Today was the end of France’s official period of mourning for the victims of last week’s Bastille Day truck attack, and there was a memorial service here in Nice attended by socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls and other officials.
Loud praise from the crowd at the memorial service for the first responders was followed by sustained, widespread booing of the prime minister, with calls of “murderer” and “resign”. He’s probably not popular here anyway, since this area is a bastion of the right – Marion Le Pen, niece of National Front leader Marine Le Pen (and more of an American-style conservative than her aunt), won the first round of the election for regional presidency last year, and lost in the end only because the socialist pulled out. But it could be that anger after the third terrorist attack in France in a year and half will be a catalyst for change.
The makeshift memorials that sprang up along the Promenade des Anglais, where the murders took place, certainly didn’t suggest a game-changing level of anger. I saw only a couple of notes that suggested such anger; one read, in French, “May God (the true one) protect our children from these barbaric animals,” while another read “Go to Hell. Daesh, Daesh, f— you.” The rest were all of the “Pray for Nice” variety. (See pictures of the informal memorials at my Instagram feed; the photo below is representative of how flowers were placed over the blood stains all along the promenade.)
I claim no expertise on French politics, but I’m skeptical that any western country has experienced the level of jihadist violence that will galvanize the citizenry to punish the willful blindness of our feckless political class.
One marker that such a change really has occurred would be in immigration policy. The Nice jihadist was an immigrant from Tunisia – a legal resident, but not a French citizen. (He was allowed to settle in France in the first place because he married his cousin, who apparently has French citizenship.) He was also a petty criminal, with repeated brushes with the law, including a conviction for beating a motorist in a road rage incident.
So why was he permitted to continue living in France? Not being a French citizen (and not being from another EU country), France should have expelled him after his first encounter with the law, whether he had jihadi ties or not. All non-citizens are guests, and any deviation from the highest standards of behavior should result in removal.
But of course France has the same problem we do – a post-national elite that will not oppose the anti-national Left in its relentless, ongoing effort to eliminate sovereignty and punish the West for being the West. This lack of civilizational self-confidence is obvious to foreigners; so much so that the Tunisian ambassador felt free to tell French officials that the Tunisian-born, Tunisian-raised, and Tunisian-citizen jihadist should only be referred to as “French” because his “origins are irrelevant.”
Firmness on immigration won’t single-handedly solve our security problems, though it would certainly help. Rather, it’s a leading indicator – when France makes a practice of deporting non-citizen criminals, and when we start sanctioning countries that won’t take their own citizens back, only then will I believe that we’re starting to regain the confidence needed for our civilization to defend itself.