name one

John B’ s comment, pulled from this thread at Liberal Conspiracy:

I live in a plurality-Muslim area in London. It’s fine. I used to live in a plurality-Muslim area in Manchester. It was fine. I’ve friends who’ve lived in plurality-Muslim areas in Blackburn, Preston and Leeds. They were fine.

No media citing of “no-go areas” I’ve ever seen has gone beyond “there are places in [town X]”, rather than “[xxx street in town X]” (except for a particularly daft piece by Littlejohn which cited the area where I live as an example). To me, this is a strong sign that the dhimmitudinalists are making the whole thing up.

If anyone reading honestly believes in ‘no-go areas’, name any street, pay my train fare to get there, and I’ll happily walk down it. And I’ll be fine.

It’s money-mouth time. No-one who spouts this line of crap should go without being challenged to name a “Muslim no-go area” and producing evidence that no on is safe there because they are not Muslim.

Of course, no amount of evidence will convince the genuine loons. But their problem is slightly different: they think the Muslims are coming to get them. Every night, Melanie Philips lies awake wondering about whether Osama bin Laden has established a caliphate her garden shed. Every morning, she awakes sweating at the thought of Hassan Nasrallah rifling through her knicker draw.

I live in a plurality Muslim area too, and I’m fine. No I’m not fine. As it happens, a big ugly crowd of Muslims are standing over my shoulder demanding that I write this. They’re like that you know.

This is related to an officious toytown cop stopping a couple of evangelicals trying to convert in an area…where there are Muslims. Happens here in Crumpsall too. Door knockers from the Jehovah’s Witnesses, plus the odd Mormon. The neighbours are generally more polite to them than I am.

For the overall moral of that story, consult your Mencken: "it is the aim of every polizei to lay his hands on every citizen, at least once a day". Any pretext is as good as another. And there are a lot of pretexts around these days.

Comments

[Simon]

Birmingham's Muslim-majority Sparkhill area is such a "no-go area for non-Muslims" that one of its councillors is a gay white atheist with an impressive drinks cabinet. The Muslim population knows he is gay, because an anonymous English-Urdu leaflet told them so in 2004. He got re-elected with a massive majority that year. Many of his campaign team are Muslims, too.

I would sooner spend time in Alum Rock (where this incident happened), Aston, Sparkhill or Sparkbrook than I would any one of the desolate white estates on the outer fringes of the city.

[dsquared]

Conversely, the Medway towns of Gillingham, Chatham and Rochester are pretty nasty mono-ethnic ghettoes, and Michael Nazir-Ali is the Bishop of them.

[Simstim]

I'm not sure that the inhabitants of the Medway towns get as much say in the selection of their Bishop as the Sparkhill electorate have with regard to their councillors.

[ejh]

I'm sure I recall a very nasty Telegraph piece not many years ago in which it was claimed that Bethnal Green was a no-go area, that street signs there were not in English and so on. For some reason I am under the impression that it was written by a descendant of Brendan Behan - is that likely or is my memory hallucinating again?

[dsquared]

There are street signs in Bengali in Bethnal Green, but it's quite the opposite - they're part of the rather optimistic "Banglatown" marketing initiative aiming to attract as many white people as possible to come and gawk at the colourful locals.

[ejh]

But they are also in English, are they not? At least they were when I was last in Bethnal Green (about three weeks ago).

[ajay]

Yes, they are in both English and (I assume) Bengali. I think most of the white people aren't attracted by the street signs so much as by the curry and street markets....

[AntiquatedTory]

Good on you and better on John B. I live in a country with too few Muslims to have any Muslim-majority neighborhoods, but I have friends living in Muslim-majority neighborhoods in London and Den Haag, and this "no-go area" is just rubbish. The London area in particular is an island of security between the often violent criminal yobbishness of Manor House and Seven Sisters.