Don't Let Me Stop You: Jean-Marie Le Pen

The French riots brought a strong sense of vindication to one French politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front (FN) party. We use the term "far-right" advisedly, recognizing the MSM tendency to portray all conservatives as loonies. Give the man his due, though. He has been saying for years that allowing masses of Muslim immigrants to form a country-within-a-country would lead to exactly the kind of disaster that unfolded in the past month (and continues to fester). You don't have to like him or agree with him on other issues.

OpinionJournal: "Three years after his greatest triumph, when he finished second in the presidential elections, party infighting and age seemed to be wearing him down. The riots have revived him. Following detours into euroskepticism, anti-Americanism (he opposed both Iraq wars), gay-bashing and Nazi revisionism, this is more familiar territory. 'For 30 years, I've said that the crazy growth of immigration from the Third World would submerge France,' he declaims. 'I put forth policies that defend our identity, our territory, our prosperity. And my ideas challenge the ideological currents of globalization as well as the partisans of the free flow not only of capital and merchandise but also people.' In his attacks on liberal economics, JMLP is squarely (if disconcertingly) in the French mainstream, alongside Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who also proposes that France can opt out of globalization.

Mr. Le Pen argues that globalization must be reversed altogether. 'The 10 million foreigners mostly from the Third World' are impossible to 'integrate or assimilate,' he says. (According to the last census, there are 4.3 million immigrants in France, population 60 million.) But didn't France assimilate Armenians, Poles and others? He waves his hand. Those immigrants were 'a little like your Mexicans in the United States: They are Christians--even if not practicing, they are culturally Christian. Our immigrants are principally Muslim, guided by the precepts of Shariah that aren't only political but religious.'"

Well, if "globalization" is defined in this way, we're not in favor of it either, nor do we think it is inevitable.

As the OpinionJournal article notes, there are reasons to doubt that Le Pen will ever rise to real power. For one thing he's much happier as a perpetual opposition gadfly.

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