Time to Leave — France Is Lost

Our French correspondent Robert Marchenoir has compiled a report based on a translated blog post by a disaffected Muslim, and has added his own commentary.


Time to leave — France is lost
by Robert Marchenoir

Alibekov has had just about enough. This 30-year-old conservative blogger, French-born, newlywed, with a good university education, has just decided to turn his back on his home country, where his grandparents hid Jews during the Second World War. He has almost completed his immigration papers for Canada. He is leaving soon. Next step, possibly: the United States.

After university, Alibekov lived and worked for six years in Africa. He returned home a short while ago to the Paris region. What he saw horrified him. Last June, he filed this post on his blog, Bouteille à l’Amer, which he shares with his friend Memento Mouloud. All the facts in the following eyewitness report are genuine, he told me — only the names have been changed:

First of all, let us extend a warm welcome to Abiba. She has just arrived from Cameroon, thanks to a tourist visa her husband got her by bribing some official. Abiba plans to give birth in France. She expects the authorities will be kind enough to grant her legal residency status, because of her child. She will spend one or two years in low-cost hotels, moving from time to time. [The government will pick up the bill — translator.] After that, the happy family will be granted a city council flat by the social services, on the grounds of her being a single mother. They will also provide her with a job, so she can pay part of the rent.

This valuable advice has been passed on to her by her aunt, who has been living in France for five years. Her aunt had received it previously from a cousin, who has been living in France for ten years.

We are headed for the district of Seine-Saint-Denis, in order to attend a funeral in an African family.

[Seine-Saint-Denis is a district adjacent to the northern limit of Paris proper. The first bishop of Paris, Saint Denis, was buried there in the 3rd century. French kings have been buried in the basilica of the town of Saint-Denis since the 7th century. The ill-famed district, also known by its administrative number, “the 93rd”, is nowadays one of the most heavily populated by immigrants.]

We reach high-rise concrete buildings, planted next to some wasteland. I am immediately reminded of The Dormant Beast, [the sci-fi comic book] by Enki Bilal: an apocalyptic landscape, repulsively filthy, and an out-of-this world population.

Bearded men with moronic looks, dressed as if they were in Islamabad, come out from nowhere, huddling together. I try to catch their eyes, but their gaze remains perfectly alien to me. All I can see in it is some sort of mystical fear, mixed with unfathomable stupidity.

Slouching on a bench next to tuned-up cars with blaring stereos, some youngsters listen to “Raï and B” music (so as to assume a “French” identity, as opposed to an American one). They dutifully proceed to create a tapestry of glistening spit to stamp their feet on.

Next to the front door lies a heap of refuse originating from the local McDonald’s, KFC, and grocery store. Banana peels and peanut shells degrade into a strange form of humus.

A diminutive white lady, followed by her ten years-old son, makes a desperate effort to keep the place bearable: while on her way, she stoops to pick up three discarded bags of French fries, and throws them in the bin where they belong. As soon as she walks into the lobby, a youngster dumps his uneaten shawarma right in front of the glass door.

We proceed towards the Eastern building, staircase B. The corridor is flanked by mail boxes with Arab names, sometimes barely emerging from under fading graffiti.

[Expletive omitted.] The stench of urine is suffocating. Tears come instantly to my eyes. It gets worse as we set foot in the elevator. I am advised to stay clear of the steel sides. Once polished, they are now stained with vertical streaks of rust. It seems the elevator’s walls react to urine as swiftly as pH test paper.

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On the twelfth floor, we are faced with a choice: one door is adorned with Koranic verses, the other with photographs of Mecca and the Kaaba. We run into a couple of retired French blue-collar workers of exquisite kindness. Just the type of people the System would describe as loathsome racists and fascists. Does Konaré live nearby? Well, they say, his third wife actually lives just opposite to them on the tenth floor; however, Konaré himself lives in the Western building with his second wife.

