In the wake of the attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo, right-wing “experts,” pundits and politicians have unsurprisingly breathed new life into the meme of “no-go zones,” a well-established trope of the reactionary propaganda of the trans-Atlantic “Counter-Jihad” movement. Most visible, and most risible, were Steven Emerson's and Nolan Peterson's comments on FOX News regarding "no-go zones" in England and France, for which both Emerson and ultimately the network were compelled to produce rare nopologies. Of course Emerson and Peterson are not alone in making declarative statements about “no-go zones” over the past few weeks, let alone over the past decade or so: it's become a common and predictable refrain for a) the stable of national-security and terrorism “experts” who flit among right-wing media venues, b) right-wing pundits and their insensate devotees throughout the blogosphere and c) similarly insensate right-wing politicians and cultural leaders such as Bobby Jindal and Tony Perkins.
Robert Mackey's Open Source column for the New York Times has produced two valuable meta pieces concerning the “no-go zone” commentary and the criticism and mockery such claims have engendered: "Murdoch and Fox News Mocked on Twitter for Claims about Muslims" (12 January 2015) and "Fox News Apologizes for False Claims of Muslim-Only Areas in England and France" (18 January 2015). Of particular interest in the latter piece is Mackey's discussion of the origin of the myth of the 751 French “no-go zones” in the 2006 misrepresentation of administratively defined Zones Urbaines Sensibles by Daniel Pipes who, having then visited several ZUS, updated his original 2006 piece on 16 January 2013 with this: “[h]aving this first-hand experience, I regret having called these areas no-go zones.” In Pipes' most recent update on 17 January 2015, he denies credit for coining the term “no-go zone”:
Jan. 17, 2015 update: Research into the term no-go zones referring to Muslim habitations in Western Europe done by the pseudonymous Yoel Natan finds its earliest use to be on my website, DanielPipes.org: An Australia resident who calls himself "fed up" wrote on March 22, 2006, that "In Sydney, Australia, we have large areas of our city that are deemed no-go zones."
The next use was by the Norwegian analyst who calls himself Fjordman, on July 13, 2006, who defined "Muslim no-go zones" as places "where anything representing a Western institution (post office truck, firemen, even mail order delivery firms) was routinely ambushed with Molotov cocktails."
Then came my use of the term on November 14, 2006.
Pipes is correct that his was not the first use of "no-go zone(s)." Among numerous examples antedating his or his citations' usage, we could note the meme's appearance in Tony Blankley's 2005 publication
The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?. Indeed, the relevant paragraph from Blankley's book was copied and pasted into his prepared statement for the farcical
hearing before the House Committee on International Relations (Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia) entitled
Is There a Clash of Civilizations? Islam, Democracy and U.S.-Middle East and Central Asia Policy (14 September 2006):
Muslim parts of Paris, Rotterdam and other European cities are already called ''no-go zones'' for ethnic Europeans, including armed policemen. As the Muslim populations expand and their level of cultural/religious assertiveness expands, more and more European geography will be ''reclaimed'' for Islam. Europe will become pock-marked with increasing numbers of ''little Fallujah's'' that will be impenetrable by anything short of military units. [p.40]
Yet Blankley can also not be credited with any neologism here. Used officially in the 1970s to identify barricaded areas in cities and towns of Northern Ireland controlled by Irish republican paramilitaries, and then used in British media accounts of impoverished, high-crime housing-estates during the 1990s, the "no-go" meme was further adapted to the service of nativist rhetoric in the context of the racial tensions among British Asians (Pakistanis, Bangaladeshis, Indians, Sri Lankans
et alii) and whites in Northern England during the late 1990s, tensions that erupted into violence in the Spring and Summer of 2001.
Having incubated in some unseemly discursive communities for several years, the meme gained considerable traction in right-wing commentary on the "Muslim riots" in France beginning in late 2005. Tony Blankley, Daniel Pipes, Peder Jensen (aka Fjordman) and others in the "Counter-Jihad" movement—what the Center for American Progress so efficiently and effectively denoted as Fear, Inc.—are representative of this phase. Their rhetorical innovation was layering the "no-go zones" meme atop the raving and rancid conspiracy-theorizing of Gisèle Littman's (aka Bat Ye'or) Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis, published in 2005. Steven Emerson, whose recent comments illuminated the "no-go zones" meme, is likewise deeply enmeshed in Fear, Inc., as amply discussed in both CAP's 2011 report and David Miller's and Tom Mills' "Misinformed Expert or Misinformation Network?" (15 January 2015; h/t poco).
That is the broad outline of the origins and propagation of the "no-go zones" meme. Follow me below the orange whazit for more detailed discussion.
As noted above, the notion of “no-go” zones and areas was current in the British press in the mid-1990s in discussions of housing estates in which police, paramedics, mail-carriers and others feared to tread. A 17 April 1994 article “Fear Rules in No-Go Britain” from The Independent (with the 40 “no-go” areas listed separately) exhibits the typical contours of such discussions in the contemporary media: high-crime, high unemployment, particularly for young males, low opportunity and relatively high populations of (unspecified) ethnic minorities. Yet what united almost all of the 40 areas—the theme, really, of the incidents during the Summer of 1992 to which the article refers—was poverty and hostility toward the state's punitive management of poverty rather than ethnicity per se.
