A fascinating and important insight from the ever-astute French commentator Michel Gurfinkiel (subscription required) suggests that Jen-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s neo-fascist National Front, is poised to strike a strategic alliance with French Muslims. Those who have just done a double-take over that last sentence because they assume that French neo-fascists, like the British BNP, detest all immigrants equally and Muslims in particular, should think again.

First, one of the most striking aspects of today’s politics of racial hatred is the axis that links the far left, the far right and Islamists. If you read the websites and utterances of all three, there are certain areas where the point of view and indeed the language and the imagery are virtually identical. Three guesses what those areas are. Yup, got it in one: hatred of the Jews and of Israel.

This, however, is only a part of Gurfinkiel’s analysis of what’s going on in France:

The Islamicization of France is largely a fait accompli. It is assumed that 6 to 8 million citizens or residents of France, 10% to 13% out of a global population of 62 million, are Muslim by now. And that the Muslim community, being more prolific, is much younger than the rest of the population: As much as 25% of French citizens or residents under 20 is Muslim, with the number reaching 40% or 50% in the big cities.

The National Front is surprisingly popular among Muslim immigrants or second-generation Muslim citizens. For all its campaigning about immigration, Mr. Le Pen's party has always extended support to Arab and Islamic causes abroad, from Saddam's Iraq to Arafat's or Hamas Palestine, and from Al Qaeda to Iran. And it is as firmly anti-American and anti-Jewish as the Muslim community itself tends to be.

The attraction of the French far left, which accounts for another 20% of the national vote, toward Islam, rabid anti-Americanism, and even anti-Semitism, a phenomenon underscored by the emergence of Dieudonne, a former liberal music-hall humorist who has turned into an enormously popular French equivalent of Louis Farrakhan. Dieudonne, the son of a black Camerounese father and a white French mother, claims that Jews were the main European slave traders in the 17th and 18th centuries. He refers to civic and educational programs about the Holocaust as ‘memory pornography.’ He has welcomed the electoral victory of Hamas in Palestine. According to the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, he is in moral terms ‘Le Pen's son.’

Recently, Le Pen’s strategic adviser Jean-Claude Martinez has said that the National Front

must adjust to globalization, forget about some of its founding myths, like ‘Joan of Arc fighting an alien invasion,’ and welcome immigrant blacks and Arabs into the national fold.

This is because, Gurfinkiel suggests, the far right in France is not monolithic but is in the process of fracturing into neo-fascists like le Pen and more traditional Christian right-wingers:

Neofascists think Jews and Americans are the chief enemy, rather than Arabs and Muslims. In a way, they even tend to celebrate Arabs and Muslims as fellow fascists. As for Christian right-wingers, they see Arabs and Muslims as the chief enemy. For years, Mr. Le Pen has been pretending he is a Christian right-winger rather than a neofascist and that resistance to Muslim immigration is his major concern. Now he has emerged on the side of the neofascist branch and is ready to drop the anti-Muslim issue.

It reminds me of the British Foreign Office during the 1930s and 1940s, which thought that the Arabs and the Jews were each as loathsome as each other but that the Jews had the edge in loathsomeness.

Did I say the 1930s and 1940s?