France’s Wuhan coronavirus lockdown measures, which only began easing days ago, were among the world’s strictest. “Permits to leave one’s home were limited to 60 minutes, once a day, and no farther than half a mile,” writes the Gatestone Institute’s Dr. Guy Millière. Approximately 15.5 million people were stopped and checked, and 915,000 citations were issued.
“The citations, according to newspapers, were given to people who stayed outside for more than an hour, or who went beyond the authorized limits,” reports Millière, a professor at the University of Paris.
But there is a group police have been told not to stop at all: People living in Muslim dominated no-go zones, euphemistically called zones-urbaines-sensibles (“sensitive urban zones”).
In fact, the cops aren’t even supposed to venture near such places. As police union president Yves Lefebvre explained, “The government knows that a large-scale uprising could happen, and that a minor incident might be enough to set the powder keg ablaze,” relates Millière.
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“Therefore, police officers have unwritten instructions: they must avoid incidents at all costs. If an incident occurs, they know that the government will blame the police, and no one else,” Lefebvre continued.
He’s not kidding, either. Just consider a story Millière recounts:
Saturday, April 18, 11 pm. Villeneuve-la-Garenne, a small town in the northern suburbs of Paris. A young man rides a motorcycle at high speed and hits the door of a police car. He breaks his leg. He is sent to the hospital. He does not have a driver’s license but does have a long criminal history. He was sentenced several times by the courts for drug trafficking, robbery with violence and sexual assault.
As soon as news of the accident is released, hostile messages about the police circulate on social media; and in a dozen cities in France, riots break out. The riots … continue for five days in a row. A police station in Strasbourg is attacked and set on fire. A school is nearly destroyed a few miles from Villeneuve-la-Garenne.
Rather than responding with firm language, the French government is saying that an investigation into the behavior of the police has been opened and that the officers will most likely be punished.
No-go zones, areas in European nations where civil law has broken down and to some extent been replaced by Sharia law and where authorities often fear to tread, were once dismissed as a rightist “myth.” In fact, some years ago the mayor of Paris threatened to sue Fox News for reporting on them.
Since then, however, Angela Merkel, the main author of Europe’s recent years’ mass Third World migration, has acknowledged their existence (in 2018). Additionally, overlooked is that the New York Times, letting a little truth slip in 2007, practically originated the no-go-zone story.
So now we don’t hear much about the zones because, as commentator David Burge (“Iowahawk”) put it, “Journalism is about covering important stories — with a pillow, until they stop moving.”
Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop what’s covered up from festering. In fact, France’s no-go-zones have exploded numerically from fewer than 100 in 2005 to more than 750 today, and “police enter them only by carefully preparing commando-like operations beforehand,” Millière asserts. “Gangs and radical imams seem totally in control.”
(Note that similar stories have come out of Sweden.)
It’s so bad now, Millière avers, that “a simple traffic accident involving the police can lead to nights of destruction and looting.” Yet “because members of the government seem to believe that if riots occur, a civil war really could happen,” he adds a sentence later, “the police are asked not to intervene and to stand aside until the destruction stops.”
This is just a bit like the Baltimore mayor who said in 2015 that rioters should be given “space” to “destroy.” Yet there is a difference, as another story presented by Millière illustrates:
A few months ago, a police officer, Noam Anouar, who infiltrated Islamist circles, published a book, France Must Know. No-go zones in France, he wrote, are now foreign enclaves on French territory. “The gangs operating there,” he noted, “have formed a parallel economy based on drug trafficking.”
“They consider themselves at war with France and with Western civilization. They act in cooperation with Islamist organizations, and define acts of predation and rampage as raids against infidels.”
Anouar concluded that reclaiming these areas today would be complicated, costly, and involve calling in the army.
So as a result, the cowardly French government turns a blind eye to the problem. Moreover, not only will pandemic-caused economic distress exacerbate the situation, but Millière states that no-go zones’ dispensation from lockdown measures reveals the situation: It’s a tacit admission they’re no longer part of the French republic.
It also constitutes maddening discrimination. While other Frenchmen had to abide by lockdown rules during Lent, Easter, and Passover, no-go-zone Muslims get to worship during Ramadan as they wish.
And Frenchman afflicted with the Wuhan virus really do need prayers, too, as doctors “have lost the right to decide what medicine to prescribe and are forbidden to see patients in person,” Millière also tells us.
“People who have the symptoms for Covid-19 are asked to remain at home without medication; if their condition worsens, they may call an ambulance,” he continues. “If they are over 70 years old, however, an ambulance will not come. A decree from March 19 asked hospitals strictly to limit access to people defined as ‘too old’.”
Yet what most severely afflicts France can’t be cured in a hospital. For while the balkanization issue is complex, France — and the entire West — are beset by four identifiable underlying problems:
• Immigrationism — the belief that immigration is always good, always necessary, must never be questioned, and must be the one constant in an ever-changing universe of policy.
• Multiculturalism — the belief that all cultures are “morally” equal and, therefore, that it’s wrong to impose a host culture’s norms on newcomers. Instead, they should be encouraged to cling to their own culture, which discourages assimilation and leads to the development of sub-nations within nations.
• Moral and cultural rot — an overlooked prerequisite for assimilation is that immigrants must be given something appealing to assimilate into. The West’s moral degradation makes this impossible.
• Moral relativism — this is the major factor because it correlates with cultural relativism (part of multiculturalism). If Westerners still believed in Truth, in moral absolutes, they’d apply a discerning eye to immigration. They’d ask about cultural elements that could enter their land, “Are they good or bad?” “Will they make the country better or worse?” But their relativism negates proper intellectual analysis of moral distinctions. For it not only justifies personal sin (its real appeal), but all sin — including, of course, that which could be imported.
As for France, it’s divided not only into French areas and no-go zones, but also on the matter of how to deal with the problem. “Intellectual” Christian de Moliner recommended in 2017 that the nation be more officially divided, that the Muslim zones be given semi-autonomy, as if appeasement and half measures would work. In contrast, journalist Eric Zemmour recently pointed out that “France is on the brink of chaos” and said that the no-go zones should be reconquered “by force.”
Whatever course the country chooses, it won’t be pretty. National decline never is — and there’s no Charles Martel on the horizon.
Photo of fractured French flag: Pomogayev/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
