French Mayor Calls for Discussing 'Great Replacement' to Become a Crime

A leading leftist mayor in France has called on the government to outlaw public debate of the “Great Replacement”, thereby potentially turning large sections of the native population into thought criminals. The Moroccan-heritage mayor of the multicultural Paris suburb of Trappes, Ali Rabeh, accused the so-called “far-right” of being responsible for the shooting which occurred in his city earlier this month, claiming that discussions surrounding the “Great Replacement” had radicalised the suspected shooter, who killed one and injured five others in an alleged retaliation against ethnic and religious minorities for the previous month of riots and looting. Appearing on France Inter on Friday, Mayor Rabeh said, according to Le Journal du Dimanche, that the 1881 law on press freedom could be amended to include penalties for “those who have presented a group of people, because of their origin, their belonging to a religion, an ethnicity or a so-called race as actors in a replacement process.” “I think the law needs to be toughened,” he said, claiming that the “provisions preventing incitement to racial hatred” are “insufficient.” The term was originally coined by French philosopher Renaud Camus, who argued that elites in Western societies viewed their citizens as interchangeable economic units that could be replaced by cheaper migrant labour with little consequence. Mayor Rabeh specifically pointed to presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, complaining that despite having been convicted for inciting racial hatred, he is “still invited to almost every talk show to spew his hatred and venom without being threatened with anything other than a fine, which for him is insignificant.” Zemmour, a leading proponent of re-migration in the country, responded: “The Gulag is on the march. Here is the project of their socialist-Islamic Republic.” The proposal was also criticised by National Rally president Jordan Bardella — the current favourite to become the next prime minister of France — who remarked that the move would “criminalise the feelings of at least 60 per cent of the French, who observe a ‘profound demographic transformation.’ Unless it’s to celebrate it, of course.” Indeed, a survey from the Institut français d’opinion publique (Ifop) earlier this year found that six in ten French people believe that the French are being “progressively replaced by non-European populations, primarily from the African continent.” Among those who agreed with the sentiment, 66 per cent said it was entirely bad, compared with 21 per cent who were neutral, and nine per cent who thought it was a good thing. A report from the Immigration and Demography Observatory (OID) in Paris in September found that if immigration levels continue at their current pace, the native French population — defined merely as those whose grandparents were born in the country — are set to become a minority in their own country by around 2050. Additionally, the report forecasts that if immigration remains steady, people of non-European extraction would become the majority by the mid-2070s. As opposed to other Western countries, the “Great Replacement” has also been promoted by the far-left, which, rather than dismissing it as a so-called conspiracy theory, has simply proclaimed it to be a good thing. Indeed, presidential candidate and the leader of the far-left France Insoumise party (France in Rebellion/LFI), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has hailed the Great Replacement and the formation of a “New France”. Mélenchon, who often complains about “ugly” white France, has previously admitted that the hard left cannot rely on the rural, white working class to support socialism. Others within his party have also embraced the concept, including MP Clémence Guetté, who boasted in June that efforts to preserve the native white population had failed, declaring in the National Assembly: “You have lost the racist ideological battle. Today, one in three French people is already linked to immigration.” Follow Kurt Zindulka on X: Follow @KurtZindulka or e-mail to: kzindulka@breitbart.com