War

THE Pope concludes his encyclical Fratelli tutti by acknowledging that “war is not a ghost from the past but a constant threat.” (no. 256) In other words, the encyclical Pacem in Terris, of April 11, 1963, has not ‘yet’ borne its expected fruit. This does not prevent Pope Francis from persevering in denial: “In the words of Saint John XXIII: ‘it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice’!” (no. 260)

He should go explain that to Erdogan, who is creating a multiplicity of hotbeds for a general conflagration in the Mediterranean. “Syria, Libya, Eastern Mediterranean, Greece, Cyprus, Caucasus... Since the beginning, the Turkish president has been playing the role of a pyromaniac fireman, lighting a new fire as soon as another begins to die down.” (Le Figaro, Monday, October 12).

To what end? “The cursor is obviously set on the presidential election of 2023, which he wants to win at all costs.” There, however, is more to it than that.

Last October 16, Samuel Paty was savagely murdered by ‘decapitation,’ i.e., by ritual slaughter, in other words, as a human sacrifice offered to ʾAllāh ʾAkbar, by Abdullakh Anzorov, a young Russian refugee from Chechnya, for having presented two satirical caricatures of ‘Muḥammad,’ the same ones that were printed in Charlie Hebdo● in 2015, to his Grade 8 students, during a class on freedom of expression. The Chechen was immediately shot dead by the police. A judicial investigation has been opened for complicity in a terrorist assassination. Among the seven accused is the Muslim father of a pupil who had filed a complaint and at the same time conducted a campaign on social networks against the teacher. It was this campaign that allegedly incited this young Muslim Chechen living with his family in Evreux to act: he bought a knife, went to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine and assassinated the teacher after paying two schoolchildren to point him out.

“This time no one can come tell us that he fell victim by chance, for no reason, to an attack of a ‘mentally disturbed person!’ ” writes Alexis Brézet, director of Le Figaro publishing house. “On the contrary: everything in the days preceding the crime seems to lead to this tragedy. For a fortnight, Samuel Paty was the object of a methodically contrived, carefully organised cabal. Islamist militants targeted, persecuted and slandered him. Among them was a ‘parent of a pupil,’ but also an Islamist activist, with an S File●, member of a ‘council of imams of France.’ ”

So it is clear. This crime perpetrated by a Muslim was committed for a religious motive by practicing this appalling Islamic ritual of slitting the throat, and is in line with the series of attacks perpetrated on our territory since 2012. The difference this time, however, is that the Muslims in question attacked the Republic’s cherished institution, its true powerful arm, that is to say this so-called National Education which receives the biggest slice of the national budget. It found nothing better, in the framework of a moral and civic education course, than to talk about Islam to young teenagers by presenting them these caricatures that are quite simply obscene.

This attack was committed two weeks after a speech that Emmanuel Macron delivered at Les Mureaux, announcing the discussion, in the coming weeks, of a bill to fight against ‘separatism’: “What we must tackle is Islamist separatism. It is a conscious, theorised, politico-religious project, which is materialised by repeated deviations from the values of the Republic, which often results in the constitution of a counter-society. It is manifested by removing children from school, developing ethnic sports and cultural practices that are the pretext for teaching principles that do not conform to the laws of the Republic. It is indoctrination and, through it, the negation of our principles, equality between women and men, human dignity.”

“Islamist separatism!’ How elegantly these things are said! For “what exactly does the word ‘separatism’ mean?” asks Alexis Brézet in the October 19 edition of Le Figaro. “The executioner of Samuel Paty and the Islamist militants, who created the conditions for his act,” he writes, “have no dream of building their Islamic society next to our Republic, they have the project of replacing it, territory after territory, with a ‘pure’ regime governed by the shariʽa! Islamists are not separatists, they are conquerors.”

That is the right word! For 14 centuries it has characterised the Qurʾānic religion itself, in its essence. For, whatever is said and done, Islam pretends to planetary religious and political supremacy, based on a supposed divine revelation that would be its own, that of the Qurʾān revealed to Muḥammad by the angel Gabriel.

I have established in my scientific translation of the first sūrahs of the Qurʾān that instead of being a divine revelation, this ‘religion’ is the figment of the pretence of a man. Father de Nantes regarded him as “a large-tented Himyarite,” a religious genius and a powerful man of action. He sought to return, upstream from Christianity and Judaism, to find the “perfect” religion of Abraham, according to the words: “Be perfect!” (Gn 17:2) that God addressed to the patriarch. This man, the author of the Qurʾān, repeats these words but sets them against the Jews and the Christians.

