It was said they didn’t exist. It was said that anyone who talked about them was an “Islamophobe” driven by blind bigotry to oppose Muslim migration. But now the primary author of Muslim migration into Europe has, apparently, joined the ranks of the Islamophobes.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (shown) has admitted that no-go zones do, in fact, exist.
The confession was made in an interview with German broadcaster n-tv as Merkel advocated tough-on-crime policies. As Fox News reported Thursday:
She said that people have a right to feel safe when they meet in public places. When asked to clarify, she specified that she was talking about no-go zones.
“It means for example that there cannot be any no-go areas, that there cannot be areas where no-one dares to go but there are such places,” she said. “One has to call them by name and do something about it.”
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No-go zones are primarily Muslim areas in some European countries where civil law has broken down and been, at least in part, supplanted by Sharia law, and where civil authorities often fear to tread. As French intellectual Christian de Moliner put it last year, referencing his nation, they are “territories [that] are outside the control of the Republic,” where the “police can come only in force and for limited durations.”
The significance of Merkel’s admission cannot be overstated. As Fox put it, “Despite evidence of the existence of [the] areas in Western countries, European leaders and left-wing media commentators have long denied, and sometimes even mocked, those who claim that no-go zones exist.”
For sure. No leader aiming to win re-election wants to admit that his government has lost control over parts of its territory. Moreover, statist Western politicians have been zealously trying to sell their multiculturalist schemes, driven by a combination of formulaic devotion to ideology and a desire to import left-leaning voters. The like-minded mainstream media have been complicit in this, knowing that widespread awareness of no-go zones — emotion-grabbing advertisements illustrating multiculturalism’s and immigrationism’s failure — can collapse the Machiavellian marketing plan.
And Merkel’s admission threatens to break this dam of deceit. As Fox also informs:
The Associated Press reported that it had left fellow lawmakers “speechless.” The remarks quickly spread across Europe, fueling and encouraging nationalist-populist politicians who have pushed back against lax immigration policies.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, which has been under siege from the European Union for its hardline stance on asylum seekers, hailed Merkel’s comments as a victory.
“Today, it seems this taboo has been broken. Guess who is talking about ‘no-go zones’?” a blog post on the Hungarian government’s official website said.
It wouldn’t be surprising to hear a deluge of “I told you so’s.” The New American and other real-news entities have been reporting on no-go zones for years, only to be rewarded with name-calling. Just consider the 2015 Fox News appearance by terrorism expert Steven Emerson, where his mention of the areas combined with an innocent mistake fueled red-hot media propaganda. As veteran journalist Leo Hohmann writes:
Emerson did misspeak, saying the city of Birmingham, England, was a no-go zone, an error that he immediately took responsibility for and corrected. He meant to say a certain portion of the city was a no-go zone.
But what happened next was [a] cynical game of deception.
Fox claimed that no no-go zones existed in Europe and the New York Times and Washington Post chided Emerson with the same outrageously false claims.
The irony? The New York Times practically invented the no-go-zone story. As I wrote in 2015, quoting Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin, “The relevant essay, authored by David Rief in 2007 and entitled ‘The Battle Over the Banlieues,’ explored the 2005 Muslim rioting in big-city French suburbs (called the ‘banlieues’) and, as Tobin puts it, ‘did not shy away from the fact that many of these places [no-go zones] had become all but off-limits to those who did not trace their origins to North Africa.’”
With the Left being short on memory and integrity and long on multiculturalist ideology, though, none of this mattered. Intense attacks by the government-media complex ensued. For example, The Guardian, ever the guardian of progressive prevarication, mocked Emerson in a cynically sarcastic article. Then, after Fox reported subsequent to Emerson’s appearance that no-go zones exist in Paris, the city’s socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, threatened to sue the station. Sufficiently cowed, Fox apologized on air for the reporting, essentially agreed to “hear, see and speak no evil,” and banned Emerson from making future appearances.
Emerson does on occasion make hyperbolic statements, which can give the Left just enough rope with which to hang the Truth. And this, a cover-up, is precisely what Merkel’s comments have helped expose, as Emerson told Leo Hohmann Thursday evening. Saying there should be “firings en masse” for the media malpractice, Emerson stated, “Fox in particular owes me an apology for its despicable assertion two years ago that no-go zones did not exist. Let’s see how honest the media is now.”
But honesty is in short supply. Mayor Hidalgo threatened her lawsuit saying the “image” and “honor of Paris” had been harmed. But note that the Jan. 2015 Fox no-go-zone reporting was sparked by the earth-shaking Muslim jihadist attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices on the seventh of that month. It’s events such as that and the 2015 Bataclan concert hall jihadist attack — which were enabled by suicidal leftist policies — that hurt the image of Paris.
But European leaders have much to be embarrassed about. It was reported in 2014 that Swedish paramedics need body armor to enter violent Muslim areas; in 2017 that animal-welfare workers were chased out of a no-go-zone in Denmark; in 2012 that the socialist mayor of Amiens, Gilles Demailly, called the Fafet-Brossolette district of the city a “no-go zone” where “you can no longer order a pizza or get a doctor to come to the house”; and in 2015 that a British police officer told MailOnline, “‘There are Muslim areas of Preston that, if we wish to patrol, we have to contact local Muslim community leaders to get their permission’.”
Then there’s the aforementioned Christian de Moliner. We only know of him because he proposed last year that France be divided and a quasi-Sharia state within the nation be created to avoid civil war with Muslims. His reasoning is that the no-go-zone problem is so severe that it’s the only way to turn lemons into lemonade.
Speaking of lemons, while Merkel deserves credit for entering the Forbidden Zone of “no-go zone” utterances, she has a history of being a day late and a Deutsche Mark short (yes, Germany uses the Euro now, but I won’t let an EU currency scheme ruin my alliteration). She admitted in 2010 that multiculturalism has “utterly failed” — but then trumpeted pie-in-the-sky “integration” policies instead. Now she’s taken the next baby step, but what does it really mean?
After all, “Merkel, like most European leaders, isn’t interested in doing anything meaningful about it [the problem],” as Frontpage Mag’s Daniel Greenfield opined Friday. “The massive migration makes no-go-zones inevitable and there is no realistic possibility for the integration that Euro elites talk up under those conditions.”
“By opening the door to mass migration, Merkel made no-go-zones inevitable and while referencing them is a tiny step forward, it will otherwise be meaningless,” he concluded.
Tragically, it likely will even remain the case that talk of Muslim no-go zones is a media no-go zone.
Photo of German Chancellor Angela Merkel: AP Images
