Yet another fire has broken out in a French church, and the “mainstream media” are doing everything to prevent people from connecting the dots — quite literally, as shall be seen — concerning its significance.
On July 11, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Rouen, a twelfth-century landmark in Normandy, caught fire. Authorities managed to extinguish the flames, but the cathedral’s spire — which makes it one of the tallest and most iconic buildings in Europe — was severely damaged.
Although this is the latest of countless churches and cathedrals to “catch fire” in France, France 24 used the incident as a springboard to engage in Islamic damage control. During a segment titled “Truth or Fake,” British-Indian journalist Vedika Bahl argued that the very idea that there is some nefarious campaign against churches in France, as this latest fire might suggest, is nothing but — wait for it — …“misinformation.”
Bahl’s immediate target was a 2019 map (below) that had “resurfaced” and was making people connect the dots. (I first wrote about it last year.) It “set an insinuation that churches in France are under attack,” said Bahl, prompting “thousands of incendiary comments” from social media users, many against Muslims and Muslim migrants.
Published by the Observatory of Christianophobia, a French website dedicated to documenting incidents of anti-Christian hate crimes, the map marks every area a church has been attacked in France with a red pin. As a result, virtually the entire map of France appears covered in red. highlighting the ubiquity of church attacks.
Outdated Data
Bahl tried to discredit the map any way she could, including through barefaced ad hominem attacks: She described the Observatory of Christianophobia’s publication director as a “far right Catholic activist” (as if that tells us anything about the map’s veracity).
But because it is accurate, the best Bahl could do was to repeatedly and dismissively stress that it’s “outdated,” and therefore in no way representative of the current situation in France.
This is a ludicrous defense: If anything, the age of the map indicates that the situation in France is much worse now than it was in 2019. As Bahl herself stressed, it shows where churches were attacked in just 2018. Although only one year’s worth of church attacks is documented, the map is almost entirely red. How would it look if it showed all the church attacks that took place over the last nearly seven years, from 2018 to 2024? It would be scarlet red — a bloody war zone.
Short List of 2024 Attacks
Churches are under attack all throughout France (once known, rather ironically, as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church”). This is an indisputable fact, irrespective of France 24’s sorry attempts at damage control.
As investigative journalist Amy Mek tweeted on July 1, 2023:
Attacks on Churches are the norm in France; two Churches a day are vandalized — they are being burned, demolished, and abandoned, and their adherents are being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. Priests are under constant threat. At what point will France’s open border politicians be held responsible?
That last question inadvertently identifies the primary culprits — namely, migrants from the Muslim world, where attacks on churches are routine. Whoever doubts this can consult my monthly series, “Muslim Persecution of Christians,” which collates various instances of anti-Christianism (including attacks on churches) that surface every month. Below are some entries from March-June 2024 in France:
- On March 5, police foiled an Islamic plot to bomb the Notre Dame Cathedral(much of which “inexplicably” went up in flames in 2019). A Muslim man of Egyptian origin, 62, was arrested. The report notes that this was just the latest terror attack to be foiled in the previous three weeks.
- On Easter Eve, March 30, an illegal Muslim migrant from Senegal with a previous crime record was “arrested for advocating terrorism and for threatening to burn down the Notre Dame de la Voie church, in Athis Mons, in Essonne.”
- On March 28, a Muslim man of Albanian origin entered a church while mass was in progress and began hollering “Allahu akbar.”
- On Sunday, March 10, the Notre Dame de Partout chapel in Saint-Mesin was discovered spray painted with several Islamic slogans, including “convert,” “Last warning,” and “the cross will be broken.” A cross outside the chapel was also vandalized.
- On March 11, a cemetery in the commune of Clermont d’Excideuil, home to just a few hundred people, was savagely desecrated. According to one report, “Inscriptions with Islamic references were found on graves, the war memorial, the church door, a calvary memorial, and a fountain. Some of the tags read ‘France is already Allah’s,’ ‘Isa [Jesus] will break the cross,’ and ‘Submit to Islam.’ Altogether, more than 50 graves were smeared.” At least five other large, public crosses (calvaries) were tagged with similar Islamic warnings and threats since the start of the year in France.
- On March 1, about 40 tombstones and crosses in another cemetery in Fresselines were desecrated and vandalized.
- On March 26, an important public cross which had stood for many generations in the village of Lias—of which the mayor said “was more than a religious symbol, was the soul of our village”—was found broken up into four pieces.
- According to a March 15 report, a Muslim woman “was planning to attack the faithful of a church in Béziers on Easter Day with a sword when she was arrested. She is on trial in Paris for conspiracy to commit terrorist crimes.”
