Last Call
Neumayr, George
LAST CALL By George Neumayr listening to Brigitte Bardot rom the ruins of Old Europe has emerged a new Edward Gibbon: Brigitte Bardot. In her book A Scream in the Silence, the aging sex...
...No wonder the law is in hot pursuit of Bardot...
...Christian France, she laments, has gone kaput, as Islamic mosques spread "while our church bells fall silent for want of priests?' Where, she asks, has the spirit of Charles Martel gone...
...Not in our name," read some of the subtler graffiti I saw in Italy...
...I am against the Islamisation of France...
...In her book A Scream in the Silence, the aging sex kitten turns her attention to the decline and fall of Western civilization, with particular concern for her native land...
...4, George Neumayr is a writer in Southern California...
...What you can't do," he added, "is criticize Islam...
...Voila...
...French officials then weakly said that they didn't like the election results...
...In 1997 and 1998, Bardot was convicted of inciting racial hatred and fined a total of $5,400 [for] published criticism of Arab customs and the role of Islamin France," reports Reuters...
...82 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JUNE/JULY 2003...
...The American one unsettles them...
...France has established a national government council of Muslims, the state's attempt to bring Islam in line with "French values...
...The phrase "going to mass," explained one French woman, is now a French euphemism for mentally fading out...
...The French do take some threats seriously...
...Parisvoice, a magazine "for English-speaking Parisians:' decried America's "thuggery," only finding relief in the fact that the war hadn't disrupted epicurean Parisian life...
...Or consider also the dismaying drop in the quality of French hookers: "Our lovely, kind streetwalkers have been replaced by girls from the East, Nigerians, travelers, transsexuals, drag queens, bearers of AIDS, and other friendly gifts," she reportedly writes...
...the antiwar Italians, not enjoying the same media monopoly, placed their attacks on walls...
...But French Muslims don't want Islam turned into Voltairean liberalism...
...Even as Baghdad fell, the children of the Enlightenment took little joy in the liberation of Saddam's slaves...
...My trips to the outskirts of Paris felt like trips to North Africa...
...But she holds out "hope," she told the press, that "they're not going to put me in prison" for A Scream in the Silence...
...On the home soil of Christian crusaders, 5 million Muslims now live, fervently practicing their faith while their Catholic counterparts spend Sundays at Michael Moore movies...
...Having a risk-free go is becoming a real exploit?' From her villa and farmhouse near St...
...Stop the bombs...
...Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister, speaks of America's military as though rampaging Mongols controlled it: "It is hard to imagine what could stop this machine...
...Who will call a halt to the barbarism and decadence...
...There were plenty of Muslims wearing headscarves...
...You can make any joke you want about the Catholic Church," a student at the University of Paris told me...
...But let's be fair...
...Bush the Assassin:' "Bush Is Mad," were also splattered on historic buildings...
...In fact, secular France has finally found religion: Islam...
...Having recently visited France and Italy, I take Bardot's learned point...
...Bardot's treatise is timely...
...An estimated 5 percent of French Catholics go to church...
...George W Bush wasn't a liberator, they told me, but a Texan ignoramus, at once too corrupt and too pious, a "marionette of the oil lobby," and a connard—roughly, stupid bastard...
...For centuries our forefathers, the ancients, our grandfathers, our fathers gave their lives to chase all successive invaders...
...F—king Yankees, stay at home...
...The French placed their anti-Bush attacks in newspapers and magazines...
...With French revolutionary-style confidence that abstract reason can rearrange reality, France is even trying to Frenchify Islam...
...The mosques fill up, but the Gothic cathedrals remain empty, save for tourists and a scattering of serious Catholics...
...Tropez—amidst nine dogs, forty cats, and her fourth husband, reports Australia's the Age—Bardot sees still graver threats to Western civilization...
...During my visit to France, the papers reported that the Union of Islamic Organizations, linked to extremist groups that preach jihad, had picked up fourteen of forty-one seats on the council...
...I saw few Catholics wearing crosses...
...When Old Europe's atmosphere of decadence is choking even her, the need for reform is now...
...One Milan church appeared wholly abandoned to the graffiti gangs...
...Just look around Paris and you'll quickly be able to breathe comfortably again...
...It looked like the Baghdad looters, so conveniently distressing to antiwar European liberals indifferent to Saddam Hussein's looting, had swept through Italy...
...It can now operate out of the French government...
...They had set up the council to take Islam out of the "cellars and garages," and it succeeded too well...
...According to press reports about the book, Bardot is appalled at the "impurities" of modern life and the "worsening decadence of society," manifest in excrement-ridden modern art "acclaimed by all the jet-set dolts," in jeans-wearing teachers in crummy schools, increasingly outré homosexuals whining about "ghastly heteros," and a penal system too soft to use the guillotine on child killers...
...We go on buying our baguettes, walking our dogs," said its writer...
Vol. 36 • June 2003 • No. 3
