Jihadi France: A dark colonial past. Ghettoes. The threat of an Islamic insurgency... and this is just the beginning of unprecedented bloodshed
By John R Bradley For The Daily Mail
Published: 00:18 GMT, 28 July 2016 | Updated: 09:16 GMT, 28 July 2016
The statistics are stomach-churning: almost 250 innocents have been murdered in France in the past 18 months by terrorists — more than the total number of French nationals killed by them in the entire 20th century.
But as the country reels from the latest ISIS atrocity — the beheading of a beloved elderly priest at the altar of his Catholic church in a quiet Normandy village — the fear is that this wave of unprecedented bloodshed marks only the opening salvo.
And that it may, with terrifying speed, turn into what the deranged homegrown Isis footsoldiers have as their ultimate goal: the instigation of a full-blown Islamist insurgency in France.
The embattled, deeply unpopular French President, Francois Hollande, has repeatedly declared that his country is now at war. Only the most optimistic observer would dare to challenge that assessment given the tragic pattern of recent events.
Still, while the bumbling president is bearing the brunt of the French people's boiling anger, the reality is that he cannot be blamed, simplistically, for the sudden emergence of terrorism on French soil.
In fact, the unprecedented recent carnage has been decades in the making — and will almost certainly take decades more to resolve, whoever wins the French presidential elections next year.
Brutal
For the radicalisation of a small, but significant, Muslim minority intent on joining the jihad is, in part, the consequence of the nation's bloody colonial past and its failure to integrate its vast Muslim population.
The history of France's brutal response to Algeria's fight against its colonial rule between 1954 and 1962 left a deep and lingering sense of resentment that festers to this day.
The eight-year war ranks among the bloodiest conflicts of the past century.
The French set up concentration camps, tortured prisoners and carried out mass executions of civilians suspected of helping the rebels fighting for independence.
Amid accusations of genocide, the death toll rose to anything between 500,000 and 1 million.
Even after independence was declared in 1962, there was more atrocity to come.
Thousands of Muslim Algerian 'Harkis' — pro-French volunteers — who had fought alongside French troops were abandoned to face bloody reprisals in their homeland.
Estimates are that at least 30,000 — possibly as many as 150,000 — were slaughtered by their fellow countrymen. The wave of immigration of Algerians and north Africans to France following independence led to a vast increase in the number of Muslims.
Today, between 10 and 15 per cent of France's population of 63 million are Muslim — the highest percentage of any European country.
However, instead of being integrated into mainstream French society, the first wave of immigrants was concentrated in the impoverished, soulless suburbs of Paris and other major cities, known as banlieues.
And their offspring mostly remain in them today.
These banlieues are characterised by high unemployment and poverty. While the average French youth unemployment rate is an admittedly shocking 23.3 per cent, for the millions of first- and second-generation Arab and north African immigrants living in the suburbs of Paris, the youth unemployment is 50 per cent or more.
Meanwhile, the French authorities turned a blind eye as local mosques were taken over by radical imams preaching hatred of Jews and Christians.
It is not difficult to understand why the young people in these grim housing estates have proved such fertile ground for Isis recruiters.
There is, of course, another obvious result of poverty, unemployment and a deep sense of discrimination and hopelessness: high crime rates.
Depressingly, up to 60 per cent of French prisoners are Muslims and, in turn, prisons have predictably become recruiting grounds for radical Islamist recruiters.
Indeed, in this regard, a clear pattern is emerging regarding the recent attacks in France. For instance, the Isis recruit who massacred 84 people by driving his lorry through crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice was 'known' to police for criminal activity, but not for terror-related issues.
So it seems highly likely that he — and many others like him — was brainwashed with alarming ease by the Isis criminal underworld and its slick internet recruitment propaganda.
Following the attacks at the Bataclan theatre and other locations in Paris last November, the French authorities finally seemed to wake up to the nightmare on their doorstep — but their response was hardly what the French people might have hoped for.
For example, a programme of 're-education' and 'rehabilitation' was introduced inside the prison system.
However, this softly-softly approach was the equivalent of the UK Government sending in a team of do-gooders to the Maze prison in Belfast at the height of the Troubles, in order to convince the Irish Republican terrorists there that blowing up innocent people really was not a very gentlemanly thing to do.
After the state of emergency was declared following the Paris attacks, there were 3,549 police raids, 407 people were placed under house arrest, 743 arms caches were seized, and 395 arrests were made — while 344 people were placed in detention and a number of mosques were closed.
Chilling
But, again, those statistics, rather than reassuring, perhaps highlight more the terrifying magnitude of the problem. Indeed, they probably represent just the tip of the iceberg that is France's enemy within.
For even in the midst of the crackdown — and during the state of emergency — terror attacks continued, including the stabbing of a policeman at his home, followed by the murder of his wife in front of their three-year-old son.
What is truly chilling is that one of the youths who slaughtered the Catholic priest had already been arrested and jailed for terrorist offences after trying to join Isis in Syria — yet he was still free to roam the streets.
Just as shockingly, the authorities had no inkling of the Nice truck driver's Islamist leanings, even though he was a known criminal.
Alas, as the German government wakes up to its own terrorist horror, it is making all the same mistakes as the French.
The one million-plus young Muslim, mostly male, refugees and economic migrants welcomed into the country last year by Angela Merkel are being placed in their own hostels and housing estates — in some ways the equivalent of the French banlieues — rather than being slowly integrated into German society.
Meanwhile, a much-touted 'five-point plan' for dealing with Islamist prison radicalisation in Germany — similar to the one introduced in France — has been proved to be a useless exercise in wishy-washy liberalism.
What does all this mean for Britain? Are we any safer than France or Germany?
Lessons
The fact that we are outside Europe's border-free Schengen Area, together with our stricter gun laws, makes it harder to possess the sort of assault rifles used in the Paris attacks.
But it's no safeguard against an Isis-inspired lorry driver or a knife-wielding fanatic.
A more important factor in Britain's favour is the extraordinary skill of GCHQ and our security services, and the unusual level of co-operation and information-sharing that exists between them and the police.
This is partly the result of bitter lessons learnt during the Northern Ireland conflict.
Yet it cannot keep us safe for ever. As the UK intelligence services warn of imminent Isis-inspired attacks in Britain, the lessons from Europe are clear.
While clearly distinguishing between the overwhelming majority of British Muslims who loathe Islamic State and the minority of radical Islamists who are inspired by the group, our government must adopt a zero-tolerance policy to anyone expressing any kind of support for terrorism.
But, above all, it must make massive funding to our intelligence services a top priority, so that they can continue to hunt down and incarcerate the many hundreds of Islamists among us who wish to do us harm.
John R. Bradley's latest book is After The Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked The Middle East Revolts.
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