A VOTRE SERVICE, MONSIEUR

Dhimmi nation (Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post, September 19th, 2004)

The French response could not have been more different. Threats to murder the two reporters met with a massive governmental effort to save their lives, not by targeting French Muslims but by cultivating them. Paris strenuously pushed local Islamists to condemn the kidnappings, hoping that their voice would convince the terrorists to release the two men.

In the process, Islamic organizations effectively took charge of the country's foreign policy, issuing statements and acting as though they represented the national population.

Bertrand Badie of l'Institut d' tudes politiques in Paris complains that French Muslims became "a sort of substitute for the French foreign ministry."

Likewise, on the international level, Paris called in chits for having stood with the Arabs against Israel and with Saddam Hussein against the US-led coalition. French diplomats openly sought the support of terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

These efforts culminated 30 years of French appeasement and, in the scathing analysis of Norbert Lipszyc, "constituted a major victory for Islamists and terrorists."

Lipszyc sees France acting like a dhimmi (a Christian or Jew who accepts Muslim sovereignty and in return is tolerated and protected).

"France has publicly confirmed its dhimmi status, its readiness to submit to Islamist overlords. In return, these have declared that France, dhimmi that it is, deserves protection from terrorist acts."

Is this not also the policy favoured by a large majority of the academic, intellectual and artistic elites throughout the West?