BY HUGH FITZGERALD
We hear a lot about possible victories this year in Europe of anti-Islam candidates. Some are well-known outside their own countries, such as Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, while others are not so well-known. One of them is François Fillon, who has a good chance to become the next President of France, and has now become outspoken on the menace of Islam. With his astonishing victory last fall in the two primaries of the Center-Right party in France, Fillon first knocked Nicolas Sarkozy out of the running, and then, in the runoff, had a landslide victory over Alain Juppé, garnering 66% of the vote. The pollyannish Juppé was known, among other things, for being soft on Islam, pushing a line about l identité heureuse” (“happy identity”) supposedly making it possible, in a way he never could explain, Muslim immigrants to unthreateningly become part of French society while still refusing to assimilate. France would now be the sum of its separate communities, and everyone would live “happily” side by side, and for ever after. Just like in the fairy tales, and fittingly, because it was sheer make-believe. For Juppé rejected the need for a ”French identity” upheld by the traditional Right. This “happy identity,” a plaintive why-can’t-we-all-get-along welcome to foreigners, is based on a refusal to admit that there is indeed a difference between today’s Muslim immigrants, so hostile to the values of their hosts, and the non-Muslim immigrants who came before, and accepted the values of the laic French state:
Juppé wants France “to be open both to its neighbors, and to the world.” For “what would France be without Marie Curie, who came from Warsaw, or Apollinaire, who was born a Polish subject of the Russian Empire, or Picasso, who was born in Spain, or Ionesco, child of Romania, or Francis Cheng, who grew up in China and arrived in Paris at the end of his adolescence?” asked Juppé, proud of this very special kind of immigration. “We are proud of this tradition of welcome and we want to keep it vibrant.”
Continue reading Hugh Fitzgerald: Introducing François Fillon (Part I)
















