Here is a quote by Nicolas Sarkozy from 2006, before he became French President:

[S]ecurity is the responsibility of the State, I am against militias, I am against the private ownership of firearms, and I'm trying to make you think about that. If you are assaulted by an armed burglar, he'll use his weapon more effectively than you anyway so you're risking your life. If the criminal is not armed and you are and you shoot, your life will be ruined, because killing someone over a theft is not in line with the republican values that are mine. The private ownership of firearms is dangerous. I understand your exasperation for having been burglarized two times, I understand the fear that your wife and daughter may have but the answer is in the efficiency of the police and the efficiency of the judiciary process, the answer is not in having guns at home.

Yes, but what happens when the state neither can nor wants to protect its citizens, which is clearly the case in France and in many other Western countries today? Here is another quote by the same man, this time as president, in July 2008, when he announced the creation of a new "Mediterranean Union" in a huge meeting between European and Arab leaders: “The goal of this summit for the Mediterranean, of this Union for the Mediterranean, is that we learn to love each other instead of continuing to hate each other and wage war,” Sarkozy told a news conference. That same month he also declared that Ireland will have to hold a second referendum after Irish voters rejected the EU Constitution, the same Constitution which French and Dutch voters had previously rejected but which was implemented anyway under another name, the Lisbon Treaty. In saner times we would have called this a coup d'état, committed not just in one country but in many countries simultaneously.

The European Union is an organization of corrupt parasites and power-grabbing traitors, mixed up with some dangerously naive fools. EU leaders are intent on flooding their countries with even more Muslims at the same time as immigrants commit countless acts of violence against native Europeans. The greatest organized betrayal in history is celebrated as a victory for peace and tolerance. Our so-called leaders open the floodgates to people who are, always have been, and always will be hostile to everything we hold dear, and tell us to love them. Unfortunately, others have rather different plans for us.

Iranian writer Amir Taheri explains how al Qaeda's chief theoretician, Sheik Abu-Bakar Naji, in his new book Governance in the Wilderness suggests that low-intensity war should be extended to anywhere in the world with a significant Muslim presence, creating parallel societies resembling "liberated zones" set up by Marxist guerrillas in parts of Latin America in the twentieth century. The Jihadis are to begin by giving areas where Muslims live a distinctly Islamic appearance, by imposing special styles of dress for women and beards for men. Then they start imposing Islamic law. In the final phase, they should create a parallel system of taxation and law enforcement. This is already being implemented in many European urban areas.

Sheik Abu-Bakar Naji recommends that Islamic Jihad should be everywhere, with "countless small operations" that render daily life unbearable for the infidels, who, when leaving their homes every morning, should be unsure whether they'll return in the evening. Naji recommends kidnappings, exhibition killings to terrorize the enemy, suicide bombings and countless gestures that make a normal life impossible. Once parallel societies are established throughout the world, they would exert pressure on non-Muslims to submit. Naji believes that, subjected to constant intimidation and fear of death, most non-Muslims would submit because "The West has no stomach for a long fight."

While Islamic theoreticians are making long-term plans for how best to terrorize our children and destroy our societies, the EU is opening up for more Muslim immigration and banning opposition to this as "racism." The only possible conclusion native Europeans can draw from this is that our so-called leaders are now either outright enemies or reduced to obedient puppets for those who are our enemies. So no, Mr. Sarkozy, we should no longer expect the state to protect our security. We need to take care of that ourselves. How? Well, by adopting a second amendment everywhere in Europe as soon as possible, but also by arming ourselves with real knowledge of our history and the achievements of our ancestors, rather than the hostile propaganda passing for "truth" we are being spoon-fed in the media and the education system these days.

In July 2008, President Nicolas Sarkozy, while laying the foundation stone of new rooms for the Arts of Islam at the Louvre in Paris, stated that "France is a friend of Arab countries. Islam is the bearer of one of the oldest and most prestigious civilizations in the world," and the new exhibition is "an opportunity for the French and all visitors to the Louvre to see that Islam is progress, science, refinement, modernity." Prince Alwalid Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah's nephew, is an important donor to the project. "France wants peace, France does not want the clash of civilizations between East and West," said the French president. "France says to the Arab countries that it will help them acquire the energy of the future, nuclear energy used for peaceful civilian purposes."

So, France wants peace, and since we all know that Islam is peace, does that mean that France wants Islam? Probably not all the French, but their political elites certainly seem to want it or else have resigned themselves to that prospect.

I like many aspects of French culture, but I admit I deeply distrust modern French political culture. At least since the late eighteenth century, France has been stuck in a pattern with shifts between an incredibly elitist political class, violent upheavals and Utopian ideologies. Frankly, one of the most disturbing things about the EU is that it exports this unhealthy bureaucratic and political culture to the rest of the continent.

There is no doubt that France is disproportionately responsible for the mess much of Europe is in now. The EU was a French idea, and so was Eurabia. Both have been viewed as tools to promote otherwise declining French influence on the international arena. I distinctly recall claims from 2005 that the French should vote "yes" to the proposed EU Constitution because it was an "enlarged France." But with burning cars, hundreds of de facto Islamic mini-states in the heart of France and notoriously arrogant political elites hell-bent on importing even more Muslims, exactly why should other Europeans want to live in an enlarged France? The country is currently set on a path to cultural suicide and has a worse demographic profile than any other Western European nation.

