On some half-forgotten bookshelf downstairs is my English translation of French author Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel, Submission. In it, a coalition of lefties and a new Muslim Brotherhood party with a charismatic leader conspire to deny Marine Le Pen and her nationalists the chance to win the 2022 presidential election.
If that sounds familiar, you didn't need to read the novel — earlier this week I wrote about a similar coalition forming in the real world next year to deny Le Pen and National Rally from winning the 2027 presidential election.
The Muslim Brotherhood candidate — Mohammed Ben-Abbes — wins in Submission and quickly moves to end the Fifth Republic and create Europe's first Islamic republic.
Houellebecq wasn't even the first to go there. Australia-based author John Birmingham published Without Warning in 2007, where an unexplained cosmic event wipes out 95% of the U.S. population — plus swathes of Canada and Mexico, too — on the eve of the 2003 Iraq War. A side plot involves French elites sensing which way the wind will blow without the American hyperpuissance, and aligning their country with Islam.
But you don't have to indulge in speculative fiction to see which way the wind blows in France today.
Houellebecq, now 70, faces up to a year in prison and/or a 45,000 euro fine for “complicity in provoking discrimination, hatred or violence” against Muslims for comments made during a 2022 interview.
And Another Thing: Coincidentally but not without dark irony, Submission was published in Europe on the same day as the terrorist attack on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo satire magazine. Two French-born Algerian Muslim brothers murdered 12 and injured another 11 because the publication had dared to mock Muhammad.
Speaking with philosopher Michel Onfray for Front Populaire, Houellebecq "described Muslims as a threat to the security of native French people and predicted attacks against mosques and cafes frequented by Muslims," according to one report, calling such hypothetical violence "Bataclans in reverse." That's a reference to the 2015 Bataclan theater massacre, part of a series of Islamic terror attacks over two days, resulting in 130 dead civilians and at least another 875 wounded.
The same Morocco World News story summarized the rest of Houellebecq's remarks: "Muslims should leave France if they failed to respect the law and stop committing theft and assault. During the same interview, he described the far-right 'great replacement' theory as a fact rather than a theory."
"Far-right," eh?
A judge at the Nanterre judicial court put Houellebecq under formal investigation on Tuesday, "following complaints from the Union of Mosques of France (UMF) and the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples (MRAP)."
While MRAP has no official connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization has been criticized for close ties to figures associated with the Brotherhood's loose global network.
Please note that Houellebecq didn't actually call for anti-Muslim violence; he merely predicted it if France remains on its present course. His lawyers argue that his words fall under protected speech, even in France.
But we still can't have anyone saying things like that, can we? It might upset the people who put France on its present course, and will do almost anything to keep it there — including threatening a 70-year-old novelist with prison time during the run-up to a presidential election.
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