I was responding to the 'Molenbeek-is-a-no-go-zone" meme that is being repeated here and there. I quoted you because you were the last person to comment on it, that’s all. That may have been a bit flippant on my part, sorry.
Yup. Ignorance fighting, I find, is the longest running game of whack-a-mole :D.
What people must keep in remember is that Iraq War-based impressions to the contrary, the French can be pretty damn aggressive and hawkish when they believe their interests are at stake. After all France is one of the most interventionist countries in the world after America , specially deploying troops in their former colonies in Africa (most notably Mali). Until the last century, it was France that had the reputation of being one of the most martial nations of Europe as it proved under the wars of Louis XIV, the Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars-that ancient spirit of 1789 being seen again in the vows of President Hollande to be “merciless” against the savages and Prime Minister Valls’s declaration that the forces of Islamist reaction would be “totally annihilated”. This is rhetoric far stronger than anything George W. Bush said in the aftermath of 9/11 and both Hollande and Valls are otherwise inoffensive centre-left career politicians.