This is the true translation of the word ʾislam, which does not mean “submission” but “perfection” according to the meaning of the Hebraic root šālam “accomplished, perfect.” ʾIslam is nothing less than the perfection of the religion ordained by God and the “fulfilment” of what the ‘Torah’ and the ‘Gospel’ proclaimed!

Such is the theme of the Qurʾān. This thought blurs the distinction between the Old and New Testaments, a source of inexpiable conflicts, and devolves the religion of Abraham, Moses and Jesus (a simple successor of Moses), to the children of Ishmael, the Arabs, by virtue of the author’s astonishing assertion that before Moses who gave the Law to the children of Israel, before Jesus Christ, a simple prophet and Moses’ successor, God had made a Covenant with Abraham… and Ishmael, the eponymous ancestor of the Arabs (Q 2:125)! From that day down to the present, the Qurʾān thus equally disconsiders Jews and Christians whom it dooms to hellfire for having introduced in Scripture, after the time of Abraham, “changes” to his primitive “perfection.” The former did so by taking advantage of the tradition of Moses, the latter by affirming that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

The author denies bringing or even receiving a new revelation. Yet, he cleverly breaks the whole mainspring of Sacred History by effacing the exclusivity of the Covenant that God made with Abraham and Isaac, the election of the People of Israel, leading him to the obstinate negation of the Messianic dignity and divinity of Jesus Christ. The author, for whom Jesus is only a ‘precursor,’ considers himself to be the true “Beloved,” according to the exact translation of the word muḥammadun. He was raised up by “the God” to put an end to this quarrel that had been opposing Christians and Jews for six hundred years and finally to re-establish this initial “perfect” religion in Jerusalem (!) by conquering it from the Byzantine Christians! This is the origin of the jiḥad, which designates the action of “gathering into [armed] bands,” according to the meaning of the Hebrew gūd (Gn 49:19 and the series of alliterations derived from this word to evoke precisely the Arab incursions against the tribe of Gad installed in Transjordan), to go up to the conquest of Jerusalem.

Muslims have lost the understanding of the origins of their religion, of this brilliant and profoundly antichristic intention that I expound in the three volumes of my translation. Thus, one hundred and fifty years after the founding events, a whole legend with an alleged revelation of the Qurʾān brought from Heaven to the Prophet Muḥammad by the angel Gabriel, had replaced the historical fact

Nevertheless, even thus distorted by the Sīrah, the later Muslim “legend” remains what is essential. It is drawn from the one divine revelation and gives Islam its permanent value and spiritual strength: monotheism, submission of man to the moral law, to the divine Decree, the expectation of judgement and future life, all presented in a prophetic spirit, also taken from the one biblical revelation.

On this basis, the Qurʾān divides the human race into two categories: the “faithful” who have embraced the “perfect religion” and the “apostates:” Jews and Christians against whom war is inexpiable. Islam, against Christianity, aims at dominating the universe by alternations of victories and defeats, interrupted by truces that are mutually agreed to in order to ensure commercial interests. The goal, however, remains and will always remain the same: its definitive victory by exterminating or enslaving the “apostates,” unless they convert to Islam, which is already under way for many people.

We have the painful example of Sophie Pétronin, a French woman held hostage in the Sahel for three years by a jiḥadist group. She has just been freed in return for a ransom and the release of more than two hundred jiḥadists, an agreement negotiated by the new authorities in Bamako under the nose of our military forces deployed in the region. Pétronin found nothing better to do than to take advantage of this detention to make “a spiritual retreat” and convert to Islam! This was undoubtedly the price she had to pay to save her head, as it may be the case for many French people in the not too distant future.

France is not a racist country as our Father has always explained. “Throughout the centuries, barbarians came, many foreigners set foot on, occupied its soil, people have found here the refuge that they were seeking, the work that they needed, the homeland of their mind and heart; they became French. Our country, our people assimilated a good many barbarian hordes and captivated scores of great foreigners who enriched them with their blood, their works, their genius. Others, unassimilated, unable to be assimilated, camped and still camp today on its soil, who must be wisely converted, conquered or expelled.” (CRC no. 198, March 1984)

It must, however, be said that from the 1970s onwards, France has experienced unprecedented migratory movements in order to compensate for the manpower that industry was lacking at the time. These movements became more pronounced in 1975 by decision of the Council of State to cancel a ministerial circular of 1972 which until then had made the entry and residence in France of immigrants conditional on obtaining work and housing. From 1975 onwards, the government was paralysed in the name of human rights in its ability to regulate migratory flows according to the economic needs of the country; any restriction on the arrival of foreign populations was henceforth interpreted as an act of racism, which was an attack on human dignity and the freedom to come and go. The situation only continued to worsen in the 1980s, when Julien Dray, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Harlem Désir founded this particularly active association of “SOS Racism.”

