A Report From Hell: Seine Saint-Denis (Part Three)

by Hugh Fitzgerald

The French police do not engage in “harassment,” as the Muslims complain; there is only the occasional attempt of a frazzled and frightened gendarmerie to discourage the drug dealers, the thieves, the criminals of all kinds, including terrorists on the run, who find their refuge in Saint-Denis. So menacing are the Muslim gangs that the French police now must enter Saint-Denis with at least four policemen in each squad car.

Riots erupted in February last year after a young black man was allegedly sexually assaulted with a baton by police officers.

Migrant camps, set up in tents along the Seine in this area of Paris, were destroyed by the police in May, with the occupants who didn’t get away taken for processing in detention centers after a raid.

And what were the French to do? Should they simply have allowed these miserable illegal camps to remain in the very heart of Paris, right along the Seine? With the open trafficking in drugs, the garbage piling up, the human stench, too, not only from an absence of toilets — in the middle of a city that lives by tourism, they had to do something.

Yasser Lout of CCIF (Group Combating Islamophobia in France) said attacks and harassment of innocent Muslim communities had ‘risen considerably since the terrorist attacks’, even though many of the victims of the 2015 Paris outrage were Muslims.

“Mosques have been firebombed, and Muslim centers daubed with pigs’ blood. New powers for the security services make house searches and arrest easier, especially when suspects are targeted because of their ‘physical [Arab] appearance’, said Mr Louati.

One would like to have examples provided of “innocent Muslim communities” that have suffered “attacks and harassment” in France. I have searched up hill and down dale and have found no attacks on such “innocent communities,” but rather, a few isolated incidents — three blank grenades flung on the ground outside a mosque, a single bullet hole in the same mosque fired at night when no one would be present, several shots fired at an empty prayer hall, pigs’ heads placed outside several mosques. These are, of course, deplorable, but there was no physical injuries to anyone. No “communities” under attack. No murders of Muslims. Nothing like what has happened at Charlie Hebdo, or at the HyperCacher, or at the Bataclan, in Paris, or in Toulouse outside a Jewish school, or in Nice, along the Promenade des Anglais, or in a church in Normandy.

The influx of migrants into Saint-Denis has been made worse because of a crackdown at Calais which has seen the infamous Jungle camp — used by migrants as a base to try to reach England — demolished and thousands of inmates dispersed.

One group I met comprised migrants trying to reach Britain who told me they were originally from countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Ghana, which may be troubled but are hardly war-torn. I also met men from Afghanistan.

Andrew Malone notes that the French helped prevent migrants from reaching England by demolishing their camp at Calais, thereby “making worse” the “influx” of migrants to Saint-Denis. What should the French have done? Left all those Muslims to continue disrupting local life from the hideous camp they constructed in Calais, which the French rightly call the “Jungle”? Left them undisturbed so that they could continue to engage in drug trafficking and petty crime from their roost in the Jungle, and from which they keep trying to smuggle themselves, inside lorries, into England? The French police were doing the British a favor, by destroying that camp for criminals intent on entering the U.K.

‘We will stay here until we can get to Britain,‘ I was told. ‘In London they will give you a home; here, they just let you sleep in a park. I will make friends there and find a girlfriend.’

And why do these people want to get to England? Because they think — they’ve heard through the Muslim tam-tam — that the benefits are even better there than in France. That’s what their movements are all about — finding the most generous welfare state, helping themselves to every benefit on offer, supplementing that with money made from crime. No, in London “they will not give you a home” — at least not yet, but it’s an understandable mistake, given how much Muslims do receive. As for finding a “girfriend” — well, there’s always Rotherham. Is that what Malone’s Muslim informant had in mind, as I suspect? Not exactly a desirable kind of immigrant. He says nothing about wanting to contribute to Great Britain. He wants a free house. He wants a girlfriend. That’s the extent  of his vision.

First published in Jihad Watch.