Eric Zemmour, intelligent and unbowed,  reminds his listeners at "Z pour Zemmour" on RFT that De Gaulle, who was responsible for abandoning Algeria to its monstrous and primitive fate  when the war could have been won, gave as his justification that he did not wish to see his small village (pop. 678) of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises become Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées  [« étonnante indépendance accordée par le Général de Gaulle, avant toute chose pour que, disait-il, mon village ne devienne pas Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées et qui n’a pas évité, mais au contraire accéléré l’installation sur le sol français de millions d’Algériens."].

De Gaulle thought he was keeping the Musilms at bay. Instead, successive governments allowed in hundreds of thousands, and then millions of Muslims, a colossal mistake, a mistake that was not inevitable and that did not have to be made. Those governments were led by arrogant and complacent elites, supported by various apologists for islam (such as Le Monde's hideous "expert" on the Middle East, a kind of French version of Robert Fisk named Eric Rouleau -- who later would be appointed the French ambassador to the Islamic Republic of Iran) led by elites who did not know about Islam, but thought they did, or thought that the suave and secularised Muslims they knew, or in some cases met at university, were representative of Muslims, and they could not conceive that Islam would not, over time, change, because they lacked both a knwowledge of the texts and tenets of Islam, but of the attitudes to which those texts and tenets give rise, the aggression, the violence just beneath the surface, the irrationality, the hysteria, the permanent hostility, easily becoming murdreous hostility, toward non-Muslims -- all this was ignored, or pooh-poohed. A generation of scholars of Islam, such as Dufourcq, were ignored, and so too were others, such as the writer and Protestant theologian Jacques Ellul, who recognized early on the menace of Islam, that is of the bearers of Islam, in Europe.

Now everyone of sense admits that it was folly to have allowed so many Muslims into the French midst, and everyone now recognizes, even if they do not say it aloud, that the large-scale presence of Muslims in France has led to a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous, for the indigenous non-Muslims and for other, non-Muslim immigrants. And the situation can only get worse pari passu with the number of Muslims. There are things that can and should be done. There are hundreds of ways, little and big, to cut down or cut off altogether further Muslim migration, and ways to deport those who have not yet acquired French citizenship, and even ways to deport those who have acquired such citizenship, but through committing perjury. And there are ways to make the economic environment less attractive, by cutting the crazily generous benefits -- free education, free health care, free or greatly-subsidized housing, and so on -- that Muslim immigrants have proven so adept at taking advantage of, just as they have been adept at avoiding the kind of work for which their levels of training and intelligence make them fit.

One of the things that Zemmour identifies, rightly, as weakening the French resistance to Arab and Muslim immigration has been the wholesale swallowing of a narrative about "colonialism" that was never true. It was not true that the French "colonized" any Arab country save for Algeria. And it is true that Algeria was always the subject of coloniizing, and the cruelest colonizers, the ones who brought nothing but persuaded many of the natives to forget their own, Berber, history and language and culture, were the Muslim Arabs. The French built the first schools (unless you consider a madrasa to be a school), the first universities, the first hospitals, built the roads, built the cities (some of them beautiful, though under Arab rule everything has been slowly collapsing), and brought modern methods of agriculture. This is not something for which the French need apologize. They should ask themselves what Algeria would look like had the French never arrived. Libya? Yemen?

I doubt that in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises there is yet a mosque. But that's only because there are still fewer than 700 inhabitants. Just wait.