Last Friday it was enough to go to Le Pontet, 17,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Avignon. The stadium fills up, in a phenomenal time lapse that says a lot, if not all, about how one religion falls and another takes its place. It is the great Islamic prayer that marks the end of Ramadan.
Avignon, the “city of the Popes”, in the Paris Match investigation today has become "the city of the Salafis". “Most of the passers-by look alike, black veils for women, baggy afghan pants for men,” says Paris Match. “Most of them wear the believer's beard, long and sometimes dyed with henna, as in the time of the Prophet. It seems to go back fourteen centuries. Gender segregation is respected: hairdressers for women, inaccessible to men; bars full of men, inaccessible to women. They serve coffee, tea, lemonade... Everything, except alcohol. It is a mini-Islamic republic”.
And the Wiesenthal Center also wonders if the former city of the Popes and of Christianity has not become a "centre of radical Islam".
It does not only concern cities like Sarcelles, where the former mayor (of the left) Francois Pupponi has just said: "The Great Replacement exists: today's population is not the same as yesterday".
In Sarcelles, north of Paris, a 15-year-old girl returns home from high school. She wears a Star of David pendant. A man armed with a knife attacks her, cuts her face and runs away. Also in Sarcelles, an eight-year-old boy wearing a kippah was kicked and punched. We are in one of “Les émirats de la République”, the emirates of the Republic, from the title of Pupponi's book.
Islam is changing the face of the entire French countryside. In Auzat, a village of 565 inhabitants on the border with Spain and Andorra, there is a mosque. As in Niederhaslach (1,400 inhabitants). And in Docelles (953 inhabitants), in Loupershouse (966 inhabitants) and Saint-Jean-Rohrbach (1,021 inhabitants).
But it is also happening in Italy, albeit twenty years later. In Brescia in recent days (the bishop and mayor were also present), thousands of Muslim faithful celebrated the end of Ramadan at the Brixia Forum. And in Spain, says an Iberian journalist in First Things in March, "there has been a 22 percent increase in mosques in just six months".
Le Figaro takes us to a stadium in Saint-Denis, where there is the basilica of the kings and where Charles Martel rests, the one who rejected the Moors: “Yellow vest over the djellaba, Mehdi leads the faithful. 'Salam alekum! Here the men! There the women!' From 7:45 on Friday, a growing stream of Muslim worshipers, carpet under arm, thronged the entrance to the Landy stadium in Saint-Denis. The city has authorized the use of this outdoor venue, adjacent to the Stade de France, for Eid el-Fitr."
"Men, women, children and prams arrive in party clothes, djellabas and hijabs. The stadium fills up before prayers, scheduled for 9am. Explains Amar, the secretary of the association that manages the mosque, 'it's nothing compared to the Delaune stadium. Four kilometers further on, it welcomes 7,000 worshipers every year for Eid el-Fitr'. As in the mosque, the men in front, the women behind. 'Next year there will be even more people, this is the price of success', assures a volunteer".
At the same time, the same scene in Arles in Provence. And throughout the rest of the country.
By the day it is more and more evident that the “game over” declaration in Western Europe is ahead of us. The cause, however, is not the mass colonization of Western Europe, which has escalated several marches in recent years. The main cause is the rejection by the ruling elites of the values on which Western civilization was founded. Western elites have been quietly working to abolish Western civilization since the mid-1960s. Europeans were encouraged in every possible way not to have children, then immigration was forced upon them as necessary due to the collapse of the birth rate in Europe.
"Europe is one step away from Islamic globalisation," said the great Algerian writer Boualem Sansal to L'Incorrect magazine this week, suggesting that France add green (the color of Islam) to its flag. “Saudis and Qataris think big and far, Europeans think small and short-term. Islam is divine, victorious, it came to Islamize and abolish, not to negotiate truces, but to forcefully implement the four commandments of Allah: unite the community, enlarge the house of Islam, fight the unbelievers and establish the Sharia. Islamism thrives, it's everywhere, even where you can't see it. It's a deadly pollution, it's in the air and in the wifi that the winds of venality, resignation and the woke push in the right directions”.
I'm back from a long tour in France, where I haven't been since before Covid. The country is won over. It does not seem to interest anyone - except a few isolated intellectuals. As if there weren't even a people anymore, as well as an identity, culture and religion. Visiting the Notre Dame construction site, one feels a sense of estrangement even from those sad ruins. Now they are making it a “green area”. And a large country is transformed, as Alain Finkielkraut writes, into an "airport" for tourists and migrants.
Is this the fate of the peoples of Europe? I want to leave. But to where?
Giulio Meotti is an Italian (non-Jewish pro-Israel) journalist with Il Foglio and writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author, in English, of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of "J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel" published by Mantua Books, in addition to books in Italian. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Gatestone, Frontpage and Commentary.