One day in middle school, Stanley Simon, then Bronx borough president, paid a visit to my class. Fielding students’ questions, one girl asked him about the burned-out buildings in the Bronx. Playing the typical politician, he emphatically replied, “Where?! Where?!” Having been raised in a somewhat less rarified atmosphere than my schoolmates, I could have told him where. But at age 13 I wasn’t inclined to speak up.
Public officials are almost universally loath to admit that decay or disorder exists within their jurisdictions, especially since their policies are often to blame. Such is the case with European politicians denying the existence of “no-go zones,” Muslim enclaves in which the enforcement of European civil law is spotty at best and where police and emergency personnel may fear to tread. In fact, when presidential candidate Donald Trump recently said that such Islamized areas exist in London, he was castigated by British officials. But now some U.K. police officers have come forward with a startling admission:
Trump is right.
Reports the Daily Mail:
[O]ne serving officer in west London said: ‘Islamification has and is occurring’, adding: ‘You have to have extra vigilance in certain parts when you are working’.
… A Lancashire 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’.
One officer from Yorkshire said on the online forum Police.Community: ‘I’m not allowed to travel in half blues to work anymore IN MY OWN CAR as we’re ‘All at risk of attack’ — yet as soon as someone points out the obvious it’s ‘divisive.’
He added: ‘In this instance he (Trump) isn’t wrong. Our political leaders are best either ill-informed or simply being disingenuous.
… One female officer in the Met said if a police officer was attacked it would be written off.
She said: ‘Even if one of us did get killed or dragged off in a van. It would just be reported as a ‘one-off incident’ and no reason to change the ‘British style of policing.’
This reflects a statement made by U.K.-based Muslim refugee Dr. Mudar Zahran, who readily admitted in an October interview, “We do have a genuine problem with Muslims in Europe … in most cases they don’t seem to fully integrate in the country.” Also according with it are comments made last year by Tom Winsor, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary. Referring obliquely to Muslim communities, he conceded that the areas were certainly no-call zones, saying, reports the Mail, “‘There are cities in the Midlands where the police never go because they are never called. They never hear of any trouble because the community deals with that on its own. They just have their own form of community justice’. Mr Winsor said some forces get ‘close to zero’ calls in some areas.”
Winsor confessed that, as a result, the police have no idea what crimes are perpetrated in such areas; even murders could be committed and go unreported and unanswered. Note here that so-called “honor killings” (victims are girls) are tolerated in Islamic cultures. Also know that “community justice” in Winsor’s statement would be a euphemism for Sharia law.
Despite this, British politicians and officials have roundly rejected or condemned Trump’s statements. Prime Minister David Cameron called Trump’s allegations “divisive,” Home Secretary Theresa May said they were “absolutely wrong,” Member of Parliament George Osborne and London Mayor Boris Johnson called them “nonsense,” and London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith labeled the real-estate tycoon “an appalling creature.” Even Scotland Yard weighed in, though more respectfully, stating “Mr Trump could not be more wrong.”
Yet critics might say this brings to mind Upton Sinclair’s observation, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And silencing tongues in Britain is not just threat to livelihood but also the nation’s “hate speech” laws, which are used to stifle criticism of Islam; in one shocking case, politician Paul Weston was charged last year with a “Racially Aggravated Crime” for quoting an Islam critique penned by Winston Churchill.
The truth does, however, leak out. For example, the Gatestone Institute’s Soeren Kern quoted Pakistani-born former Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali as saying, “One of the results of [multiculturalism] has been to further alienate the young from the nation in which they were growing up and also to turn already separate communities into ‘no-go’ areas where adherence to this ideology [of Islamic extremism] has become a mark of acceptability.”
Yet one of the sticking points is semantics. Obviously, “no-go zone” is not an official designation, but an informal characterization meant to relate a general concept. As Kern also reported, quoting Islam expert Andrew C. McCarthy’s “lucid clarification of what no-go zones are and of what they are not”: “No sensible person is saying that state authorities are prohibited from entering no-go zones as a matter of law. The point is that they are severely discouraged from entering as a matter of fact — and the degree of discouragement varies directly with the density of the Muslim population and its radical component. Ditto for non-Muslim lay people.”
And the problem is even more severe in France (note that Trump also cited Paris’ no-go-zone problem). As Kern wrote in his January report “European ‘No-Go’ Zones: Fact or Fiction? Part 1: France”:
A 120-page research paper entitled “No-Go Zones in the French Republic: Myth or Reality?” documented dozens of French neighborhoods “where police and gendarmerie cannot enforce the Republican order or even enter without risking confrontation, projectiles, or even fatal shootings.”
In October 2011, a 2,200-page report, “Banlieue de la République” (Suburbs of the Republic) found that Seine-Saint-Denis and other Parisian suburbs are becoming “separate Islamic societies” cut off from the French state and where Islamic Sharia law is rapidly displacing French civil law.
… The Socialist mayor of Amiens, Gilles Demailly, has referred to the Fafet-Brossolette district of the city as a “no-go zone” where “you can no longer order a pizza or get a doctor to come to the house.” Europe 1, one of the leading broadcasters in France, has referred to Marseille as a “no-go zone” after the government was forced to deploy riot police, known as CRS, to confront warring Muslim gangs in the city. The French Interior Ministry said it was trying to “reconquer” 184 square kilometers (71 square miles) of Marseille that have come under the control of Muslim gangs.
It is impossible to adequately cover here all the sources cited by Kern, which include a multitude of newspapers, magazines, documentaries, and public figures who attest to the reality of French no-go zones. Reading his whole report is necessary.
In addition, I have reported on how Swedish paramedics have requested body armor to wear in their nation’s no-go zones; and on how, while liberals have dismissed the no-go-zone story as a rightist meme, it was actually introduced by the New York Times in 2007.
As for politician pettifogging, I’m not sure how many 13-year-olds were fooled by it in my class decades ago. We can only hope that enough adults will see through it today — and that truth won’t become the most perilous no-go zone of all.
Photo of mounted police patrol in London: AP Images
