Michel Gurfinkiel, a French journalist and public intellectual, served as editor-in-chief of Valeurs Actuelles from 1985 to 2006, and authored several books on geopolitics, international relations and culture. He is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think thank, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.
France faces a future of ethnic civil war at worst, and periodic terrorist attacks and political tumult at minimum. Yet its difficulties—both geopolitical and demographic—can be overcome with patience and determination.
“For all that, the long-term consequences may not be positive for Jews, and French-Jewish emigration, either to Israel or North America, will likely not subside.”
The November 13 killing spree in Paris came as no surprise. The Islamic State had threatened France explicitly and repeatedly for more than a year, and French government officials high and low issued warnings as well. Most pointedly, Judge Marc Trevidic, who was in charge of antiterrorist investigations in France for ten years, disclosed in September that IS was planning “something big” against France. He spoke of an “overbid logic” among competing jihadi groups: “Each group is eager to strike further and in a heavier way than other groups. They all want to win the Pulitzer prize of terrorism–that is to say to do something as grand and as lethal as 9/11.” Hence ISIS in Paris on November 13, and al-Qaeda in Bamako on November 20.
