In France, all of the activists who are fighting against the Islamist effort to push religion into the public space are on the left

From In France, Even Muslims Have Had It With Radical Muslims by Richard Bernstein.

After the El Paso shooting, the mainstream media were quick to declare it the work of a white supremacist. Given the MSM's desperate effort to push the idea that there is a rise in white supremacy, it of course warranted waiting a few days to see whether this was really the case. And indeed, it is now emerging that what we are looking at is an anti-capitalist, environmental extremist. Possibly a racist as well, though it appears his focus was on overpopulation rather than race, and focusing on "invaders" (i.e. illegal immigrants) rather than Hispanics, per se. In other words, some form of a xenophobe rather than a racist.

And of course, the real issue is that he was a mass murderer, not how the MSM wants to manipulate the presentation of his actions.

I pair the two events (France and El Paso) because the social justice postmodernist ideology prevalent on the left, in MSM, and in academia, all interpret everything in terms of race when all sorts of much more viable explanations exist. The MSM misdirects as much as it illuminates.

Sometimes, seeing how others are dealing with the same issue, can provide greater clarity. In this instance, the other is France.

France has, post-WWII, been staunchly republican and secular. They have long refused to track people by race, properly acknowledging that all people are human, with human rights, not mere tokens of groups. Regrettably, that absence of visibility has helped fuel all sorts of social mistrust.

The article paints a picture that is some sort of an amalgam of the social isolationism of Bowling Alone, the class dysfunction identified in The Bell Curve, and all the research on the disappearance of social trust in the face of societal heterogeneity arising from the increasing percentage of foreign born.

In America, all this gets cast in terms of racism when it is far more related to class, economics, and general out-group xenophobia than it is about race or religion. In France . . ., well, read the the article.

Yes, the symptoms are about the challenges manifesting as Islamic terrorism and aggression, but the root cause concerns are about cultural continuity.

“We're totally past the point where it's the fascist far right and the National Front electorate who are standing up against Islamization,” Marie-Laure Brossier, a city councilor from the Paris suburb of Bagnolet and an ally of Hamdan’s, told me. “The Islamo-left labels us fascists and right-wingers, but that's just an effort on their part to discredit us. Practically all of the activists that I work with and who are fighting against the Islamist effort to push religion into the public space are on the left.”

While the details are different between the US and France, in fact, dramatically different, there are some similarities.

As in the fact that all of this is a function of the inaction of the distant, effete, and ineffective Mandarin Class ignoring the consequences of their policies on the citizens of the nation.

“It's clear that there is a big change,” Pierre Manent, a political philosopher at the prestigious School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. “We've had a substantial immigration, the major part of which consists of Muslims coming from North Africa, Afghanistan, Syria, and other places. The doctrine of successive governments has been to minimize the changes that this has brought about and especially to say that any worries about it are exaggerated. The policy has even prevented us from having clear statistics, because of the idea that the republic is open to all. So the tendency has been to prevent a calm discussion of the question. But a growing part of the culture is Muslim, much of which resists assimilation. That's a fact.

“When you reach a certain critical mass,” he continued, “integration becomes impossible. It isn't even desirable any more for any of the parties in question. We may already be there.”

Read the whole thing. There is a lot going on, here and in France, and we are less aware and knowledgeable about what it is or what is right to do about it than anyone wants to acknowledge. And the Mandarin Class wants to shut down all discussion because it reflects badly on them and threatens their sinecures in the corrupted establishment.