“A new generation of anti-racism is emerging,” we read in the February-March 2020 issue of Valeurs Actuelles, “which conceals a genuine project for a society in which the migrant – the Muslim in particular – ceases to be ‘a worker looking for work’ and becomes a ‘victim.’ In the name of the ‘rights’ of this victim, anti-racism will then reshape French society. French society, which professes that attachment to the nation takes precedence over all other considerations, is gradually giving way to another society, where not only ethnicity is taken into account, but where ethnicity generates ‘rights’. The trap closes and, very quickly, the problem of Islamism is emerging under the issue of immigration.”

The facts, the dates, as they are presented to us here, are perfectly accurate and are even common sense, but the analysis is nevertheless insufficient since it avoids an essential issue, one that cannot be circumvented without the risk of a deadlock. It is the very position in which our republican institutions find themselves today.

The rights of immigrants, the rights claimed by Muslims as such are nothing other than the human rights, according to which our republican institutions are organised, all of them responsible for applying and enforcing them, and if necessary by sanctioning each other. For no law, no regulatory text, no administrative decision, no judicial decision can be taken or handed down in disregard of these rights recognised to all in theory, although impossible to apply to everyone in practice.

Now, as Father de Nantes explained to us so clearly, these rights of man make each individual or “person” an autonomous subject endowed with absolute rights that are antagonistic to one another and towards authority. They establish the “person” as the origin and the very principle of all sovereignty, all authority and all law. Consequently, they are by definition subversive of all human order. It is in the name of the rights of man… and of woman that henceforth the relationships between husband and wife are based on a strict equality of rights. This equality leads to the annihilation of the father’s authority as head of the family and thus to the systematic ‘atomisation’ of the family, although it is the indispensable basic unit of all life in society.

They are also subversive of all political and social order. It was in the name of the rights of man that the Revolution brought an end to the Christian Ancien Régime through the “decapitation” – it is true that the guillotine was a more civilised means than a simple knife – of the king and the queen and of all the “enemies of the people.” It was in the name of the rights of man that the Revolutionary Days of July 27, 28 and 29, 1830 took place, causing several hundred deaths, provoking Charles X’s abdication and the abolition of sacral power in France. It was in the name of the rights of man that the Army, the Ministry of Justice and finally the whole nation were asked to kneel down as being responsible for the condemnation of Alfred Dreyfus, who was allegedly innocent of the crime of treason.

It was in the name of the rights of man that Marshal Petain’s national salvation government was annihilated through the purges, condemnations and assassinations of tens of thousands of Frenchmen who thus paid for the ‘crime’ of loyalty to the Marshal and the French State. It was in the name of the rights of man that, in keeping with the purest tradition of Dreyfus’ supporters, the French army, at the height of the war against FLN terrorism in Algiers in 1957, was put through a violent campaign of denigration of its methods and actions, a prelude to the abandonment of Algeria in 1962.

This brief evocation of our contemporary history shows that the rights of man are an infernal machine designed to contest every form of subjection, every hierarchy, and all order. This is so to such a degree that Father de Nantes did not fear to say that “a thousandfold more crimes have been committed in this country in the name of human rights than were ever committed for reasons of State and for the sake of public security!” (The Urgency of A Political Order, CCR no. 164, p. 10)

Since the rights of man subvert every human and political order, they pursue no goal other than that of “écraser l’infâme” (‘crushing the Infamous One,’ an appalling expression whereby Voltaire incited revolt against Our Lord,) of “substituting any idol whatever, for Jesus Christ the King of the world and sovereign Legislator, Who must not be allowed to appear as conqueror in any way at all. The best idol for the world’s ruin in the impiety of the great Apostasy remains, in the eyes of man (and of woman), their own fantastic image: Man, Woman, ‘like gods’” (Gn3:5).”

Hence the dictatorship in the name of human rights that this obsessive and sectarian secularism of our republican institutions exercises to systematically, fundamentally, radically prohibit the Catholic religion, the Church, from having any influence in the public, political and social life of France. In the name of this secularism, at the end of the 19^th century, the Republic launched a violent persecution against the religious of France to the point of excluding them from schools and all the works they provided, expelling them from the national territory, despoiling the churches, and finally adopting the law of separation of Church and State, with this declared will of destroying and effacing the slightest vestige of the social reign of Jesus Christ, Who is driven into the depths of the individual conscience.