During the second half of the 1990s, the rhetoric of “no-go zones” developed in what we might call high and low forms. The high form—efforts to address poverty, unemployment, problematic housing estates, education policy, multiculturalism and their complicated intersections—was represented by governmental initiatives such as Blair's Social Exclusion Unit (founded in 1997) and by quasi-independent initiatives such as the Runnymede Trust's Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (established in 1998). Thus we read in the BBC article “£800m Lifeline for 'No-Go' Estates” (15 September 1998), referring to the Social Exclusion Unit's Bringing Britain Together: a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (1998):
The social exclusion report says the UK still has "pockets of intense deprivation where the problems of unemployment and crime are acute and hopelessly tangled up with poor health, housing and education".
"They have become no-go zones for some and no-exit zones for others," it says.
The low, explicitly racialized rhetoric of “no-go zones” is best represented by Bernard Wright's “Race War in Oldham” and “Ethnic Cleansing in Britain” in
Spearhead (December 1999), the personal rant-space of white-supremacist John Tyndall and quasi-official publication of the British National Party (BNP) during Tyndall's leadership. From the former [
nota bene: I find linking directly to hate-publications distasteful, so I will simply provide sufficient bibliographic information to find the sites on your own, should you wish]:
In the late 1980s and early 1990s the police in Oldham became aware that some extreme doctrines were being preached in the mosques around the town and that attacks on white people were increasing. The lid was kept on this until two years ago, when Chief Superintendent Hewitt, the Oldham police chief, was put under pressure to report in the local paper, the Oldham Chronicle, that racial attacks in Oldham were among the highest in the country. He revealed that 75 per cent of these were being committed by Asians on white people, in some cases resulting in white families having to be re-housed away from multiracial areas and in mainly white ones after having suffered brutal intimidation from some of their Asian neighbours. The local council, which for the past 19 years has been Labour-controlled, has totally failed to offer the white population any sympathy or support.
Chief Supt. Hewitt again made his report in the local paper last year, quoting much the same figures and a continuing trend. The town now has 'no-go' areas for white people, strenuously though the local authority tries to deny it. [emphasis mine]
Asian areas, not for the first time, are having considerable amounts of money spent on them to keep them decent after being continually run down by their inhabitants, and this makes for a constant strain on the town's resources. The true price of the multiracial experiment in Oldham will probably never be assessed, but it must be staggering.
Wright's use of “no-go areas” exemplifies the potency of the meme as a rhetorical counterpart to the physical “Paki-bashing,” “berserking” and “sidewalk cracking” of the earlier and less genteel history of the nativist, white-supremacist and fascistic British National Party (BNP) and National Front (NF). The racialized “no-go” meme, as wielded by the BNP and NF and absorbed by their unofficial foot-soldiers in varied fascist associations such as C18, was a significant rhetorical structure in their political machinations and direct provocations leading up to the outbreak of violence in 2001 between white racists and British Asians in Oldham (26-28 May), Burnley (22-25 June) and Bradford (7-10 July). In Kalra's and Rhodes' excellent analysis of Oldham and Burnley in particular, they note the presence of ”no-go" rhetoric in the BNP's demonstrations and campaigns of letter-writing to local media in the months prior to the riots, effectively stoking racial animosity within and among local communities and attracting national-level attention (V. Kalra and J. Rhodes, “Local Events, National Implications: Riots in Oldham and Burnley 2001,” in Waddington
et alii, eds.,
Rioting in the U.K. And France: a Comparative Analysis. Portland: 2009, 41-55). The BNP's success at introducing their racist meme into the national discourse as an explanatory frame is evident in the BBC coverage of “no-go” Oldham both before and after 26 May (see
here,
here and
here, among others). The media coverage and narration of Burnley and Bradford, despite differing specific conditions and triggers in each of the three towns, follow strikingly similar contours.
Thus by Summer 2001 the “no-go” meme had become an established racist trope in nativist British discourse targeting British Asian communities. While the religious dimension did play a role in this discourse, as evident in both Wright's comments cited above regarding mosques and in the history of BNP (and others') active opposition to the construction of mosques and Islamic centres through the 1990s (leafleting the proposed Ismaili cultural centre in Croydon in June 1996, for example), it was a relatively minor role in their more comprehensive narratives of whites versus Asians in the competition for resources and the failure of British multiculturalism. The shift in emphasis from race (“Paki-bashing”) to religion (“Muzzie-bashing”) began to occur in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. As Kalra and Rhodes note, post-9/11 interpretations and narratives of the local events in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford have acquired the global flavor of the War on Terror and the Clash of Civilizations (2009: 46).