- On March 12, another woman, aged 39, barged into a church during morning mass, where she made threats while waving a knife around. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic and hospitalized. The church has already suffered an arson attack, and stands near an area where three teenagers once violently attacked two other teens while callingthem “dirty Christians,” nomenclature regularly employed by Muslims.
- On Sunday, Apr. 14, five Muslim teenagers bargedinto the Saint-Etienne Cathedral in Metz and interrupted a concert in progress by hollering “Allahu Akbar” before fleeing.
- On May 29, after knocking down a large public cross with his van, a Muslim man of Turkish origin emerged from his van and, after shouting out a few “Allahu akbars,” began to perform Muslim prostration prayers at the scene.
- On May 14, the St. Thérèse Church was set on fire in Poitiers (ironically, where Muslim invaders were first defeatedin 732). A large statue of the Virgin Mary inside the church was also found beheaded. This was the second such attack on the church in two years. In 2022, the nativity figures near the same Mary statue were found smashed to pieces.
- On two other separate occasions in May, another Virgin Mary statue was similarly beheaded (here) and another riddled with bullets (here).
Incidentally, for every church incident in which the culprit is clearly Islamic, there are dozens more in which the assailant’s identity is unknown (or unpublished). Thus, there were many other “anonymous” attacks on churches in March — two of which were known to be arson. In April, many other churches — including another Notre Dame, built in the 1600s — went up in flames (see here, here, here, here, here, and here for more examples). The same thing happened in May — (see here, here, here, here, here), general desecrations (see here, here, here, here), desecrations of cemeteries (see here and here), defecations in churches and urinating in their baptismal fonts (see here and here), and bomb threats (see here).
Minimizing the Severity
In short, it would seem that a full-blown jihad has been declared on the churches of France, and its godless leadership is looking the other way when not actively providing cover.
For example, even before “Truth or Fake” tried to debunk the aforementioned map, Snopes, which presents itself as the final arbiter on what is real or fake news, was also forced to admit the map is accurate, while trying, as Bahl did, to minimize its findings:
[W]hile this map does document some relatively serious crimes, such as arson or the toppling of church statues, many of these pins correspond to graffiti-related incidents. We also found one pin related to a person’s simply interrupting a church service.
In other words, having jihadist, anti-Christian graffiti spray-painted on a church, or having intruders interrupting a church service by screaming, “Allahu akbar!” is not really all that “serious” or worth documenting.
One wonders if Snopes and France 24 would be so casual if mosques all throughout France were being vandalized and interrupted by Christians screaming “Christ is King”? Would they try to debunk maps showing where these attacks occur?
Scratching Their Heads
The lying and hypocrisy is hardly limited to French mainstream media. Even in the U.S., the response to the jihad on French churches is one of feigned ignorance, as captured by a somewhat surreal Newsweek title from 2019: “Catholic Churches Are Being Desecrated Across France — and Officials Don’t Know Why.”
Although the report does a decent job of summarizing the “spate of attacks against Catholic churches” — including through “arson,” “vandalism,” and “desecration” — the words “Muslim,” “migrants,” or even “Islamists” never appear in the report. Rather, they mention “anarchist and feminist groups” who are angry at churches because they are “a symbol of the patriarchy that needs to be dismantled.”
Meanwhile, even deductive reasoning makes clear that Muslims own the lion’s share of attacks on churches. According to a 2023 report,
France is in the top five European countries with the most recorded anti-Christian hate crimes. The other countries in the top five are Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden.
There is something else that these top five nations all have in common: the largest Muslim populations in Europe. Put differently, while Eastern European nations have their share of “anarchist and feminist groups,” they also have much fewer attacks on churches — and, rather tellingly, much fewer Muslims.
There are, of course, “practical” reasons why all these Muslim attacks on French churches are massively obfuscated and dissembled. Imagine, for instance, how the most iconic and tragic torching of a French church in recent years — that of the Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019 — might be understood if it was common knowledge that countless churches in every corner of France have been and continue to be attacked by that nation’s significant Muslim population (hundreds of whom made it a point to gloat as Notre Dame went up in flames).
At any rate, one wishes to thank France 24 and Ms. Bahl for reminding everyone that the above map of church attacks is, indeed, “far outdated” and limited to 2018. As such, here’s hoping that the Observatory of Christianophobia updates the map to include the last six years (2019-2024), thereby documenting the bloody war zone that the “Church’s Eldest Daughter” has truly become.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.