Ok, I'm back. Deep breath...
What precisely do you want me to post? As far as I can tell pretty much all articles online about these so-caeed "no go zones" are either by clear nutjob websites or, otherwise, by English speakers who always fail to link their material to something published in French. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm yet to see an article in which one of these writers clearly says "
I, a non-Muslim, attempted to walk through Street X of Suburb Y on Date Z, and was denied access / attacked / abused on the basis that I was not Muslim." Neither have I seen these writers refer to specific experiences of this nature by named individuals. If it really was happening, my belief is that the FRENCH media would have been all over this for years. And as a French reader, I can literally find NO evidence of this on Google.
Are there pages about the
zones urbaines sensibles? Sure. Many also clearly describe some of these zones as being dominated by Muslims, ridden by crime, unsafe, with high levels of unemployment, and so on. A very common example is Seine-Saint-Denis in northern Paris. I see articles claiming that non-Muslims fear to tread there. But I don't pay any heed to that, since I myself passed through there last month, my (blond, Belgian) girlfriend next to me. A very unpleasant and depressed area, to be sure. You keep your hand in your wallet pocket and don't make eye contact unless you want to risk being offered drugs. But a place where sharia law has displaced the French law? Hell no.
So again, I'm happy to talk about this further but we MUST deal with specifics.
In the meantime, I have read the articles you have linked and have some remarks...
This one pops up on many Google searches I run. However, I am immediately sceptical of what is written because the author clearly does not understand what a zone urbaine sensible is:
Garbage. I already provided information on what the ZUS concept really means, but I'll provide
another, this time from the French government body ONZUN (National Observatory for the Sensitive Urban Zones):
The part in bold says: "
The Sensitive Urban Zones are characterized by the existence of a great residential areas and an marked imbalance between housing and employment. Most often, these are large groups of social housing [projects] from the period 1950-1970, where people suffer more from exclusion and unemployment than the average of the affected areas."
So as I said, the very essence of a 'Sensitive Urban Area' is that it is basically the underprivileged and struggling parts of the cities. Ghettos, places with social housing, large numbers of unemployed, etc. In order for these places to be defined by their strong Muslim presence, you would have to believe that the ONLY run-down parts of French cities are those where Muslims dominate. In other words, that it is impossible for a run-down part of the city to be a China-town, a West African ghetto, or anything else. And that's just nonsense. This Daniel Pipes is a racist American bigot
whom even prominant Iraq War supporter Christopher Hitches denounces as a propagandist, and he clearly hasn't the first clue what he's talking about.
Onwards:
I am not one to consider a Catholic website a source of objectivism when it comes to Islam, but even if I was, this article mainly (and exclusively, I believe) sources the Washington Times article, published 2 days earlier. So I'll focus on that 'original' source instead:
My main beef with this Washington Times article is that it does not refer to any French reports, which one would consider 'primary sources' for such a topic. Instead, it relies mainly on quotations of the Director of JihadWatch.org - the
acrid Islamophobe Robert Spencer - and also of Soeren Kern, fellow at the right-wing think-tank, the Gatestone Institute (whose founder is a
financial backer of anti-muslim groups). Hardly balanced reporting, when the essence of journalism is to explore a story by sourcing a variety of viewpoints rather than just a few selective ones.
The Catholic.org article - unlike the Washington Tomes one - actually has the balls to name a specific "no go" zone, but it's the typical Parisian scapegoat, Seine-Saint-Denis, which I've already addressed above.
Oopos, another religious-partisan source. Oops, the author is who? Soeren Kern! Sigh...nonetheless, I'll address a couple points:
In this article, Kern claims that ...nice try, nutjob, but you're actually quoting not the number of Muslims, but the total number of people, in all of France, estimated to live in these Zones (
source). I've already explained the logic fail in thinking that only Muslim-dominated areas can be considered possible Sensitive Urban Zones, but unlike Kern I'll try to be concrete:
Let's again talk about Seine-Saint-Denis. The Catholic.org article states that some 500,000 Muslims live in this area...but the total population is
more than 3x that! So if Seine-Saint-Denis is a Sensitive Urban Zone, you can only claim that a third of the inhabitants of that Zone are Muslims. Such basics are lost on Kern, who clearly is counting the whole population. Sloppy hack-job.
Oh yeah. In Paragraph 2, Kern offers some cities who are host to Sensitive Urban Zones. He finishes with the city Amiens, "where Muslim youths recently went on a
two-day arson rampage that caused extensive property damage and injured more than a dozen police officers." Sounds bad, but click that link. It's about the 2012 Amiens riots, check, but the word 'Muslim' does not appear once in his source (!). I've done some Googling on this riot, and none of the major media articles claim the rioters were Muslims, nor indeed say anything about the ethnic or religious background of the rioters. That's because those riots had nothing to do with relgion. They are understood to have erupted due to a recent arrest of a man for dangerous driving in the area, and at-first small clashes blew up from there. Not at all related to religion, but Kern doesn't care because Amiens has some areas with a significant Muslim population.
And last but not least, we have something that's more than 8 years old, and it's..a blog? Ok...the author is a 'Catholicgauze', whose real name is apparently Peter Humboldt.
This one only has four paragraphs, and to be frank it reads more like a stream of consciousness (ok for a blog, in fact). The guy actually has the integrity to point out that the anti-jihadist websites are wrong to suggest that 'all 751' Sensitive Urban Zones are under the control of radical Islamists, and even points out that "
that the Islamist movement in France is small overall" Still, it would- again - be nice if he specified which 'few' of these Zones are "
truly no-go zones."
The blog entry also links to a
2011 update about the UK. Note that he links to a story by the Daily Mail, well-known across Europe to be a sensationalist rag, but whatever. I don't deny that extremists put up these signs in some areas, saying "You are entering a Shariah controlled zone." After all, Anjem Choudary took credit for this. But the fact that people put signs up doesn't mean that the area itself is cordoned off, with its own boundaries, laws and so on. It just means that certain Muslims in the area are nutjobs and decided to put up some stupid signs. Moreover, as the article says, "
Scotland Yard is now working with local councils to remove the posters and identify those responsible for putting them up." So whose law overrode whose here? The UK government's or the Sharia law of the extremist idiots?
Blergh, what a waste of time that was on a Saturday night. Should have just gone to bed.