It was a total success owing to both the ‘Ralliement’ in 1892 and the declaration Dignitatis Humanae adopted in 1965. First, by the ‘Ralliement’ ordered by Leo XIII, French Catholics became subservient to the Republic, due to the servility and cowardice of our French bishops who were far from taking Bishop Freppel as a model. Then, in the declaration Dignitatis Humanae the Church asked States to apply to her nothing more than the social right to freedom of religion that she herself had recognised at the Second Vatican Council for all religions or irreligions.

The Church has thus retreated, and today she is happy to have done so! Religion, however, has lost out and as a result, fraternal charity has waned; our French nation has lost its vitality. In 1940, our disaster indeed sanctioned a blatant political and military unpreparedness. More profoundly though, since “the spirit of pleasure had prevailed over the spirit of self-sacrifice,” the people of France were not ready to make the sacrifices that the French soldiers of the Great War had been able to make twenty years earlier. There followed the abandonment of the land, the betrayal of the Community of Algeria. Metropolitan Frenchmen preferred to vote ‘Yes’ in the referendum on self-determination so as not to have to defend their brothers who were victims of the cutthroats there.

“No!” Following Charles de Gaulle, they preferred to turn towards a Europe for business and to devote themselves to this liberal economy that ensured the country’s pervasive material success. Everyone benefited, of course, but this materialism ended up depriving France of its Catholic religion, the source of its military heroism, civic mindedness, national fraternity, that sense of community. These numerous strengths and virtues, which could have served to confront the religious problem that Islam poses today and that is thwarting the Republic divided against itself, have been lost.

What is the problem that this religion is posing today?

There is so much confusion in people’s minds that it is impossible to answer this question without possessing the three keys below.

The first is that all subjects related to immigration, security, or religion are formidable electoral springboards. Father de Nantes constantly reminded us of this with very great insistence. It is because many of his readers and friends did not want to understand this obvious fact that our Father had to resolve to dissolve the Phalange in 1988. Every politician, every elected representative who is supposed to understand these questions and provide solutions for them knows that by taking a public stand, either for or against, on such matters, he is going to inflame and exacerbate the democratic passion of the French electorate. He himself may be hostage to his own passions or ideologies. Moreover, the media and advocacy groups of all kinds repeatedly amplify this phenomenon to which the same elected representatives and political leaders are constantly enslaved. So everything we can hear or read on these subjects is, in any case, always biased.

The second key: in the name of the principle of secularism, our ‘democratic’ institutions make a point of intervening in the religious domains that they want to control and dominate, while claiming to ostensibly ignore the content, value and truth of religious doctrines. Yet how can a question be seriously treated by limiting oneself to its form, to secondary concerns, without taking any interest in its substance, in principal matters? It is contradictory and it is a case of genuine insanity. The Besançon Criminal Court has just sentenced four Bosnian Muslims for beating and shaving bald their daughter and niece who wanted to marry a young Christian Serb. The October 24 issue of Le Figaro comments: “There is only one point from medieval tradition to intra-family violence that was overlooked on Friday: the religious reason for the parents’ anger, even though Selma [the victim] said it was motivated by religion. ‘The question is not religion,” the president of the Tribunal said, ‘but how Selma was shaved and by whom.’ ” No comment!

The third key: this ‘neutrality,’ so contradictory and equivocal, hardly conceals an unshakable bias that the Good God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, does not exist, nor do all the political, economic, social, scientific, philosophical, religious, cultural and other consequences that such a profession of irreligion implies. Moreover, this neutrality is always insidiously practised to the advantage of Islam. This religion represents not only an electoral reservoir that it would be a pity to neglect, but above all a choice ally for the establishment in France of a multicultural society and no longer a Christian one, or even a war machine against the Church. For, the Catholic religion, Catholic nationalism in all its forms were, are and always will be the only real declared adversaries of the Republic, which thus deliberately deprives itself of the superior lights of faith on all the human activities it is supposed to organise.

On September 8, 2020, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, the new environmentalist mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, breaking with a tradition that most of his predecessors had honoured, refused to go to the basilica of Fourvière to take part in the ceremony to renew the Vow that the Aldermen had made on March 12, 1643 to ward off a plague epidemic. The alleged motive was the principle of secularism. This principle did not prevent him, the very next day, from heading to Gerland to lay the first stone of a new mosque. The former capital of the Gauls already has fifteen mosques and other places for Muslim prayer!

On January 12, 2015, the day after the attacks committed in the name of Islam on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher, Christiane Taubira, the French Minister of Justice, flew to the assistance of this religion, which had nevertheless just terrorised the whole of France, by enjoining all public prosecutors to “fight with the greatest vigour any reprehensible, hateful or contemptuous words or actions, uttered or committed on account of religious affiliation.” So if Emmanuel Macron has announced that in order to fight ‘Islamist separatism,’ at the beginning of the next school year, he will abolish home schooling for children, this is no reason for peaceful Catholic families who want to protect their children from the intrusion of the National Education system to be too quick to take fresh heart: this general and arbitrary ban concerns them just as much. If they venture to defy it, the label ‘sectarian aberration’ will be immediately tagged to their reputation.

