization that beheads, enslaves, rapes, crucifies, and burns people alive—has “nothing to do with Islam,” why are Muslims angry at France’s efforts against ISIS to the point of launching terrorist attacks against its civilians?

The only way to accept that regular Muslims—such as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the non-ISIS affiliated perpetrator of last week’s Nice attack—are aggrieved at France’s war on ISIS is by first accepting that such Muslims identity and support the worst human rights abusing state of the 21^st century (as several polls indicate).

On France’s domestic front, Heneghan finds a number of other factors and policies to aggrieve Muslims:

The country, which has Europe’s largest Muslim minority, also has a steadfastly secular culture that sidelines religion in public life, typified by a ban on Islamic face veils in public and headscarves in state schools and the civil service.

Supporters say this encourages a common French identity but critics say it alienates non-Christian minorities, who see many vestiges of France’s traditional Catholicism – such as official holidays for Christmas and Easter – but little leeway for them.

This is a misrepresentation of facts.  All religious symbols—not just Muslim ones like the face veil—are banned in France’s public schools.  Devout Christians are banned from wearing conspicuous crucifixes.  And although there are many more Christians than Muslims in France, they do not commit terrorist acts (perhaps because Christianity, unlike Islam, comports well with secular rule).

At any rate, by claiming that France “alienates non-Christian minorities”—when indigenous Christians face the same restrictions from the secular state—Heneghan continues disseminating Islamic propaganda:

Some in the five-million-strong Muslim community, about 8 percent of the population, complain of discrimination and many Muslims live in poorer neighborhoods in the large cities.

They feel France is unfairly tough on their religion….

The poor babies…  If it’s so bad, why do they go there? Why do they stay there?  Why do pious Muslims willingly migrate to a staunchly secular nation? Why don’t they feel aggrieved at and hold responsible their own corrupt Muslim countries of origin—and terrorize them instead?

Whatever one makes of the claims of this report, the facts remain: “Terrorism … is a threat that weighs heavily on France and will continue doing so for a long time,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said after the Nice attack.  “Today, France is clearly the most threatened country,” the head of the General Directorate for Internal Security also declared. “The question about the threat is not to know ‘if’ but ‘when’ and ‘where’.”

The reasons for this have little to do with anti-French Islamic propaganda and everything to do with Islam’s presence in France, a non-Muslim, “infidel” nation.

Consider: If Muslims are terrorizing France due to social and political “grievances,” why are they also terrorizing and slaughtering other non-Muslim minorities who have no political power to “aggrieve” anyone?  For example, a 2016 statistical report found that Muslims—not ISIS, just regular Muslims—are responsible for persecuting Christians in 41 of the 50 worst nations to be Christian in.

In these nations, Muslim governments openly discriminate against Christians—churches are banned from being built—while Muslim mobs openly persecute, abduct, extort, enslave, and rape them with impunity.   And they all justify their persecution by citing Islamic doctrines that are unequivocally hostile to non-Muslims.

Yet here are Muslims who are allowed to build mosques and granted equality before the law complaining because “They feel France is unfairly tough on their religion” and because they “see many vestiges of France’s traditional Catholicism – such as official holidays for Christmas and Easter,” to quote Reuters.

Unlike the disparity between the indigenous Europeans and their Muslim guests, the Christians being persecuted by Muslims are often identical to their persecutors in race, ethnicity, national identity, culture, and language. There is no political dispute, no land dispute. Most significantly, these disempowered Christian minorities certainly have no political power—meaning there are no Muslim “grievances” either.

So why are they hated and hounded? Because they are Christians—infidels—and that’s the ultimate reason the French are being terrorized.

The French and all Western people—indeed, all non-Islamic people—would do well to remember what James Lorimer, a theoretician of legal jurisprudence, wrote back in 1884 in his Institutes of the Law of Nations:

So long as Islam endures, the reconciliation of its adherents, even with Jews and Christians [“People of the Book”], and still more with the rest of mankind, must continue to be an insoluble problem… For an indefinite future, however reluctantly, we must confine our political recognition to the professors of those religions which… preach the doctrine of “live and let live.”

In this light, a much simpler factor explains why France has been repeatedly exposed to terrorist attacks—a factor that was casually alluded to in Reuter’s otherwise pro-Islamic propaganda piece: “Europe’s largest Muslim minority” resides in France; there is a “five-million-strong Muslim community, about 8 percent of the population.”

In short, Islam’s Rule of Numbers—which holds that the more Muslims grow in numbers, the more violence against non-Muslims grows with them—is the true reason France has become the “most threatened country.”

 http://www.raymondibrahim.com/2016/07/18/reuters-muslim-grievances-responsible-for-terrorism-in-france/