That ought to disprove the notion that Islam is taking over France.
When Michel Houellebecq published Submission a decade ago, while Muslim terrorists were butchering cartoonists, the book’s calm unimpassioned description of France falling under the sway of a Muslim Brotherhood party with the gradual acceptance of the protagonist, a dilettante academic intellectual, who ends the novel by ‘submitting’ and converting to Islam, and the rest of society, French literary circles saw it as both fantastic and unrealistic.
It’s a lot less fantastic now as Houellebecq faces a year in prison.
During the 2022 interview, Houellebecq quipped that “what the native French population, as they say, wants is not for Muslims to assimilate but for them to stop stealing from and attacking them. Or, alternatively, that they leave.” He warned that the situation risked spinning out of control into a cycle of violence.
The Union of Mosques of France filed a complaint, and Houellebecq was dragged into a court and then indicted for “incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence against a group of people on the grounds of origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion.”
If only he had made these remarks about Jews or Christians.
“Michel Houellebecq contests the criminal charge against him. The statements in question do not contain any element of exhortation, even implicit, and therefore fall under the protection of freedom of opinion and expression. A prophet of doom does not wish for misfortune, quite the contrary. His place is not in a courtroom,” his lawyer argued.
Now, Houellebecq, who is 70 years old, may be sentenced to a year in prison.
If a prominent French intellectual is sent to prison for suggesting that Islam is taking over France, that ought to disprove the notion that Islam is taking over France.