Congratulations Islamists of the world, you cunts just handed the Élysée Palace keys to the neo-Nazi Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, in the 2016 French presidential election. The Front National founder, Marine’s father Jean Marie, an ex butcher who fought in the French military for French colony Algeria to stay in the dominion in the 60s, once said that the Holocaust was a detail in the history of the world replete with massacres. His daughter’s platform is the new Islamophobia bible. She dreams of the day she will finally ascend to the French throne of the Fifth Republic and rid France of its Muslims who dared to invade France’s soil after it lost its colonies to independence in Northern Africa. But this was one of history’s righteous ironic plots where the Arabic colonized who had been taught for centuries in French that their ancestors were the Gallic were now able to cross the Mediterranean, work for cheap and finally see for themselves what this Gaul was all about. France is an equal opportunity offending place, ranking number one on every European survey on anti-Semitism, up to 40% in some estimates and hating in its vast majority on everything remotely Arabic and Muslim. Being a Muslim or a Jew in France is equal to being black in the United States. You are not second-class but you are. In this sense, Charlie Hebdo, where I worked under its founder Professor Choron years ago, is very French. It is impossible for an American to imagine such a publication here. Mad Magazine was to Charlie Hebdo what Taylor Swift is to Robert Crumb. Spy Magazine could have been Charlie Hebdo if only Graydon Carter and Kurt Anderson had had interests other than star fucking. Imagine a Time magazine cover with a drawing of President Obama with his dick out… well Charlie Hebdo did it with the socialist President Francois Hollande after his proclivities to betray every single one of his campaign promises and to govern as a philandering Milton Friedman were revealed. He is shown letting it all hang out on the cover saying, ‘Me, President,’ a reference to the syntagm anaphora he had used in the presidential debate to list how he would govern differently than the vapid psychotic incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy. Imagine that ‘journalists’ at the New York Times had revealed to the world the secret they had kept locked in the 42nd Street newsroom regarding the homosexuality of Pope Benedict XVI and his affair with his secretary that prompted his reluctance to prosecute child molesting priests and his stepping down. Well Charlie Hebdo did it with a cover of the gay pope kissing a Swiss guard and saying, ‘Free at last.’ Imagine the Wall Street Journal running a front page cartoon exposing the prophet Mohammed’s naked butt to a famous filmmaker and saying, ‘Do you like my butt cheeks?’ a reference to Brigitte Bardot talking to Jean-Luc Godard in Le Mepris. Imagine Mohammed on all fours with a star on his butt with the legend, ‘A star is born’ or Mohammed being carted around by a rabbi as both say, ‘Don’t mock us’ or Mohammed showing impatience with his true believers’ fundamentalism and saying, ‘It’s so hard to be loved by cunts.’ Well Charlie Hebdo did it and the caricaturist who made this cover, Cabu, was shot this morning by one of these very same cunts. On the television now on loop all over the world, one cunt is heard saying, ‘We have avenged the prophet Mohammed’ and ‘We have killed Charlie Hebdo.’ There is no doubt that he is French but what the news cables, which are finally about to make money, don’t tell you is that his accent is that of a very uneducated French trailer trash. France is now fighting his kind in Northern Mali, the Central African Republic and Northern Iraq. Educated French people were until this morning obsessing over two books. Eric Zemmour’s The French Suicide in which he explains that Vichy protected French Jews and that if France doesn’t start mass deporting its Muslim population it is committing hara-kiri. Interestingly enough, Zemmour is Jewish and hara-kiri used to be the name of the monthly version of Charlie Hebdo. The other new French frenzy is Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, a futuristic novel in which he imagines the French president in 2022 to be a moderate Muslim who imposes a ‘mild’ Sharia law with headscarves and stay-at-home women, after the right and the left rallied behind him to defeat an extremely popular Marine Le Pen. This is not such a fantasy since in the last March European election the Front National, like most fascist parties across Europe, won the elections. Zemmour and Houellebecq are dangerous idiotic phallocrats but they speak to a country where last week the mayor of a small beautiful town refused a gypsy family the right to bury their new born in the local cemetery. Paris has now lost its executive power to Brussels and it is now the European parliament which decides which type of cheese or which fish should be put on the table. For many French people who as recently as the early seventies were by a vast majority peasants, the European Union gave Berlin the victory that was denied to Hitler. France, the sempiternal finicky axis mundi of hubris, never went through the process of confronting its contribution to the Holocaust like Germany did, nor was it ever able to admit the crimes against humanity it committed in its colonies. Zemmour’s parents were colonizators in Algeria and had to move to France after the Algerian War. Houellebecq grew up in the French colony Reunion. As of today, no French student is taught at school that France deported nearly 80,000 Jews during World War II, with neighbors telling on neighbors and the police doing the round ups. French national trains were used for transport. No young French person knows nowadays that until World War II, forced labor and conscription was the law of the land in the French colonies, especially those located in the Maghreb. And this morning Houellebeck was supposed to be on the cover of Charlie Hebdo with a drawing barely mocking him if only to say that in 2022 he’ll fast for Ramadan probably like the rest of France. He once said that you had to be a cunt to be Muslim. I was so excited to go work for Professor Choron that I had seen when I was a kid, drunk on TV, calling uptight conventional people in debates assholes. He respected nothing. I had published in my hick province a weekly called ‘Rolling Stone’ no less and had sent him a copy. Each article was rife with misspellings and like a dumb Fernando Pessoa I signed every piece under a pseudonym. He asked me to come to work with him in Paris at Hara-Kiri and told me, ‘I never read your dumb rag but I admire the balls you have to put this shit out in newstands.’ Like in Honore de Balzac’s Lost Illusions I arrived in the capital full of hopes on a typical French picaresque journey. Choron was tall, bold, drunk and mean. Everything went in the office. I remember an editorial conference where I suggested that we change the name of the magazine every week. ‘You are a fucking asshole, you anarchist pig, get the fuck out of here,’ the right wing anarchist yelled at me from across the wooden table of the barn in the center of Paris we used as conference room. I admired his nihilism. He was the editor in chief who had put on the cover a drawing of President Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s wife, naked and spread eagle, with flies buzzing around her groin. That issue was forbidden by the French government, which, let’s not forget, had until the arrival of Francois Mitterand in 1981 a Secretary of Information. The great fascist General Charles De Gaulle had been the first one to suffer Hara-Kiri’s wrath. But right next to me at the editorial conference sat silent the Louis-Ferdinand Céline wannabe Marc Edouard Nabe, a protégé of Choron and of the cruel caricaturist Georges Wolinski who was killed this morning. Nabe, at the time, was living in the same building as Houellebeck. In my extreme naiveté I was shocked to see him in what I thought was a bastion of 1968 anarchism. Right wing anarchism was a concept I couldn’t comprehend. ‘Why was this anti-Semite, pro-Islamist sitting here with us?’ I remember thinking. I wish someone had whispered in my ear, ‘Forget about it Jacques, it’s France.’
