In January 2013, "74% of the French said that Islam 'is not compatible with French society'."

Christopher Caldwell, at the Wall Street Journal, really pours it on at the last few paragraphs of his Saturday essay, "Immigration and Islam: Europe’s Crisis of Faith France and the rest of Western Europe have never honestly confronted the issues raised by Muslim immigration":

What continues [after the Paris attacks] is the deafness of France’s government and mainstream parties to public opinion (and popular suffrage) on the issues of immigration and a multiethnic society. Mr. Hollande’s approval ratings have risen since the attacks, but they are still below 30%. In January 2013, according to the newsweekly L’Express, 74% of the French said that Islam “is not compatible with French society.” Though that number fell last year, it is almost certain to be higher now.

Voters all across Europe feel abandoned by the mainstream political class, which is why populist parties are everywhere on the rise. Whatever the biggest initial grievance of these parties—opposition to the European Union for the U.K. Independence Party, opposition to the euro for Alternative für Deutschland, corruption for Italy’s 5 Star Movement—all wind up, by voter demand, placing immigration and multiculturalism at the center of their concerns.

In France, it is the Front National, a party with antecedents on the far right, that has been the big beneficiary. In the last national election, for seats in the European Parliament, the FN, led by Marine Le Pen (daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen), topped the polls. But the ruling Socialists froze the Front National out of the recent national ceremonies of mourning, limiting participation in the Paris rally to those parties it deemed “republican.” This risks damaging the cause of republicanism more than the cause of Le Pen and her followers.

Acts of terrorism can occur without shaking a country to its core. These latest attacks, awful as they were, could be taken in stride if the majority in France felt itself secure. But it does not. Thanks to wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, thousands of young people who share the indignation of the Kouachis and Coulibaly are now battle-hardened and heavily armed.

France, like Europe more broadly, has been careless for decades. It has not recognized that free countries are for peoples strong enough to defend them. A willingness to join hands and to march in solidarity is a good first response to the awful events of early January. It will not be enough.

Be sure to RTWT.

One of the reasons that leftist MSM outlets attack populist parties as "far-right extremists" is because traditional nationalist conservatism (populism) is a threat to the left's stultifying cultural hegemony of political correctness and decay. The "far-right" isn't the problem in Europe. It's the left. And the left's capitulation to radical Islam.