The Daily Mail: How I've seen the France I love torn apart by hatred: LEO McKINSTRY - who has lived there for over a decade and witnessed growing tensions between locals and Muslim hardliners - despairs for the future
Bastille
Day is meant to be a moment of celebration in France. But when my wife
and I had dinner on Thursday evening with neighbours near our French
home in the Loire region, we encountered visceral despair about the
state of the Gallic nation. The
company was charming, the hospitality magnificent, yet parts of the
conversation were profoundly sombre. This was hours before the news of
the Islamist atrocity in Nice emerged, but our friends' concern for
France's future was palpable.
Mass
immigration, the relentless growth of the Muslim population, the
alarming spread of jihadism and the enfeebled stance of President
Hollande's socialist government had left them with a feeling that their
country is increasingly under siege.
[...] One night I
woke up to the smell of acrid smoke in the air [the author lived in Carpentras]. Looking out from my
bedroom window, I saw to my astonishment that five cars had been set on
fire in our street.
On another occasion, while out in the countryside with my wife, I was menaced by a Muslim armed with scythe.
When,
slightly shaken, I told this to a neighbour, who was a French army
veteran, he recounted how a local Muslim had one day threatened to slit
his throat.
Let's
be absolutely clear: most of the Muslim population were thoroughly
decent people who wanted nothing more than to live their lives in
harmony with other peaceful French people.
That said, the religious and racial tension in Carpentras was palpable in everyday life.
Carpentras has the oldest synagogue in France, and the town's Jewish roots were another source of this tension.
My
wife and I went one night to a choral concert at the town hall by a
renowned Israeli choir, but because of Islamist threats of violence,
security was as tight as it might have been for a visiting foreign
leader, complete with guard dogs and armed troops.
It
was partly because of the death of our Provencal dream that we sold our
Carpentras house three years ago and moved further north. [...]
Until recently, violent anti-semitism in
France was largely seen as the preserve of the far Right, a dark legacy
of Vichy France's collusion with the Nazis during the war, but today it
is another weapon of Islamist intimidation.
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