The number of shisha shops, where Arabs can use the hubble-bubble pipes, has noticeably increased in the last two years. Several new ones that did not exist two years ago when I last visited have now been opened just on the street where I was staying. It’s one way for Arabs to pass their time, secure in the knowledge that the generous French government will provide for their every basic need: housing, medical care, schooling, even family allowances that were originally meant as pro-natalist measures, intended to encourage the French to have larger families. Instead, the French government now finds itself supporting not French families, but the much larger Muslim families. In the city, many Arabs, to judge by their presence on café terrasses, park benches, and city sidewalks and stoops, manage to while away the hours, day after day. Perhaps their wives are hard at work; I don’t understand these hours of idleness.

Some graffiti by the Arabs vandalize existing signs. Posters of Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor who was a former French Minister of Health and President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982, have frequently been defaced, with swastikas painted over her face. Wall graffiti attacks on Macron’s posters read “Macron Jew Bitch.” In the 18th arrondissement in Paris, according to a friend, the words “Truie Juive” – “Jewish sow” – have been painted on shopfronts of what, I presume, are Jewish-owned stores.

At the main entry to the city of Avignon, a gigantic fresco was painted on a wall this summer. It shows Macron as a puppet, dangling from the strings held by the puppeteer, depicted as the well-known Jewish economist and former adviser to Mitterand, Jacques Attali, his “Jewish features” distinctly exaggerated. It took a while, but Jewish organizations finally got the city to cover up the fresco for its obviously antisemitic content. Other antisemitic visuals have shown Macron placed in the center of a circle of advisers, many of them clearly Jewish.

In Paris, the façade of the prestigious Sciences Po, one of the “grandes écoles,” was defaced with graffiti, including “Mort à Israel” (Death To Israel) and “Koufar” (Kuffar, or Infidel), a word that is aimed not at Jews alone, but at all non-Muslims.

The “Gilets Jaunes” are groups of leftist protesters who for almost a year have been appearing for weekend protests in many French cities, manifesting their rage against the state, and proclaiming a variety of free-floating grievances. One of their posters reads “Contre Racket Fiscal Judeo-Bolshevique Sur Les Carburants” – blaming “Jewish Bolsheviks” for the rise in the price of gasoline and heating oil. While the Gilets Jaunes are not a Muslim group, a number of Muslims have hitched their wagon to the left-wing Gilets Jaunes, showing up to join their protests. Some Jewish shops in France have had “JUDEN” written on their storefront windows, which brings up terrible memories of Kristallnacht on November 9-10, 1938.

The groups of Arabs sitting on sidewalks and stoops, and instead of getting out of the way, force French people to get off the sidewalks and walk in the streets, are malevolently exercising their dominance. Perhaps the more than doubling of the local force of gendarmes will be sufficient to discourage such bullying thugs. Perhaps those caught painting antisemitic or anti-French graffiti can be given serious sentences, instead of the slap on the wrist that they currently receive. Perhaps street robberies will go down, house burglaries will decrease, and the drug trade that North Africans control dealt a mortal blow by this sudden increase in the numbers of police. 

The growing Muslim population in the French city I lived in during August created an underhum of menace, where Muslim toughs were intent on making life difficult the French whose city they were treating as their property, which, if current demographic trends continue, it eventually will be. The indigenous French with whom I spoke all agreed, without exception, that there was a profound “problem with Muslims,” and they were hoping for politicians in Paris to do something. But what? Shutting down mosques where Muslims have been “radicalized” or expelling “extremist” imams back to North Africa won’t be enough. They are hoping that the government will eventually realize it must put a halt to all further Muslim immigration, and will be prepared to expel Muslims to their countries of origin if they break the law, rather than paying for their upkeep in French jails, and then releasing them back into France where they committed their original crime and, where, we know, their level of recidivism is very high.

It’s the daily disruption of life, the menace in the air, the graffiti meant to insult and frighten both “the Jews” and “the French,” that chips away at the collective sense of wellbeing. The Arabs who run the drug trade, or who conduct street robberies, or commit house burglaries, or stolen cars (another favorite activity) have all contributed to the sense of insecurity that is now palpable. In the French family I was visiting, the husband has now armed himself, and his wife, too, with pepper spray, for he lives in the city center where, he says matter-of-factly, it is simply “no longer safe at night.” He was born in, and grew up in, this city that was always considered one of the safest in France. Thanks to the Muslim immigrants whom a succession of French governments have allowed in, all of them criminally negligent in not sufficiently investigating what the arrival of so many millions of Muslims would inevitably mean for the native French and the future of France, it is no longer so safe.

What I observed in my month in southern France was nothing so obviously alarming as jihadi attacks. Instead, what one sees is a slow degringolade, where the quality of life for the French goes steadily, inexorably down pari passu with the increase in the Muslim population. Those immigrants have been responsible for more street muggings, more robberies, more home burglaries, more aggressive behavior on the street toward the Infidels, more hideous graffiti against Jews and the “Français de souche” on the walls of buildings, more drug trafficking, more of everything that unsettles and frightens those French people who sense that they are gradually losing control of their own country. Macron is no Eric Zemmour, but he cannot continue to turn away from confronting the malign effects resulting from millions of Muslim immigrants who cannot, and do not want to, integrate into the society of the French Infidels. I think – I hope – that in his second, and final, five-year term as President, Macron will surprise us all by backing to the hilt his no-nonsense Minister of the Interior, Gerald Darmanin, who has a good understanding of the Muslim menace, and is prepared to act aggressively for the benefit of the indigenous people of France.