by Hugh Fitzgerald
London mayor Sadiq Khan has attacked Home Secretary Sajid Javid for “playing to the far right narrative” with a tweet he sent following the sentencing of a grooming gang in Huddersfield. Mr Javid tweeted after a gang of 20 men were sentenced on October 19; “These sick Asian paedophiles are finally facing justice. I want to commend the bravery of the victims. For too long, they were ignored. Not on my watch. There will be no no-go areas.”
Sadiq Khan severely criticised the Home Secretary’s comments, consigning him to the outer darkness by comparing his tweet’s language to that used by Donald Trump. He told LBC: “It’s quite clear now that there are Conservative politicians who think the way to succeed in the Conservative Party is by playing to the far-right narrative. There was no need, in my opinion, to insert the words ‘Asian’ in that tweet, or ”no-go areas.’ The sort of people who use the phrase ‘no-go areas’ are Donald Trump – he used it in the context of London and even Boris Johnson rebutted him when he said that – and also the EDL and far-right groups.”
First, the phrase “no-go areas” has been used not just by Donald Trump and others (all of course right-wing, far-right, alt-right) whom Sadiq Khan despises, but by many local leaders, police officials, scholars, and writers in Europe to describe the situation in their own cities and towns.
In France, for example, as Soeren Kern wrote in 2015:
Fabrice Balanche, a well-known French Islam scholar who teaches at the University of Lyon, recently told Radio Télévision Suisse: “You have territories in France such as Roubaix, such as northern Marseille, where police will not step foot, where the authority of state is completely absent, where mini Islamic states have been formed.”
French writer and political journalist Éric Zemmour recently told BFM TV: “There are places in France today, especially in the suburbs, where it is not really in France. Salafi Islamists are Islamizing some neighborhoods and some suburbs. In these neighborhoods, it’s not France, it’s an Islamic republic.” In a separate interview, Zemmour — whose latest book is entitled, “The French Suicide” — says multiculturalism and the reign of politically correct speech is destroying the country.
French politician Franck Guiot wrote that parts of Évry, a township in the southern suburbs of Paris, are no-go zones where police forces cannot go for fear of being attacked. He said that politicians seeking to maintain “social peace” were prohibiting the police from using their weapons to defend themselves.
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.
The French newspaper Le Figaro has referred to downtown Perpignan as a “veritable no-go zone” where “aggression, antisocial behavior, drug trafficking, Muslim communalism, racial tensions and tribal violence” are forcing non-Muslims to move out. Le Figaro also reported that the Les Izards district of Toulouse was a no-go zone, where Arab drug trafficking gangs rule the streets in a climate of fear.
Sadiq Khan may want to consult, on the subject of “no-go zones” in France, two reports:
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, “Banlieues 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. Since 2011, hundreds more much areas, where the representatives of the French state — police, firemen — hesitate to enter, have been identified.
France is not the only European country with No-Go Zones, but it is the country where no-go zones have been subject to the most study. Parts of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Berlin, Malmö and Stockholm are places where the police seem to have lost control. The Hungarian government has released a report.
Sadiq Khan insists there was “no need” for Sajid Javid to mention “no-go zones.” But Javid was trying to present a picture of where these grooming gangs flourish, often out of sight of the police, who are hesitant to enter such areas.
Is anything Sajid Javid said untrue? Were not all 20 of the men who were convicted in Huddersfield “Asians” — a word which has been used for decades in the U.K. to avoid identifying people forthrightly as British Pakistanis, though everyone knows what the word is meant to convey: Muslims of Pakistani origin. Sadiq Khan thinks identifying the groomers in this way is unacceptable, though he fails to explain why. Why is it wrong to identify the religion and ethnicity shared by all of these groomers in Huddersfield? Can he imagine why it might be useful for the public — and parents of daughters — to know?
Nor were these “Asian” groomers limited to Huddersfield. In the most publicized of such cases, dozens of other groomers have been tried and convicted for the sexual exploitation, and repeated rape, of 1,510 English girls in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Still other “Asian” — that is, British-Pakistani — men have been tried and convicted for the same offenses in more than two dozen British cities. Their preferred victims were girls aged 12 to 14. The modus operandi was for the men to wait outside schools and care homes, sometimes in taxis (for many were taxi drivers), to engage these young girls in conversation, to show an interest in these vulnerable girls — often from poor and dysfunctional families — that few, of none, had done before, and then to inveigle them into sexual relationships. Then they would be taken to houses where they were first plied with alcohol and drugs, and then sexually abused, repeatedly, by groups of men, passed around like party favors to still other men.
First published in Jihad Watch.
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One Response
President Trump may have used the term ‘no go areas,’ but probably not in reference to a place in the United States. ‘No go area(s) is frequently used in the American media to refer to very dangerous Muslim neighborhoods in European countries. I have never heard or seen it used in reference to such a place in this country, which isn’t same thing as saying there are no ghettos of one sort or another here.