The only reason I know anything about Le Pen is because of her last run a few years ago. She was highlighted as part of resurgence of nationalism, populism, and xenophobia (i.e. far right) taking hold in Europe.

French people are not oblivious to the prior kerfluffle with Islam.

Driving from Paris, especially sightseeing in Tours, to Bretagne and on down to Biarritz (there's excellent surf on the west coast)with an eye to getting some 'cultcha' on the way, there's no missing reminders that France stopped the Islamic empire from taking over Europe and establishing an unbeatable caliphate.

It may have been 1300 years ago, and it's something we in the USA (unless you're an American Indian) don't have in our subconcious, and yes, Josephine Baker was hugely popular (as a representative of American jazz culture) but the French sense of history still warrants a wariness of minarets and minarets imply.

We're witnessing something similar in the US. There's a long running joke that Mexico will retake it's lost land not militarily, but by outpopulating the WASPs. Gotta change the corpus of the gag to include Asians, Africans, and Middle Easterners.

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