That being said, we are now free to present the full truth about the problem raised today in France by Islam.

As we have studied and scientifically demonstrated, Islam, in the very essence of its doctrine, was, from its beginnings, a religion of conquest and has remained so to this day. It considers to the point of fanaticism that the ‘Muḥammad’ of the legend is the prophet of “the God.” (the exact translation of the name of ʾAllāh), that the Qurʾān is a revealed Book, making manifest the falsity of the other religions that must be annihilated for the good of humanity, out of obedience to “the God.” From a religious point of view, this religion logically considers that all human activities, be they family, material, political, economic or other, must be dominated by the will of its God. Integrist, totalitarian, fanatical, there is no possible way of coming to an understanding with this religion and paradoxically this is precisely what gives it all its strength. Therefore, the distinction between ‘moderate Islam’ and ‘radical Islam’ exists only in the minds of apostate Christians, who love comfort, hygiene and ‘security,’ who do not know the Qurʾān and who, in the end, prefer to remain in the illusion, in that false spirit of tolerance that the ideology of human rights and the transcendent dignity of the human person gives them.

“The important thing,” Father de Nantes wrote, “is not the dignity of the person and the recognition of individual rights, which are decadent Western concepts! The important thing in Islam is the community that subsists and feels strong, capable of fighting, dominating, conquering and moving forward. “Holy war,” therefore, is a vital imperative in Islam and it is conceived as a fight for the Muslim fraternity rather than as a fight for the Kingdom of God.” (CCR n° 125, August 1980) This is why Pope Francis was able to sign with the Imam of El-Ahzar a joint declaration on the theme of the "Fraternity" which is dear to him, Fratelli tutti!

If a distinction can be made, however, it is between Islam and Muslims and among Muslims themselves. Highly divided and with great disparities among them, many are far from practising their religion fanatically and desire only to live in peace. This is obvious.

It is equally obvious that many of them are under the domination of jiḥadist press-ganging or are close to becoming one and therefore represent a real danger to order and peace in our country. These, by all means, like wild beasts, must be hunted down and definitively ‘neutralised.’ It is a matter of life and death.

Between these two extreme situations, many Muslims are imposing themselves as such, de facto and de jure, in a more or less spirit of conquest of French society. This involves the creation of mosques and places of prayer, conspicuous wearing of Islamic clothing such as the veil, the burkini, respect of diets, creation of Qurʾānic schools, teaching of languages and cultures of origin, etc. The institutions of the Republic are now reacting without a common plan of action, some oppose these repeated attacks on the ‘principle’ of secularism, others on the contrary accept these Muslim advances in our French landscape in the name of the right to asylum, freedom of conscience, religious freedom, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to be different, in short, in the name of human rights.

This is what Valeurs Actuelles noted in its February-March issue of this year: “beneath these supreme references to French law, there are schools, universities and a whole galaxy of associations, organisations, monitoring centres, committees, high councils such as the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (French broadcasting regulatory body), the Caisse nationale d’allocations familiales (the ‘family branch’ of the French social security system), Family Planning, the International League against Racism and Antisemitism, the League for Human Rights, the Movement against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples, etc. A whole ecosystem has been working, year after year, to attack relentlessly the national body to drive in the Islamist splinter more and more deeply, durably, irremediably.”

What does Emmanuel Macron who has decided to wage war against what he calls ‘Islamist communitarianism,’ ‘political Islamism’ have to propose? He recommends a ‘republican reconquest,’ secularism! Yet “when are we going to understand that Islam proposes a universalism more complete and more powerful than ours?” Valeurs Actuelles comments, “Muslims could not care less about the Republic. Actually, it is France that should be proposed. This France that has been unravelled, decomposed, eviscerated, and of which so little remains today.”

This common sense reflection allows us to present three conclusions.

Firstly, propose France to Muslims. Yes, indeed, but a France liberated from the Republic. This is the necessary condition, failing which there is no solution. The Republic has nothing, absolutely nothing to offer Muslims to nourish their hearts and minds. It only has its irreligion and its individualistic materialism that the Muslims deeply despise, even if they know how to take advantage of them. A Republic, that henceforth is going to generalise the diffusion of cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo in the name of a crazy ‘sacrosanct freedom of all opinion’ by order of Emmanuel Macron is a real call for civil and religious war that falls under criminal irresponsibility.

