Last week a knife-wielding Tunisian immigrant attacked worshippers at the Basilica of Notre-Dame de L’Assomption in Nice, France. Three people were stabbed or slashed to death: “a 60-year-old woman, whose throat was slashed in the church; a 55-year-old man, stabbed to death inside the church; and a 44-year-old woman, who died in a restaurant across the street after fleeing the basilica.” The attacker was howling Allahu Akbar during the attack, so the killings’ motive may never be known.

Despite the chances of the discovery of motive being so remote, Associated Press took a stab, so to speak, at it in AP Explains: Why France sparks such anger in Muslim world.

What follows is not a clever parody from The Onion or Babylon Bee.

Many countries, especially in the democratic West, champion freedom of expression and allow publications that lampoon Islam’s prophet. So why is France singled out for protests and calls for boycotts across the Muslim world, and so often the target of deadly violence from the extremist margins?

Its brutal colonial past, staunch secular policies, and tough-talking president who is seen as insensitive toward the Muslim faith all play a role.

As France steps up security and mourns three people killed in a knife attack at a church on Thursday – the latest of many attributed to Islamic extremists in recent years — here’s a look at some of the reasons the country is under fire.

That’s right. It is France’s fault that three people, one of them a black immigrant from Brazil, were killed in a church.

When the AP story appeared on Twitter, it was lampooned to the point that AP deleted the tweet.

The bottom line in the article is that if you want to have a secular society and freedom of speech, you are insensitive to Muslims, and you have no right to be shocked when they randomly kill people in a Catholic church.

Of course, the premise of the story is utter bullsh**. It is the same kind of “why do they hate us?” claptrap tossed about in the US after every Muslim terrorist attack. It does nothing to answer the question of why people who hate France seek out refuge in France.

I think the answer is much simpler. France is on the line of contact between Western Civilization and a rising tide of barbarism. Over time a series of weak and pathetic governments that represented a lack of belief in the right of French culture to exist–an impulse also present in the US in regards to American culture–allowed enormous numbers of Muslim North African immigrants to settle permanently in France without any plan to either assimilate them into French society or even educate them about the values of the nation where they lived. Stop me if any of this is beginning to sound familiar.

Recent French governments have discovered that allowing “no go” zones where French law did not run and permitting a violent fringe of a restive and increasingly disloyal minority to carry out assaults on values considered to be core to the French way of life was not acceptable. This has caused some resistance.

Like Italy and Spain, France is finding itself under siege from within, and the natives of those counties are on the cusp of seeing their native culture become a minority culture. France is fighting back, and it is the defense of Western values, not some history of being a colonial oppressor that is creating terrorism.

The idea that France’s colonial history inspired a Tunisian some four generations removed from being under French rule to attack a basilica is nonsense. The idea that a Catholic church was attacked because France is too secular is arrant nonsense. The victims of this terror attack, like Father Jacques Hamel, were killed because they were Christian. They symbolized Western Civilization. Their existence offended a man who had been raised on a form of religious bigotry and intolerance all too common in the region he hails from. There is a way of stopping it. The question is whether France has the guts to do it. It is really that simple.