In a commentary about Saudi Arabia’s nurturing of extremism, Arnaud de Borchgrave has some information on France I haven’t seen elsewhere. French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, who is a man, received a report from French intelligence that must have evoked a tiny frisson of fear in the highly-nuanced diplomat: Head-in-sand saw no evil. (Hat tip: J.D.)

Alarmed by the spread of Islamist extremism in Europe, France’s new Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin, who was the former Foreign Minister, asked the “Renseignments Generaux,” the French equivalent of the FBI’s counter-intelligence branch, for a report on what goes on in the country’s mosques.

Eighty percent of the imams in the 1,000 mosques surveyed by RG are foreigners; 20 percent French nationals, but only 2 percent born in France. Most of the imams said they are unpaid volunteers dependent on collection plates. In 40 percent of the mosques, imams admitted they were “self-proclaimed” or “improvised” with no theological credentials. Only the Turks could prove they had undergone religious training.

A little over one tenth of the imams surveyed said they were “self-taught” and were getting their religious training on the Internet. Asked to show what web sites they were consulting, they were all pro-al-Qaida. France’s domestic intelligence agency also reported a steady increase in inflammatory sermons from Brest to Marseilles. Their attacks on French discrimination against Muslims — female scarves banned from state schools — paled next to anti-U.S. diatribes.

The Saudi royals detained over 1,000 imams after last year’s bombings in May and November. They were warned they would go straight to jail if they so much as mentioned the word jihad (holy war) in their Friday prayers. The Saudi billionaire, speaking not for attribution, said there are 40,000 mosques in Saudi Arabia, and the warnings go largely unheeded.