For “the rule of law,” i.e., respect for the hierarchy of norms, and therefore, taken to the extreme, respect for the fundamental rights of the individual to the detriment of the good of the national community, is nothing other than an admission of the impotence of republican institutions in the face of the conquering spirit of Islam. “Islamists benefit more widely from a climate in our societies that can be summed up in the word weakness. The flaws in liberal democracies, particularly legal ones, are just one expression among others of this climate of weakness,” Le Figaro writes in its October 26 issue. Absolutely not! It is the Republic as a whole that is defective, by definition, by essence, and we must get rid of it in order to attack the root of the evil, so that a power of a dictatorial, even royal, sacral nature, can in all circumstances ensure the order and peace of the nation, and thus really give our political institutions a superiority and a strength that is recognised and respected by the Muslim populations in France.

Secondly, the overthrow of the Republic would give back to the Church its civilising mission of restoring and strengthening the thousands of bonds linking human communities, the most perfected of which is the nation, by irrigating them with the supernatural charity that is their only source. It is through the superiority of our Christian civilisation that we will win the hearts of Muslims, first of all to aggregate their communities to our French national community, and then to convert them to our holy religion. In the meantime, the Republic refuses to come to an agreement with the Church to fight against the rise of Islam. The betrayal is obvious. Yet the people who are ready to cross swords with the religion of the Qurʾān do not realise it!

Hence the importance, for us Phalangists, to know our doctrine of the 150 Points that Father de Nantes left us in order to ‘hold firm’; because, thirdly, in the present state of affairs, I can do no better than to repeat the last words that our Father pronounced at the end of a lecture, on April 17, 1986, and which are more topical than ever: “Islam is becoming the obligatory truth, otherwise there is always the threat. Islam is advancing because of this threat. I think that if we do not change, if we do not return to a true Catholic religion of the Syllabus, with a monarchic society, an authoritarian society of a Very Christian King, of a Catholic dictator, we will be eaten alive one after the other, by terror and then by the seduction of the masses. Our country will become a Muslim country!”

In the meantime, France has the Muslim world unanimously against it, because of this alleged right to caricature and blaspheme that Emmanuel Macron is defending. Like Daladier in 1939, he is throwing us into war without having prepared it.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh, several thousand demonstrators gathered in the vicinity of the French embassy at the call of Islam Andolan Bangladesh (IAB), one of the main Islamist parties in Bangladesh. “We Muslims have never caricatured other religions,” said Rezaul Karim, one of the leaders of the IAB. “I call on all Muslims around the world to boycott French products. We will teach them a lesson,” he promised. In the crowd, a portrait of Emmanuel Macron accused of “worshipping Satan” was burned. In Syria, the Gaza Strip and Libya, portraits of the French president were also burned. In Pakistan, our ambassador was summoned. Iran is also stirring up anger in the streets while in other countries such as Morocco or Jordan, the tone is more moderate, but it was still necessary for them to give a little set piece to condemn the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

The most worrying was a communiqué from the thabat agency, close to the Al-Quaida organisation, published on October 25, advising individuals to committing acts of jiḥad with knives, targeting in particular churches and symbols of Christianity. The threat was taken very seriously by the Interior Ministry. On Friday, October 30, a Tunisian migrant who had transited through the island of Lampedusa so dear to the heart of Pope Francis slaughtered three innocent Catholics in the Basilica of Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in Nice according to the Islamic ritual, to the cry of “ʾAllāh ʾAkbar.” On the same day, the police services were able to narrowly thwart similar tragedies in Lyon and Avignon.

As might be expected, it is Turkey that is making the most of this affair. This country has been governed since 2003 by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, first as Prime Minister then as Head of State. He is very close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s secular Turkey has considerably changed, since the time of its founder.

“It is no longer this rudimentary country with an uncertain identity on the fringes of Europe,” Tancrède Josseran writes in the October-November 2020 issue of Le Figaro Histoire. With 83 million inhabitants, it surpasses Germany. It is the world’s sixteenth largest economic power and is asserting itself. It is not asking for a place of honour in the West, it wants to be recognised for what it is, i.e., a rising power. This is the meaning that is being conveyed by the transformation of the Basilica of Saint Sophia into a mosque, as well as that of the Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, one of the most beautiful churches of Istanbul, announced by Erdogan on August 21.”

