France has 15,000 Jihadists - it's official
France has 15,000 Jihadists - it's official

In France there are officially 15,000 citizens under surveillance for Islamic radicalism. It is the shocking discovery, based on government figures, published by the magazine Valeurs Actuelles. A state like Sweden has a smaller official army.

One out of every two young French Muslims is a Salafist of the most radical type.

It is the French mainstream and establishment, not the Jihadists, which must be “de-radicalized”. From its dangerous delusions and suicidal temptations.
It is not a surprise that France’s only Islamic deradicalization centre in Pontourny just shut its doors after less than half the places in the programme were filled. The French Interior Ministry has just announced that the centre will close due to a lack of voluntary participation. Last February, a parliamentary commission found that the French government's flagship program to deradicalize Jihadists is a “total failure”. $42 million  were spent to build 13 centers, one in each of France's metropolitan regions, aimed at deradicalizing would-be Jihadists. The centre in Pontourny employed 27 people at an annual cost of $2.6 million.

It is the French mainstream and establishment, not the Jihadists, which must be “de-radicalized”. From its dangerous delusions and suicidal temptations. In an interview with the magazine L'Obs last June, Sir Salman Rushdie said: “I am in fundamental disagreement with these left-wing people who do everything to dissociate fundamentalism from Islam. Islam has been radicalized for fifty years. When the people of the Islamic State attack, they do it by saying 'Allahu Akbar.' So how can we then say that this has nothing to do with Islam? It must be stopped”.

That is why the de-radicalization program failed. Because Jihad is an integral part of Islam and one third of French Muslims today embrace violent ideas, such as sharia, anti-Semitism and hatred for the “infidels”.

America fought Islamic terror in the Iraqi “Sunni triangle”. Europe's Sunni triangle is made up of the French city of Sevran, the British city of Leeds and the Belgian municipality of Molenbeek. The Algerian writer Boualem Sansal was right when, at the Frankfurt's Book Fair last autumn, he said: "In Europe there is a great evangelization. Not in the name of Christianity, but Islam."