Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” unveils false flag terror

By Kevin Barrett, VT Editor

Imagine: On the very day a highbrow literary novel is released, a gargantuan publicity stunt catapults it far beyond the top of the bestseller list, making its author and publisher rich. (Actually, the publisher was already rich, but you get my drift.)

And imagine: Thanks to the aforementioned publicity stunt, the book becomes a political H-bomb: the most explosive, high-impact political novel in modern French history . . . maybe in modern history, period. Its very title, and its author’s very name, become rallying cries for a new crusade – and slurs in the mouths of those who oppose that crusade.

And further imagine: Nobody even entertains the possibility that that the book’s release date and the publicity stunt might have been intentionally coordinated.

On January 7th, 2015, Michel Houellebecq’s “Islamophobic” novel Soumission – which describes a 2022 Muslim takeover of France – was released. On the same date, a massacre attributed to radical Muslims took place in the Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The terror stunt made Houellebecq’s name, and his novel’s title, buzzwords of French islamophobia, pushing sales to over 120,000 copies in just five days – the same five days when millions of mind-control victims marched in the streets holding identical “Je suis Charlie” signs.

Thanks to such researchers as Swiss professor Daniele Ganser, we now know that virtually all high-profile “leftist” terror attacks in Europe during the Cold War were Operation Gladio false flag publicity stunts engineered by NATO and allied intelligence services (and the bankster elite that holds their puppet strings). There is no reason to believe that this has changed now that Islam has been substituted for communism as the West’s designated civilizational enemy.

Yet just as most people living in the 1970s through 1980s were dumb enough to believe that “radical leftists” (rather than the enemies of leftists) were behind the Brabant shootings, the Bologna train station bombing, and the depredations of the Red Brigades and the Baader Meinhof gang, so most people today are “even dumber enough” to think “radical Muslims” (rather than the enemies of Muslims) are behind 9/11, Bali, Madrid, 7/7, Mumbai, Charlie Hebdo, and the recent Friday the 13th hecatomb in Paris.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Given the historical context of Operation Gladio, how can anyone not be suspicious about Soumission coming out on Charlie Hebdo Day? And yet the crazy coincidence theorists had a field day. Christopher de Bellaigue in the MI-6 asset The Guardian wrote:

Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission made its entry into the world under conditions that can confidently be declared unprecedented. Soumission did not simply come out on 7 January, the day when jihadists attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo; it was both pebble and ripple on a fathomless day.

Breakfast had seen the critics taking chunks out of this preposterous fantasy in which France comes under Islamic rule eight years from now. “Irresponsible,” pronounced Pierre Assouline, a Goncourt jurist; the commentator Patrick Cohen accused Houellebecq of peddling fears and phantasms. To no one’s surprise a caricature of the author was on the cover of the new edition of Charlie Hebdo (“in 2015 I lose my teeth. In 2022, I will do Ramadan”), while Houellebecq himself, bored, saturnine, dentally lamentable, did the rounds of the morning radio and TV shows. After the attacks at 11.30am things got a lot darker and weirder. A faked “extract” from Soumission, purporting to show that it had predicted the attacks, went viral, Houellebecq cancelled further publicity and left town, and, over the next few days, as republican France roared back at the Islamists, Soumission leaped to the top of the bestseller lists – where it remains (it had sold 120,000 copies after only five days).

Soumission marks one of those exceptional instances when politics and art arrive simultaneously…

By sheerest coincidence, of course.

Obligatory disclaimer: I am obviously not suggesting that Houellebecq was personally complicit in the Charlie Hebdo anti-Islam publicity stunt; nor am I claiming that the primary purpose of the Charlie Hebdo PR operation was to promote Houllebecq’s book. Rather, I suggest that the two events were coordinated by a hidden hand – the same hidden hand behind all the big PR stunts that drive the phony “war on terror” – as a kind of revelation of the method.

The whole operation stinks of Straussian neoconservative doublespeak. Leo Strauss taught that the truth is too dangerous for public consumption; therefore his neocon Guardian Elite should always communicate on two levels: (1) Offer a superficial, simplistic good-vs.-evil message for the dumb masses who aren’t really paying attention (2) While concealing subtle indications hinting at the truth for the benefit of ones fellow members of the Guardian Elite – hints that also serve as revelations of the method designed to paralyze and disempower non-Guardian-Elite members sharp enough to understand the hints but not on board with the program.

A simplistic good-vs.-evil message was conveyed by Submission‘s Guardian Elite PR spinmeisters to the masses: “Islamic terrorists are about to take over France, Europe, and the world! Quick, somebody do something!” This message was bullhorned globally by the orchestrators of the Charlie Hebdo publicity stunt, and linked by association to Houellebecq’s book that came out on the same day.

But those who actually bother to read the book, and manage to understand it, find something completely different. There is nothing in Submission about Islamic terrorism. On the contrary, in Houellebecq’s imaginary France of 2022 Islam rises not through violence, terror, or military force, but because it fosters stable families and offers reasons to go on living. In the novel’s version of the near future, France’s submission to Islam happens not with an Islamic bang, but with a Western whimper.

Submission is not an Islamophobic book. On the contrary, it is a wicked satire whose target is the spiritually-empty West; Islam is just a foil, and a fairly attractive foil at that. Like Muslim convert Murad Hoffman’s Islam: The Alternative, Houellebecq’s Submission views Islam as well-placed to fill the void in the heart of 21st-century post-Christian Europe. But whereas Hoffman writes doggedly earnest non-fiction celebrating the prospect of an Islamic West, Houellebecq’s novel is raunchily hilarious, fantastically fictitious, and grotesquely pessimistic about the possibility of anything, even Islam, making the human condition bearable.

