Which is the real France: the country of the quiet and beautiful provincial village, or the one suffering under an onslaught of Islamic terrorism, as evidenced by the recent murder of a police chief and his girlfriend by a Muslim terrorist?
Apocalyptic visions have their pleasures, and the murder of the policeman and his consort (they were not married) easily stimulates such visions. But we are rational beings as well as irrational ones, and it is incumbent on us to try to assess the situation according to the evidence. Oceans of ink have been spilt on the attempt to estimate the true extent of the threat of Islam to the West, and the attempts range from the frankly paranoid to the most supinely complacent. For myself, I veer constantly between the two, hardly pausing in between. In the last analysis, the West has all the cards, intellectual and military; but if it refuses ever to play them, they are of no account.