This movement of Islamisation on the part of Turkey concerns both its own territory and ours. The 2018 report of the Direction générale de la sécurité intérieure (DGSI) [The General Directorate for Internal Security is a French intelligence agency that reports directly to the Ministry of the Interior] clearly highlights Turkey’s intention to use Islam in its geostrategic vision, notably through its emigrants who have settled in various European countries, including France, in competition with Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the Maghreb countries. This report lists two very active structures on our territory. First of all the DITIB, an emanation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whose object is the Islamisation of the Turkish diasporas, by federating them, by teaching them the precepts of the Qurʾān, through cultural and cultual organisations, by organising the pilgrimage to Mecca, etc. The DITIB manages more than half of the Turkish mosques and prayer halls in Europe and controls in France nearly half of the imams that foreign countries send to and employ in our country.

Another structure is the Milis Görüs, close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its essential role is to construct mosques. The DGSI notes in its report: “A particularly dominant movement in the influence of Turkish Islam in France and in Europe. It conveys values such as anti-Westernism, anti-Masonry and the refusal of secularism, notably by wanting to make women wear the veil, even in schools. Its logo is very explicit from this point of view: it represents a Europe surrounded by an Islamic crescent.”

Tancrède Josseran continues: “Through Islam, Turkey is reassuming its fundamental nature and its global vocation, and this observation sweeps away political divisions. Kemalists, Islamists, conservatives and nationalists are unanimous: the planet is moving towards a post-Western order and Turkey must find its place in it. As a result, the legal frameworks established in the aftermath of the First World War are considered outdated. If the Treaty of Lausanne recognised Turkey’s independence, it was, by Erdogan’s own admission, a Turkey reduced to the minimum: ‘Someone [alluding to Mustapha Kemal without naming him] tried to make us swallow Lausanne as though it were a victory. That is not obvious. Look at the Aegean Sea right now. We abandoned the islands at Lausanne. Is that a victory?’ ”

Hence the conflict over the islands of the Aegean Sea, which represent for Greece its first and last line of defence and for Turkey the risk of being cornered at the eastern end of the Mediterranean by application of the Montego Bay Convention, which since 1982 has allowed any country to extend its territorial waters to 12 nautical miles (22 km). It is this same convention, to which Turkey is not a signatory, that created and granted to all coastal States the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) that are at the heart of current tensions in the eastern Mediterranean. “By encroaching on Greece’s exclusive zone, the Memorandum of Understanding that Turkey unilaterally signed with Libya in November 2019 defends an arbitrary vision of its own exclusive zone. This implies confrontation with Athens and Nicosia who claim the same waters.” (ibid.) What is ultimately at stake is none other than the control of the maritime routes, the wealth that transits through them and the right to exploit the energy wealth that the Eastern Mediterranean contains. We will not insist since we have already dealt with this geostrategic challenge in which France has a role to play. (cf. Il est ressuscité n°214, October 2020, p. 7).

It is the war in Syria, with which Turkey shares a border of more than 800 kilometres, that has disorganised Turkey’s agenda: after banking, in vain, on the fall of Bashar al-Assad, Ankara has gradually reoriented its policy towards a military campaign concentrated on the Kurdish militias of Iraq and Northern Syria, accused of collusion with the Turkish separatist guerrilla army that calls itself the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK. This offensive accelerated after the abortive coup of 2016: in the space of four years, the Turkish army carried out three military incursions into Syria, supported by Syrian auxiliaries. “Today, we are witnessing a much less idealistic policy based on the defence of Turkey’s strategic interests, which is proving to be much more offensive on a regional level,” notes Jean Marcou, a specialist in contemporary Turkey.

It entered a new phase in the spring of 2020 with its intervention in Libya. By flying militarily to the assistance of Fayez al-Sarraj, the head of Tripoli’s government of national unity, opposing General Haftar, Turkey showed that it is capable of asserting itself militarily beyond simple cross-border operations.

In short, Turkey is everywhere. As for the ultimate goal, Erdogan does not conceal it: “A century later, the caliphate must be re-established,” he has declared.

“This re-establishment of the Caliphate,” writes Alexandre del Valle, a specialist in geopolitics and author of a book on the Muslim Brotherhood, “will, in my opinion, be done gradually, through flexible institutions, a Turkish neo-Ottoman leadership, diplomatic pressure and projects of pan-Islamic political, socio-cultural, religious-theological, educational and even economic and strategic solidarity (establishment of Turkish companies and military bases in full expansion in the Gulf and in Africa, etc.).”

Is this the case in the South Caucasus, beset by a conflict of great intensity between two former Soviet republics?

According to international law, the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, south of the Caucasus Mountains, north-west of Iran, north-east of Turkey, belongs to Azerbaijan. In reality, however, this enclave in the middle of Azeri territory is Armenian by its history, its culture, its population and above all its religion. It is a very ancient land of Christianity, mainly dependent on the Armenian Apostolic Church, which has been schismatic since the 5^th century. Due to its geographical location, the Nagorno-Karabakh plateau, like the Yerevan region, has been invaded by Assyrians, Scythians, Medes, Babylonians, Parthians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and Russians. The Armenian identity was forged by this sometimes heroic opposition to these invaders. For the Armenians, Nagorno-Karabakh, often the first bulwark against enemies coming from Asia, a sacred land if ever there was one, is the equivalent of Kosovo for the Serbs.

