WarSclerotic

Islamic Extremism in France Part IV: Crime and Immigration, Clarion Project, Leslie Shaw, May 25, 2016

French policemen in front of the Hyper Cacher supermarket, the site of an Islamist attack by Amedy Coulibaly, who had pledged allegiance to ISIS. Coulibaly, the son of African immigrants from Mali, was a close friend of Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi (whom he had met in jail in 2005), the gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo attack. The Kouachi brothers were sons of Algerian immigrants.

French civil servants are forbidden by law from voicing opinions that are not in line with government policy and can only express their views anonymously. In October 2015, a group of senior civil servants known as Plessis published an op-ed in the Figaro newspaper attacking the impotence of government policy and pernicious media propaganda on the issue of illegal migrants.

“This impotence, coupled with a moralizing media discourse, is increasingly disconnected from the will of the French people, who have been subject for several decades to the disorder caused by uncontrolled immigration, are worried about the threat of terrorism and demand protection and security. It is striking to observe that the current non-stop media blitz, verging on moral bullying, has failed to convince the French people.”

The disorder referred to is an omnipresent reality in France, most notably in the legal system.

In March 2015, the Administrative Court building in Toulouse was ransacked by Islamic extremists who scrawled “The Prophet Will Judge You” on the walls. One third of the 6,000 cases currently being judged by the Toulouse Administrative Court relate to illegal aliens and 30% of those are challenges to deportation orders. The attack was not covered in the national media and local reports underplayed the fact that it was perpetrated by Islamists.

French Administrative Courts rule on litigation between French citizens and the state in areas such as taxation, social housing, building permits and civil service employment, but in recent years there has been an explosion in cases brought before the court by illegal aliens supported by NGOs and these now account for over one third of cases nationwide.

In 2011 there were 53,482 such cases, and the figure is no doubt much higher today. This means that a French taxpayer or civil servant in litigation with the state or an entrepreneur trying to get an invoice paid may have to wait three or four years for a judgement. Challenges to French law brought by illegal aliens have thus thrown the legal system into chaos and are costing the French taxpayer billions of euros.

Other areas of the French judicial system have been thrown out of joint as a result of immigration as well. One example is the Tribunal Pour Enfants, or juvenile court, which handles cases involving minors.

Although it is illegal in France to compile statistics based on ethnic origins, it is sufficient to take a stroll through the corridors of the juvenile section of courthouses around France to realize that the vast majority of cases involve minors of North African or African origin.

Sociologists will put this fact down to poverty and lack of opportunity, but the reasons go deeper and are linked to the differing codes of socialization in the countries of origin of the parents and the host country.

These children underperform at school because the parents are incapable of or unwilling to push them to study. Poor results and truancy are common, and many leave high school with no qualification. Those who obtain a diploma are automatically accepted into university but lack the drive and ability to succeed.

Putting this down to deprivation is an invalid argument because the children of over 120,000 boat people from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos who arrived in France in 1979 have succeeded in assimilating into French society and are renowned for their respectful attitude and hard work in the classroom.

Juvenile delinquency is not a problem in these communities and the reasons for this are cultural, not economic.

Another field where children of North African and African origin outnumber other ethnic groups is the Aide Sociale à l’Enfance, or child protection system. This public service deals with both juvenile delinquents and children who for various reasons have been removed from their parents.

Again, statistics are not available but one only has to go to the waiting rooms of the offices of the ASE in French cities or visit the hundreds of child care residences to realize that the vast majority of children there are from Muslim families.

I am personally familiar with the case of an 11-year old French girl who was temporarily placed in a home after being rescued from an abducting parent. Of the 35 child residents, 34 were from North African or African families. When the French child’s father sent her a miniature nativity set to decorate her room at Christmas, she was forbidden from setting it up so as not to offend the Muslim children.

The most striking disproportion is in the area of criminal justice and is reflected in the prison population, where Muslims, who represent 10% of the population, account for between 50% and 65% of inmates.

These are ballpark figures as the compilation of statistics is illegal, but again a visit to courtrooms and penitentiaries is sufficient to show the estimates are not far off the mark. Indirect methods used to calculate the number of Muslim prisoners are observation of Ramadan, first names, testimonials of imams, presence at Friday prayer and demands for halal food.

Sociologist and author Farhad Khosrokhavar puts the figure at between 50% and 80%. In his 2013 study Radicalization in Prison: The French Case, he reported that non-Muslim inmates complained they felt like they were living in a Muslim country due to the regular calls for prayer and the fact that over half the prisoners in the exercise yard were Muslim.

Whatever the real figures, the connection between juvenile delinquency, violent crime and jihadism is beyond any doubt. Most of the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism over the past 10 years had a criminal record and many were multiple offenders of a legal system that allowed them to roam freely throughout Europe.