This is why contemptuous laughter is the only appropriate response when a Western politician talks about freedom.

Former film star Brigitte Bardot, France’s iconic blonde bombshell and “sex kitten” who reigned supreme from 1952 – 1973, has been on trial five times for insulting Muslims and “inciting racial hatred.” The prosecutor in her fifth trial, Anne de Fontette, wants a heftier fine and a tougher sentence: the equivalent of $24,000 and a two month (hopefully) suspended jail term.

What crimes has Bardot committed in the land without a First Amendment, in the land of Hate Speech laws that are being slickly exploited by non-persecuted Muslims?

Bardot has written: “I am fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country.”

[French Icon Brigitte Bardot's Blasphemy Against Muslims, by Dr. Phyllis Chesler, Breitbart, February 20, 2015]

Bardot's opposition is not rooted in the defense of Catholic France that animates the French Right.  She opposes Islamization largely because she feel it has a negative impact on animal rights.  She is, as she always has been, an icon of the French Left.

It's important to remember how central Bardot was once seen to the left wing French intelligentsia and feminist movements during her prime.  She was seen as the central figure in the dissolution of traditional sexual norms, best exemplified in the notorious barefoot dancing scene from 1956's And God Created Woman, a film censored in the United States by the National Legion of Decency.

As the left-wing Guardian put it,

In a 1959 essay about Bardot called The Lolita Syndrome, Simone de Beauvoir foresaw Bardot's entire life with its upheavals and triumphs. She called Bardot the "locomotive of women's history", and compared her irruption into French society with existentialism, presenting Bardot as the first and most liberated woman of postwar France.

De Beauvoir wrote: "When Marlene Dietrich exhibited her silk-wrapped thighs while singing in her husky voice, she was casting a spell . . . Brigitte Bardot doesn't cast spells; she acts. Her flesh doesn't have the generosity that symbolises passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and when she undresses, she reveals no mystery. She simply shows off her body, which is in constant movement. She walks, she dances, she moves. In the hunting game, she is both hunter and prey. Males are an object for her, as much as she is an object for them. This is precisely what hurts males' pride." It was clear to all that Bardot, like Albert Camus's stranger, experienced the world through her senses.

[Happy birthday, Brigitte Bardot, by Agnes Poirier, The Guardian, September 21, 2009]

Now, this same class is the one that puts Bardot on trial for opposing the Islamization of her country.  The problem is that there is no more French Left.  There is only an anti-French Left that is willing to throw aside everything it once valued— feminism, animal rights, homosexual liberation—if it means they get to dispossess the hated native Europeans.

The latest trial of Bardot shows that the French regime is lying when it spouts its nonsense about #JeSuisCharlie and preens about free speech.  But it is more than that.  It shows that the entire French Left, and really the entire Western Left, has simply devolved into a cult of bigotry against white people.  Behind all their jargon and sloganeering, they have no explanatory power and nothing to say.  They don't even have any principles left.  They just hate us.

What is policy vision of the Western Left?  Shut up, they explained.

Apparently, the French "far Right" has come a long way from Joseph de Maistre