Wrestled from Persian domination by the Russians in the nineteenth century, Stalin, certainly in a spirit of division of the Armenian people, attached this Christian land to the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, which was populated mainly by Shiite Turkish speakers. He thus prepared the conditions for an inevitable war that broke out as soon as the first signs of the loosening of the Soviet stranglehold appeared, in 1988, under the auspices of Perestroika. Nagorno-Karabakh then rose up against Baku to join Yerevan. This conflict became more intense with the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

Despite the creation in 1992, within the framework of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of the Minsk Group co-chaired by France, Russia and the United States, and tasked with reaching a peaceful and negotiated resolution to the conflict, the fighting resulted in nearly 30,000 deaths. It ended in 1994 with a fragile military victory for Nagorno-Karabakh, which then proclaimed itself an independent republic, but without international recognition. The military victory was all the more fragile as Nagorno-Karabakh conquered territories as a buffer zone from the opposing side. Since 1994, the recovery of its lost territories as well as the recovery of its sovereignty over the Nagorno-Karabakh plateau has been a national cause for Azerbaijan. Hence the endless sporadic conflicts.

On last September 27, Baku’s army launched a surprise offensive to recover these lost territories. It did so with this particular circumstance of military support, in advisors and armament, from Turkey, which did not hesitate to deploy jiḥadist mercenaries from Syria. This is really throwing oil on the fire, since the Armenians have not forgotten the mass slaughter of which they were victims, particularly in 1895 and 1915, and that Turkey has never accepted to recognise.

It is a very sensitive conflict since both sides are determined to go all the way, especially Armenia, which currently seems to be in military difficulty. Nikol Pachinian, its Prime Minister, has asked everyone “leaders of cities, districts, villages, political parties, civil organisations, business circles, to organise volunteer units” to fight alongside the separatists of Nagorno-Karabakh. To date, it seems that the prospect of regaining the Latchin corridor and thus isolating the province of Nagorno-Karabakh from the Republic of Armenia is attainable up for Azerbaijan, which enjoys recognised military superiority.

For Russia, it is also a sensitive conflict. Even though it presides over the Minsk Group with France and the United States, Russia remains undoubtedly the most qualified mediator for extinguishing this hot spot, not far from its borders, that is largely due to an arbitrary boundary delineation that dates from the Soviet period. Given the good relations that it maintains with the two belligerents, Russia is intent on not taking sides with either of them, much less undertaking a military intervention, even within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), at least as long as Azerbaijan does not extend its military operations on the territory of the Armenian State, which it will refrain from doing.

In the immediate term, Russia is trying to bring the parties closer together on the basis of the plan drawn up by Sergei Lavrov: five districts will be returned to Azerbaijan, then those of Latchin and Kelbadjar, the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh itself will be suspended while a status for the province and the return of displaced Azerbaijanis is being negotiated. Armenia is disappointed for it had hoped that Moscow would have prohibited that the occupation of the Latchin corridor be called into question. The cease-fire agreements, painstakingly negotiated so far, have never been respected and the fighting has claimed two thousand victims on both sides, according to Vladimir Putin.

The situation, however, is made all the more complex by the Turkey’s presence in this conflict. Azerbaijan’s abundant oil and gas reserves undoubtedly plays its part, with Ankara hoping to become a player in the energy domain. Yet Turkey’s commitment to Azerbaijan is also political and religious, Ankara is seeking to extend its zone of influence in this region of the South Caucasus; and with it conquering Islam is making headway…

… and is taking advantage of our weakness. This weakness lies in our secularism and our institutions in France, which is home to the largest Muslim population in Europe and which remains in their eyes, despite our denial, a Christian nation. Weakness also lies in the schism on the side of Russia which, thanks to Vladimir Putin, certainly succeeded in crushing the Muslim caliphate that was formed by violence within its borders throughout the North Caucasus with Chechnya as its bridgehead. It nevertheless remains paralysed in its missionary drive to take care of all these Muslim populations for which it is directly or indirectly responsible... and convert them. The bond uniting France, Russia and even all those Muslims who respect Her is the Blessed Virgin. She is our only recourse. It is God’s will, more and more understandable, that we turn to Her Immaculate Heart and that Russia be consecrated to Her at the behest of the Holy Father. We must therefore pray much for the Holy Father!

Brother Bruno of Jesus-Mary.