Respectfully, no one says it better than Giulio Meotti, as here on Arutz Sheva.
I’ve read dozens of reports on the rioting in France, but Meotti’s tops them all.
It’s all there in the link I’ve provided. His account is journalistic. Mine is somewhat personal.
The result is the same. France, as French, is teetering toward extinction, due to an uprising from Muslim immigrants who never knew Edith Piaf, as our illegal immigrants never knew Frank Sinatra. This is to say that the mixed multitudes who arrived with the Koran said thank you, France, we accept your hospitality, but want no part of your Equality, Liberty, Fraternity.
They refused to accept French glory, French history, French culture, so every few years, they erupt…this time worse than ever.
For this observer, the sorrow that is France today has roots in the 1940s, June, 22, 1940. That’s when Hitler invaded.
The Jews were on their own. They became prey to be hunted. By the Germans and by the French. Roundups everywhere.
When the Gestapo asked for 10,000, the gendarmes chipped in with 10,000 more…all slated to be gassed. In the end, nearly 80,000 French Jews were so fated.
We…as Mother often said…we were the lucky ones. But not entirely. Some two thirds of her family were wiped out.
Sarah, my sister, remembers it on-the-spot, first-hand, from the family home in Toulouse, which was supposed to be in the Free Zone, but it wasn’t.
Jews were hunted everywhere.
Sarah remembers the day her best friend Incarnaciion called her a dirty Jew, after Hitler and Vichy came to power.
Jews, she remembers, were taken while walking or driving.
“When Father left the house for work,” Sarah says, “imagine Mother’s state of mind. She didn’t know if he’d be back.”
Uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews never did come back.
The French were willing collaborators.
Sarah, Survivor, mother, grandmother, great grandmother of Religious Zionists thriving in Israel, a creative force in music and literature, a Woman of Valor true to her Biblical namesake, still cringes at the mention of France.
I often ask her, “Don’t you ever have warm feelings for France?”
She saw too much.
“Not at all,” she says.
“But Piaf…Charles Boyer…”
“That’s all wonderful when you are over here, not while you were over there” …as she was.
i ask her about Casablanca, that scene where everybody grows tall and gets goosebumps when the lady sings La Marseillaise.
Doesn’t that do something for her?
“Great movie,” she agrees. “But a movie is a movie…and I only love America and Israel. Sing me those anthems.”
“But.” I persist, “the French were not as brutal as the Germans.”
“Yes, they were.”
Not to get overly religious or mystical, but I must ask, is the misery France suffers today a comeuppance for her sins of the past?
Has her cup of iniquities belatedly overflowed?
Jews out, Muslims in, and this is the result.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” A free sample chapter of his gambling thriller, “Compulsive,” is available on his website. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact. Website here
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