France, the “Budding Islamic Republic”
"Five years after the killings at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, France has learned to live with the Islamist threat," wrote Yves Thréard, deputy editor at the daily newspaper Le Figaro. "The seriousness of the Islamist political fact in France is strongly underestimated", says the lawyer Thibault de Montbrial, president France's Center for Internal Security Studies. In a country that used to stand for freedom of expression, self-censorship is soaring.
France has been marking the fifth anniversary of the deadly jihadist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which took place on January 7, 2015. Last month, French Senator Nathalie Goulet warned that more attacks were likely. “In France we have a serious problem and we need to do more to prevent extremists from acting. As it stands, there will be more attacks,” said Goulet said.
There are believed to be 12,000 radical Islamists on France’s terror watch-list, “however only a dozen are thought to be under 24-hour surveillance.”
While Islamist preachers and recruiters are out on the streets, seeking out the weak minds that will form the first line of their holy war, political Islam also forms electoral lists in France’s suburbs. French President Emmanuel Macron opposed banning these political groups. “France is a budding Islamic republic,” noted the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal.
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