Staircase C is already chock-full with twenty-odd people waiting their turn to pay their respects — or to get a free meal. Seventy individuals altogether have gathered at the place, coming from three families only. Some of them learn on the spot that they are relatives, because their father had children with his own cousin, or because some half-brother married his sister before wedding wife number four.

I elbow my way through to the strategic centre of the house, and I sit on the floor. Next to me are two bearded men, wearing boubous and keffiyehs. One is browsing an interactive Koran on his iPhone. The other keeps peppering the crowd with non-stop blessings. The assembly responds in kind every ten seconds.

Women bring in plastic basins full of greasy rice, soaked in mutton juice. We assemble around them by groups of five, and help ourselves with our right hand, chanting “hamdoullah” roughly every minute and a half. Each time a girl comes out of the kitchen to tend the mourners, at least one guy asks whom she is married to. I feel I am in the middle of a group of shepherds anxious to buy a few more goats.

I am informed that each member of this happy crowd lives off the child benefits granted by the state to their multiple wives. Each man owns ten to twelve children. Each wife has her own flat assigned to her, courtesy of the city council. Most Frenchmen think polygamous Africans share their lodgings with their different wives. This is absolutely wrong. The whole point is for each wife to benefit from a certain degree of material autonomy. This, in turn, shows the financial power of the husband. Welfare benefits, of course, pervert this principle, since the husband does not need to work anymore. But the wives still get the money. Let me say this once again: France hands out a city council flat to each wife of a polygamous African living in the country. It is the man, however, who collects the state benefits, of which he gives back a tiny amount to his women.

The goal is to save enough money for a new wedding, which may well involve a bride plucked directly out of Africa — usually a younger one.

People mingle and chatter. Abdallah tells his neighbour that, with the money from the child benefits, he is currently building a house in Bamako for his fourth wife, who is twenty years old.

Moussa is worried. He made the mistake of telling the Préfecture that his wife’s sister was, well, also his wife. Therefore, the police warned Abibatou that she would have to leave the country within a month. She refuses. “What will my folks think of me, back in Africa, if they see me return? They believe I have a good situation in France. If I go back with my hands empty, they will make a fool of me. No way. I’m staying here.” So Abibatou moved to a cousin’s place, and is trying to evade the authorities.

An endless string of such stories is exchanged. Malek, Oumar, Tariq… Their worries about women, money, jealousy between wives, weddings among cousins, children born handicapped due to inbreeding… (they believe it is because of sorcery).

I feel nauseous. This is not France. I cannot believe it. Some of those guys have been settled here since the 1960’s, and they still live within their own closed community, totally impervious to their host country — except when welfare benefits are concerned — ruled by Islamic superstition and by the tribal mores of the remotest African villages.

And I do not mean Africa under the French colonial rule, which was much more liveable. Schools and hospitals, at least, were functional and free. One has to infer that they immigrate in France in order to find Africa as it was before the French empire, which is depicted in horrible terms by corrupt Third-World leaders and by immigrant lobbies such as Indigènes de la République. [An Islamo-Marxist outfit, whose leader, Houria Bouteldja, made an infamous pun on television: she forged the word “Souchiens” as a replacement to “Français de souche”, which is the way the anti-immigrant crowd describe themselves, meaning “the aboriginal French”. However, Bouteldja said “French” Muslims used to call the French “souchiens”, obviously trying to convey the real meaning of “sous-chiens”, underdogs. We know the unclean status the dog holds in Islam.]

I am trying hard to figure out what opportunity these immigrants might represent for our country. But faced with reality, I am at a loss to make something out of all that sweet talk about multiculturalism. Theories about “a French breed of Islam” are wishful thinking. Facts are facts, and it is the burden of die-hard immigration lobbyists to explain to us why it would be legitimate to impose such a presence to the French people, without, at the same time, imposing on African immigrants, as their part of the deal, a requirement to abandon upon arrival at the airport their boubous dyed in the worst of what the underdeveloped world has to offer.

