La Pauvre Brigitte!

Jeez. She said no more than what most French people--and most Francophiles--have been thinking for quite a while now: Muslims have been the scourge of Europe since the Eighth Century:

"che furo al tempo che passaro i Mori

"d'Africa il mare, e in Francia nocquer tanto, &c."

There's an anti-Islamophobia website which acknowledges as much, saying that the many struggles between the Habsburg/Holy Roman and the Ottoman Empires since then--clear up to the defeat of Suleiman II at Szalankemen in 1691, and at Zenta in 1697--tend to get conflated by modern Europeans in Holland, Germany and France primarily, who wish the savage, riotous analphabetics would just go home.

My perspective is somewhat more nuanced. I lived in France for six months in the early 1960's: What time the Pieds Noirs were flooding in from Algeria--or had flooded--and were greatly and impotently resented by les Français de souche. I didn't know then (Did anyone?) what horrors la Douce France had perpetrated against the Algerian people in its ridiculous, ferocious attempt to retain the French Colonial Empire; but I sensed, quite correctly, that the Pieds Noirs had every right to be there, to claim French citizenship, and to be as "plus français que les Français" as they wanted to be. And I quite liked them. Their studliness and their ebullience made going to the cheap, French-dubbed Italian movies that they favored, and eating in the miserably cheap restaurants where they were the principal clientele, a joyous experience.

So I say, "Let Beurs be Beurs!" I think Mme. Bardot is wrong to say that they are unassimilable. Have a little faith in la Culture Française. Already, for all their defiant car burning and scarf wearing, they are changing: They speak a rude argotic French as their first language now. They have a, perfectly correct, sense of their own personal, physical beauty--disdained they may be, but they are admired. And, thanks to the intransigeant humanism of French doctors, they have foreskins, every man jack of them. Say what you will about the accidence, irrelevance, and inconsequence of circumcision--being mutilated binds you to your culture, and not being mutilated frees you from it.