ANALYSIS: TRUE. When You Believe In Nothing, Islam Becomes Something:

France is a country that has lost much of its religion and national pride. They have become increasingly a people without desire, direction, or heart.

Christopher Caldwell points out in his similarly prescient 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, that Europe has engaged in self-shaming for so long that it reviles everything about its own culture, idolizing minority culture instead, as a kind of mea culpa for their colonial sins against the Third World. Perhaps the French today are so full of multicultural idealism, but lacking a pride in their own culture, that they would indeed go along with a religious takeover—so long as the pay is good, the wives are pretty, crime goes down, and a stable system is put into place.

Earlier: The crisis of character — Brendan O’Neill on Identity politics and the death of the individual.