Submission‘s protagonist, François, is a lukewarm devoté of the West’s most robust religion-substitute: literature. He studies, then teaches, Huysmans, whose trajectory from decadence to Catholicism provides the template for François’s journey to the threshold of conversion to Islam.

François’s problem (and the West’s problem) is not any spectral threat of terrorism; rather, it is the inability to find and sustain meaningful human relationships, especially familial and sexual ones. He is distant, physically and emotionally, from his divorced parents. He dates his fellow students while a student, then continues to date students (now his students) after he becomes a teacher. None of these relationships last. No children will result. Everyone is too self-centered.

Meanwhile, Muslims, in France and elsewhere, keep marrying and having children. By 2022, the Muslim Brotherhood party (an improbable invention of Houellebecq’s) and the right-wing nationalist, anti-Muslim National Front party (all too real) are running neck-and-neck for control of France. The insipid mainstream parties throw their support to the Muslims. Bye-bye, Western civilization.

But it isn’t the Muslims’ fault. Houellebecq recognizes that all civilizations have a metaphysical (or, if you will, religious) basis. The Christian heart of Europe stopped beating centuries ago, and the West, as they say, is history.

Though Houellebecq, unlike his protagonist, is unlikely to embrace Islam and submit to God, he does seem prepared to take a perverse, almost masochistic pleasure in yielding passively to the ever-accelerating decay and  gradual-yet-inevitable demise of what passes for secular Western civilization. The neocons, though, have other ideas.

Neocon guru Leo Strauss taught an even more radical version of the doctrine of Karl Schmitt, according to which politics may be defined as the science of organized enmity. What holds all groups together, Strauss and Schmitt taught, is shared loathing of an outsider or scapegoat. (To witness a non-psychopath developing the same insight, read the late René Girard.)

So according to the neocons, the only way to solve the crisis of Western civilization is to whip up mass hatred of another group. Since the demise of Communism, the designated scapegoat group has been Islam.

As Bernard Lewis wrote in his doublespeak classic “Islamic Terrorism?”:

“Why do we speak of Islamic terrorists? When we speak of the Tupamaros, Montaneros, and other exotically-named groups in Latin America, we do not speak of them as Catholic terrorists…(so) Why Islam? Is it because, as has at times been stated of late, Islam as a religion is particularly conducive to terrorism or even tolerant of terrorism? I think one may affirm without hesitation that this is not so.”  (Netanyahu, ed., Terrorism: How the West Can Win, p. 65).

So why DO we speak of Islamic terrorists, Bernard? Because, as he tells us later between-the-lines, we are going to CREATE THEM ourselves in order to unite the West under the banner of Islamophobia. We (the Zionist-led West) will create fake “Islamic terrorists” modeled on the Ismaili assassins of the Middle Ages. Thus we will blacken the name of Islam and brainwash the Western masses into uniting behind a new crusade. And thus will we wreak havoc in the Muslim world, allowing continued Zionist penetration of the Holy Land, just as the original Ismaili terrorists wreaked havoc against their fellow Muslims, allowing Crusader penetration of that same Holy Land.

Thus did Bernard Lewis publish the blueprint for Western intelligence agencies’ creation of al-Qaeda and ISIS. Thus did Lewis announce the bloody wave of false-flag terror that has washed over the world since 9/11/2001.

Netanyahu’s 1979 title Terrorism: How the West Can Win says it clearly and directly. Bibi and his #1 advisor Lewis assert that the only way the West can win is to CREATE “Islamic terrorism” that does not otherwise exist. Terrorism IS “how the West can win.”

The real problem with Islam, as Houellebecq and the neocons understand, is that it produces stable, reasonably happy families. It is thus a demographic and ideological threat, not a military threat.

But today’s Western masses will not rally against the “threat” of happy Muslim families. So they must be deceived by a “noble lie.” The Guardian Elite must engineer a bloody wave of pseudo-“Islamic” terror to rouse the masses and unite them against an (alleged) external enemy.

That is why the Guardian Elite slaughtered almost 3,000 people on 9/11. That is why they butchered the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists last January. And that is why they have just murdered another 200 people in Paris.

“It is for your own good, John Q. Westerner. You are too stupid to understand the subtleties of demographics, family relationships, metaphysical worldviews, civilizational decline, and so on. The only way you will stand up and fight somebody, anybody, to defend your so-called civilization is if we, the Guardian Elite, stage mass spectacles of hellacious carnage and blame it on somebody you can be brainwashed into hating.

“But just so you won’t condemn us as total liars, we are going to make it subtly obvious, if that isn’t too paradoxical, through our revelation of the method. We are going to bring out Houellebecq’s Submission, which lays bare the real nature of the ‘Muslim threat,’ on 1/7/15 – exactly the same day that we stage our first huge French false flag at the Charlie Hebdo offices.

“And then, to make it even more obvious, we will have The Economist blatantly predict the exact date of our next big terror spectacle.”

So there you have it, folks. Houellebecq, who lives accompanied by security guards because the media has miscast him as an arch-Islamophobe, is – at least between the covers of Submission – primarily disgusted by his own culture, not by Islam. The poor guy is really just a self-hating Westerner.

I can’t say I blame him.

As a literary academician turned truth jihadi who came to Islam in 1993, for somewhat different reasons than those of Houellebecq’s protagonist, allow me to present an actionable threat to the author of Submission: During my upcoming trip to Paris, I just might put on my djellaba and rosaries and, brandishing a Qur’an, rush through the dude’s security cordon and give him a big hug. He sure seems like he needs it.

Kevin Barrett

Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.

He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.

He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.

Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.

• Read Dr. Barrett’s Latest Posts Here >>>