From his post, you can guess that Alibekov has had his fair share of “racism” and “Islamophobia” indictments thrown at him. Whenever this occurs, he reaches for a small black box in his right pocket, and lays it on the table in front of him. It’s his own tactical nuclear weapon. He presses the big red button, and…

— My wife is a black Muslim African.

If his adversary still moves, or mumbles, he reaches for his left pocket, and out comes another small black box. He presses the big red button, and…

— I’m a Muslim myself.

— Whaaat?…

Now, I’m sure this is banned by the Geneva convention. Then again, everybody has the right to argue his case.

“I’m a cultural Christian, although I don’t go to church”, Alibekov explained me. “But my in-laws blackmailed me into converting to Islam, otherwise they would keep harassing my wife”.

So he just decided to go through the motions. He does not believe a word of what he said, and his African family does not care: as long as he said the words, he’s a Muslim to them.

You cannot sing sweet nursery rhymes about the goodness of African multiculturalism to Alibekov. He has been there, he has lived for two years in areas where civil war was rife, and he has nice stories of his own to tell you: how he saw a warrior wearing a necklace of penises sliced off the enemy; how he took pictures of some other fighters eating the limbs of people they had just killed; how, in some parts of Africa, thieves are punished by ramming a three-inch nail into the top of their skull (they survive — as human legumes; and as living lightning rods).

You also get the sense, through his writings, that he has a real fondness for Africa. But it does not mean he likes France being turned into an African province.

And neither does his African wife.

“She was aghast when she first set foot in France”, says Alibekov. “She told me: why, this is Africa!”

(Note that the — white — prefect Paul Girod de Langlade was summarily dismissed by the Interior minister when he said just that in front of some black private security employees, while in transit in a Paris airport in August 2009; he was also convicted of racial abuse and ordered to pay a €1,500 fine.)

“My wife also asked me, with no irony at all, whether black people were exempted from paying in public transport, when she saw the extent of the fraud taking place in ethnic enclaves.

“Every day, in greater Paris, we stumble upon people we met in Africa. They have just arrived on the back of a one-month tourist visa, and they are determined to stay permanently. I regularly get calls from Africa, telling me that Youssouf, Sissoko, or Yaya will test his luck by handing $4,500 dollars under the table for a visa, and that I will probably see him soon somewhere in the suburbs of Paris. I always do.

“By the way, my African friends who have an education or a job stay at home. The ones we see coming here are cleaning ladies, ‘musicians’, soon-to-be ‘single mothers’, so-called ‘businessmen’ who will end up selling peanuts on the pavement…”

Personal history and political analysis are interweaved in Alibekov’s decision to emigrate.

“Because I live in the Paris area, I have been in constant contact with immigrants. Since the age of twelve, I have been racially insulted fifteen times (‘filthy white’, ‘little Frenchy’, ‘little piggy’.). I was assaulted several times (always by five or seven to one).”

Almost off-handedly, while discussing with a reader in the comment section of his blog, he mentions that “the number of girls [he knew] during his studies who were gang-raped by black youths, is staggering”.

“Despite the evidence of the political disaster since the mid-seventies” he thinks, “dissidents will never be tolerated within the mainstream media. The only possible action is a form of semi-underground lobbying. I recently held a discussion with some friends and colleagues to test their limits. I realise that the law of silence still prevails. To my great astonishment, the psychological barrier is still there. Maybe people just fear being branded as Nazis if they agree with you.”

“The way things are going, whether in the workplace or because of the schizophrenia of the society at large, any country will be better than this one. My university friends who emigrated to the United States or Canada regularly encourage me to join their dream where work is rewarded, and civic virtue is promoted. France is lost. The only future it has in stock for our generation of graduates is spelled in four letters: S-M-I-C [the French acronym for the minimum wage].”

Oh, and by the way: Abiba, the “single mother” from Cameroon, has just disappeared into the woodwork. Nothing to worry about: her one-month tourist visa has now expired. She has only gone into stealth mode.