Religious extremism is a terrible thing. In Britain, religious extremism was responsible for some of the worst parts of our history, such as the burning of alleged heretics and the judicial murder of heterodox thinkers by both Protestant and Catholic aligned monarchs alike. It has caused plots against governments and spawned legislation, sometimes harsh legislation to combat such plots. In countries like Israel Jewish religious extremism has seen whole sections of the population, such as Haredi Jews, use their somewhat extreme interpretation of Torah to avoid their responsibility to do national service and defend the nation and thereby gain an advantage that non-Haredi Jews don’t have, that of not having to give up time and incur risk by joining the military. In India, Hindu extremism has seen violence and social pressures aimed at Christians, Muslims and other non-Hindus and of course how could we ever forget the intense and constant violence that occurs across the planet by Islamic extremists. About the only extremists that nobody has to worry about are extremist Jains as their extremists go out of their way not to kill any living creature.

In Western nations we rarely have to be overly concerned about extremist Christians or Jews or Hindus. Whilst they may be a little gobby at times, they are generally not disposed to violence. That is not the case when it comes to the extremist followers Islam and those who promote extremist Islamic religious views. Extremist Muslims do very readily go for the path of violence and out of all the European nations, France has suffered the most from attacks by those enamoured by and aligned to extreme interpretations of Islam.

However, it seems that France has had enough of Islamic extremism. France has finally reached the point where it cannot deny the existence of the problem of Islamic extremism any longer and can no more promote the fiction that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’.

The French National Assembly has voted to approve a law to fight Islamic extremism and separatism. This vote happened yesterday and has been flagged up for a while and is linked to President Macron’s attempt to deal with France’s ever growing problems of Islamic violence and the Islamic ghettos where such violence is taught and encouraged.

France 24 said:

France’s National Assembly approved Tuesday a law to fight Islamist extremism and separatism in an attempt to tackle the root causes of jihadist violence – in response to a wave of attacks that has seen more than 250 people murdered since 2015.

The text would significantly expand the government’s powers to close religious organisations and places of worship if they are found to air “theories or ideas” that “provoke hate or violence”.

The legislation offers protection to moderate community leaders who are in danger of being toppled by an extremist “putsch”. It will also require all associations to commit in writing to uphold “republican values” – the liberal, Enlightenment values France holds dear – if they want to receive state subsidies.

In order to crack down on religious funding from countries such as Turkey, Qatar or Saudi Arabia, the law will require associations to declare donations over €10,000 euros and have their accounts certified.

A new crime of threatening a public servant in order to gain “a total or partial exemption or different application of the rules” would be punishable by up to five years in prison.

These and the other measures mentioned in the France24 article are pretty strict, some would say draconian, that have been put together in order to deal with the increasing threat France is under from Islamic extremists. Sadly they are very necessary due to the amount of violence and extremism that has come from sections of France’s Islamic community. This law still needs to get past the French Senate where President Macron does not have a majority but I hope that the members of the Senate see sense and back it as this law is one of the better ones that I’ve seen that have been brought forward in any European nation to tackle Islamic extremism and violence.

Although President Macron has many faults, on the subject of recognising and dealing with France’s Islamic extremism problem he’s on the right side of the moral argument. This is because if Islamic extremism is not tackled and tackled hard, then it will grow and eat away at French society and French politics. If the French Senate raises the white flag over this law then I suspect that rather than seeing a much needed pushback against Islamic extremism, France will see its problems with this ideology getting far far worse than they are at present and France’s problems with Islamic extremism are already some of the worst in Europe.