Here we are in Nice again. It is sunny here, temperature in the 60s, which is not the point of this post. The point is that there are 5 million Muslims in this country, almost ten percent of the population. We got here about 8:30 last night. Got back more quickly than we intended because we have a funeral to go to--Peggy's brother has died. We went quickly out to a restaurant three blocks away, and across the street were three soldiers in berets, with sub machine guns in front of a Jewish meeting hall of some kind--I don't even know what it was, I had never noticed it before. I talked to them a moment. They looked to be about 18 years old. They are part of a response to the crisis, or crisis mood, that grips this country, a crisis that is immeasurable in scope and without a discernable end. Since we still have no food in the house we went out to lunch today too, passing in a different direction three other 18 year old soldiers with sub machine guns outside a Jewish school--and three more across the street. That's nine soldiers on two streets within a six block radius of our apartment. France is not and never has been openly anti Semitic. To France, French Jews are French and there is nothing more to discuss. Even during the Nazi occupation, most French Jews were hidden and protected. This morning the Nice Matin was full of articles and fear, articles about jihad networks past and present, some shut down, some perhaps not, and about French born Arabs recruiting youths for Isis in Iraq, and of recruits already killed there, and of recruiters recruiting also for who knows what else, and about jihadist Twitter and Facebook accounts shut down, and about the famous Nice Carnival, Feb. 13 to March 1, where additional security measures have already been added on with more to come, bomb detectors and defusers will be brought in, etc. We were only gone 28 days, and to come back to find all this amazed me. As with America's reaction to 9/11, the jihadists, one might say, have already won the war.
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