Things went seriously wrong with Europe starting with World War I in 1914, which radicalized the continent, paved the way for the totalitarian states of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and in the long run perhaps the European Union. But you could argue successfully that some of the seeds of our current problems were planted as far back as in 1789. In my book, the French Revolution is one of the worst disasters ever to befall this continent, and I simply cannot understand why so many people celebrate it as something positive. France is a wounded nation, a nation that worships its wounds and wants everybody else to share them, too. Until a sound and healthy French culture has been restored, if that is indeed still possible, others should forcefully reject any claims to French moral or intellectual leadership.

That being said, there are still many good people left in France, but they fight with tremendous odds against them. I do not speak any of the Romance languages, and I regret that sometimes. The French professor of medieval history Sylvain Gouguenheim recently published a book entitled Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les Racines Grecques de l'Europe (Aristotle at Mont Saint-Michel: The Greek Roots of Europe). It looks interesting and right down my alley, but I cannot read it until it has been translated into English.

Gouguenheim said it was in light of a 2002 recommendation from the European Union that schoolbooks give a more positive rendering of Islam's part in European heritage "that an attempt at a clarification becomes necessary." He makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world's initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of "Islam" but of Middle Eastern Christians, and that a wave of translations of Aristotle began at the Mont Saint-Michel monastery in France 50 years before Arab versions of the same texts appeared in Islamic-occupied Spain.

Aristotle's works on ethics, metaphysics and politics were disregarded by the Muslim world because they were viewed as incompatible with the Koran. Europeans, he says, "became aware of the Greek texts because it went hunting for them, not because they were brought to them." Gouguenheim calls the Mont Saint-Michel monastery, where texts were translated into Latin, "the missing link in the passage from the Greek to the Latin world of Aristotelian philosophy." Outside of a few thinkers – he lists Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Abu Ma'shar and Averroes – Gougenheim considers that the "masters of the Middle East" retained from the ancient Greeks only what they considered to be compatible with the Koran.

The notion that the West "owes" its progress to medieval translations of "Islamic science," which Mr. Gouguenheim criticizes, is the official ideology of the European Union. The fact that he receives powerful opposition when questioning it is not accidental. The ridiculous concept that we have a "shared" cultural tradition with Muslims is being propagated by all EU organs in close cooperation with Islamic countries. Pro-Islamic Multiculturalism is the ruling ideology of the EUSSR, just like Communism was the ruling ideology of the USSR and its satellite nations. Questioning it is a thought crime.

In The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, scholar Kenneth Pomeranz claims that several Asian countries, especially China, were at least as advanced as Europe as late as the early nineteenth century. Europe didn't diverge critically from Asia until then, and the Industrial Revolution started in Britain in part due to a geographical accident because they had easy access to coal, and in part due to overseas colonies and markets. It didn't have anything much to do with superior science or technology.

The Chinese did have the world's largest economy for a long time (and may well have so again later this century). They have always been good at engineering and applied technology, but significantly weaker in the mathematical sciences. As late as the seventeenth century AD, there was a consensus among Chinese scholars that the earth is flat, and this didn't change until they were confronted with European astronomical and geographical knowledge by Jesuit missionaries. By that time, Europeans had known that the earth is spherical for two thousand years. The idea that educated medieval Europeans believed in a flat earth is a myth.

In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, a largely – and in my view excessively – pro-Mongol book, Jack Weatherford claims that the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century triggered the Renaissance in Europe by opening up the continent to ideas from Asia, for instance gunpowder and printing. So, we now have claims that the Renaissance was what caused the great advances in Western science, and that it was triggered by Muslims in the twelfth century or Mongols in the thirteenth century. At the same time, there was supposedly nothing special about Europe until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries.

An intelligent reader will quickly see that all of these different claims cannot be true at the same time, yet they are all made at the same time. The point here is not whether any of them are correct, the point is to put down any sense of pride people of European origins might have in their historical achievements. It is a bit ironic that European culture is constantly derided for being racist, oppressive and evil, yet everybody else seems very busy with claiming the honor for having created it. If we are racist oppressors who rape the earth and create global warming, why are Muslims and others so eager to take credit for having created our culture? Shouldn't they feel ashamed of themselves instead?

The truth is that the scientific revolution was the greatest achievement of the human mind in history, and it was done by Europeans, not by anybody else. This particular form of ideological disinformation takes place all over the Western world, and there is no specific reason for singling out the French in this regard. I suspect many ordinary French citizens are just as fed-up with this nonsense as everybody else is. I wish good French people the best of luck in reclaiming their dignity and their country. Given the state of things, they are going to need it.

What about basing French national identity on the Battle of Tours on October 10, 732, when the people who were eventually known as the French halted an Islamic invasion of the heartland of the European continent? By doing so, they saved not only their own nation; they saved the greatest civilization mankind has ever seen. That really is something to celebrate, unlike the happenings of 1789 which led to senseless mass slaughter and widespread intra-European wars. If the French need historical inspiration, they should follow the example of the right Charles next time. That would be Martel, not de Gaulle.