National Review
Banning Barbie
By Andrew Stuttaford
August 17, 2025 9:15 AM
Plans for an open-air free showing of the film Barbie in one of Paris’s poorer suburbs (which is in a département with a high immigrant population) have been canceled following threats from young Muslims.
The Daily Telegraph:
block quote
The town’s communist mayor told a press conference on Thursday that he shelved the screening to “protect” town hall officials who were verbally assaulted that evening by a dozen young men making “insistent threats”.
Olivier Sarrabeyrouse said the group had threatened to smash equipment and had accused Barbie of “promoting homosexuality” and “undermining the integrity of women”.
The mayor filed a criminal complaint and condemned what he called “obscurantism and fundamentalism”, but also accused Right-wing politicians of exploiting the row.
block quote end
Sarrabeyrouse, who can be assumed to have quite a few Muslims among his voters, is trying to have it both ways. The “exploitation” of this incident, including, presumably, the decision by France’s conservative culture minister, a Muslim woman, to report it to prosecutors is more than called for.
The Daily Telegraph:
block quote
Aurore Bergé, minister for gender equality, said the furor was “not insignificant” because it underlined attempts by hardline Muslims to “infiltrate” districts with immigrant populations and influence social behavior.
block quote end
Bergé’s analysis is quite right. What moves such as those by that group of a “dozen young men” are designed to do is to create a parallel society among France’s Muslim communities governed by a hardline form of Islamism. This phenomenon was recently described in a report written by two senior civil servants, in which they warned, the Telegraph reported, that “the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations were setting up “ecosystems at the local level to structure the lives of Muslims from birth till death”.”
That is bad and dangerous enough, but the rules enforced through this ecosystem will not only affect Muslims: “Barbie,” after all, was meant to be open to everyone.
Such tactics work. How many municipalities will now quietly avoid free screenings of films, however innocuous, lest they offend the sensibilities of self-appointed Islamic morality police?
No comments:
Post a Comment