Éric Zemmour, writes Dalrymple, is
a ferocious opponent of what he believes to be the creeping Islamisation of France (with the connivance, willing or unwilling, of the political and intellectual elite).
Zemmour has been sacked from the TV programme on which he has appeared for years because of the following remark in response to a question about whether Muslims could or should be deported:
Je sais, c’est irréaliste mais l’histoire est surprenante. Qui aurait dit en 1940 que un million de pieds-noirs, vingt ans plus tard, seraient partis d’Algérie pour revenir en France? Ou bien qu’après la guerre, 5 ou 6 millions d’Allemands auraient abandonné l’Europe centrale et orientale où ils vivaient depuis des siècles?
Éric Zemmour
Dalrymple comments:
While Zemmour (who is of Berber Jewish origin) could claim that he was not actually advocating the kind of violent ethnic cleansing that the pieds-noirs and Germans suffered, his words could certainly be construed as encouraging or at least as wishing it. Nor is it true that his dismissal by the TV station was censorship, as he and many supporters claimed. A man’s right to free speech does not entail the duty of any particular publisher or broadcaster to disseminate his views.
In France, Dalrymple points out,
on the one hand there is a cowardly denial that there is any problem; on the other, more and more people dream of a radical or even brutal solution to it. I am reminded of the description by the Tsarist minister of justice, Ivan Shcheglovitov, of the situation in Russia in 1915: The paralytics of the government are struggling feebly with the epileptics of the revolution.
