Muslims Are not so Moderate, the French Think

The more a group of people knows Islam and comes into contact with it, the more they tend to dislike it.

The French, who enjoy the questionable cultural enrichment and dubious benefit of having among them the highest percentage of Muslims of any Western European country, have revealed in a recent survey that they profoundly reject Islam.

Le Monde has published the results of an IPSOS opinion poll with the headline "The Muslim religion is the subject of a profound rejection by the French".

A distrust of Islam has been clearly expressed by the French population, says Le Monde.

74% of those surveyed by Ipsos think that Islam is an intolerant religion inconsistent with the values ​​of French society

Even more damning, 80% believe that Islam tries to impose its way of thinking on others.

And 54% hold the view that individual Muslims are fundamentalist, predominantly (10%), or at least partly (44%), in their attitudes.

This last claim, says Andrew Bostom in The American Thinker, is consistent with a remark made by Gamal al-Banna, brother of the jihadist and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hasan al-Banna, who in a 2011 interview said that "most Muslims today are Salafis":

Gamal al-Banna attributed this mass Muslim phenomenon to the 10th century onset "closure of the gates of ijtihad " (ijtihad being the process whereby the most select, learned Muslim legists were allowed narrow interpretive "flexibility" regarding Sharia mandates), leaving the preponderance of Muslims, ever since, to blindly follow mainstream, traditionalist, i.e., "Salafi," interpretations of Islam.