France is the canary in the mine when it comes to immigration, which is why I was interested in a piece by RealClearInvestigations on how conflicted French Muslims themselves are over some worrying trends.
France is under severe internal stress. Not long ago, GetReligion’s Clemente Lisi wrote about a report on the more than 1,000 vandalisms and thefts in 2018 at Catholic churches around France. That subject was covered by RealClearInvestigations too.
Is the Islamization of France connected to the church attacks?
Sometimes yes; oftentimes no. Let’s also say that concerns about radical Islam no longer just belong to the far political right. The concerned are now other Muslims.
PARIS — They call themselves Les Resilientes, the Resisters, and they meet every week in a couple of modest rooms in the immigrant neighborhood of Saint-Denis, on the northern outskirts of Paris. Their main purpose is to provide a refuge for women who have been victims of violence, but they are fighting another battle as well.
Though most of the Resilientes are Muslims of North African heritage, they are resisting other Muslims -- the growing influence and strength of a conservative, fundamentalist Islam in their neighborhood.
“What worries me is that it's developing; it's not retreating,” the group’s founder and president, Rachida Hamdan, told me during a visit in June to the Resilientes center, located on a charmless avenue lined with public housing estates. “More and more, for example, you see little girls wearing the veil, which I oppose because I see it as a symbol of female submission. But it's also an act of open defiance against the Republic,” she said, referring to French laws that limit wearing certain religious identifiers in public. “You see it in front of the schools, mothers telling other mothers that their children should be veiled. I've been told by 17-year-old boys that I'm not a true Muslim because I'm not veiled. Who is telling them to say things like that?”