This notion of the local becoming global is also apparent in the international propagation of the “no-go zones” meme. Originating in British nativist discourse, by 2001 the meme was spreading through European and American extremist groups. Among numerous examples, we can cite the first, and certainly not last, appearance of "no-go zones" in the “Year in Review” article (29 December 2001) on the Swedish “info14” website, the internet-hub for Swedish neo-Nazis. A second example is the appearance of “no-go” rhetoric in contemporary posts and comments on bulletin boards associated with the American neo-Nazi Hammerskin Nation in which the structure was predictably adapted to assail blacks and Mexicans.
From 2001 to 2005, “no-go” rhetoric was maintained sporadically in two fringe discursive communities: the international community of white-supremacists and the emergent “Counter-Jihad” movement represented by blogs such as Gates of Vienna, founded in 2003 by Edward “Ned” May (aka Baron Bodissey), and JihadWatch, founded by Robert Spencer and the pseudonymous Hugh Fitzgerald also in 2003. Five events in 2004 and 2005 converged to popularize the meme: the Madrid train bombings (11 March 2004), the murder of Theo Van Gogh (2 November 2004), the bombings in London (7 July 2005), the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy (30 September 2005) and the riots in France (27 October - 17 November 2005). All of these events renewed discussions, some sane and some less so, about multiculturalism and the integration of Muslims within European states. A sixth event, less often remarked but profoundly significant for understanding the flourishing of “no-go” rhetoric post-2005, was the January 2005 publication of Gisèle Littman's (aka Bat Ye'or) Eurabia: the Euro-Arab Axis.
Littman's master narrative in Eurabia is the Islamization of Europe, or “Europe's evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it” (p.9). Littman's conspiracy-theorizing identifies the Islamization of Europe as a deliberate policy agenda set by European leadership in concert with the leadership of Muslim Arab countries and organizations:
The Euro-Arab Dialogue implemented in the 1970s a new sociopolitical and cultural conception, which has now affected profound changes within Western Europe. In the following pages, I use the terms “Europeans” and “Eurabians.” Eurabia designates a new entity—with political, economic, religious, cultural and media components—superimposed on Europe by powerful governmental lobbies. While Europeans live within Eurabia's constraints, few are really conscious of them on a daily basis, beyond a somewhat confused awareness. Eurabians are the agents and enforcers of this all-encomassing new Eurabian policy and culture. (p.12)
While Littman does not employ the specific phrase “no-go zones” in
Eurabia, her conspiracy-theorizing alludes to issues of immigration, the lack of assimilation and the formation of Muslim enclaves. The layering of the “no-go” rhetoric onto Littman's notion of enclaves—the formation of which is, for Littman, an act of
jihad not only permitted but encouraged by compliant European leadership—was the innovation of the pundit-class of the Islamophobia Industry (
Fear, Inc.) such as Tony Blankley, Peder Jensen (
aka Fjordman), Bruce Bawer, Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Soeren Kern, Pamela Geller and Edward May (
aka Baron Bodissey), all of whom acknowledge their reverence for and (pseudo-)intellectual debt to Littman
aka Bat Ye'or. Edward May's post “A Little Piece of Dar al-Islam” on Gates of Vienna (19 July 2010) is representative of the class:
In English they [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] are commonly referred to as “no-go zones”, highlighting the fact that white people—or at least non-Muslim white people—are not welcome there. Within the no-go zones infidels cannot expect to be protected by the representatives of the state. Often the fire brigade and ambulance services refuse to enter such areas without a police escort, and the police themselves stay away unless they have a compelling reason to go in—plus plenty of backup.
However, a more appropriate term for these blighted zones would be sharia enclaves, because they are not merely immigrant enclaves, but microcosms of the Ummah, little pinched-off pieces of Dar al-Islam ruled by Islamic law.
In May's paranoid Eurabian fantasies,
sharia enclaves will expand and merge to form
sharia provinces in the heart of Christian Europe, marking “the ongoing piecemeal dilution of secular law, with the establishment of theocratic sharia law in its stead.” It's seriously whackadoodle stuff, and seriously bigoted, and it's the bedrock narrative of the Islamophobia Industry.
[As an aside, it is Littman (aka Bat Ye'or) who is responsible for coining the “dhimmitude” meme. When it appears, or derivations such as “the day of the Dhimmi is done,” you can be certain of the discursive environment in which the speaker/author is a participant.]
Now, the alignment of the narrative structure of “no-go zones” among a) nativist, supremacist groups with acknowledged antisemitic tendencies and b) the functionaries of the Islamophobia Industry who are strongly pro-Israel may perhaps strike one as strange. That's because it is strange. The 2011 Expo Research report The Anti-Muslim Environment: the Ideas, the Profiles, the Concepts [pdf] provides a useful discussion of this in a Swedish context. Nevertheless, beyond narrative harmony there are even institutional associations such as those between the nativist English Defence League (EDL) and Pamela Geller's and Robert Spencer's American Freedom Defense Initiative. An irrational antipathy toward Muslims, it seems, can make for interesting ad hoc alliances.
In conclusion, then, the “no-go zones” meme that drew such attention in American political discourse in the past weeks and which was roundly and properly mocked by the political leadership and citizenry of the countries in which said zones are said to exist, has a deep and sordid history. It is gravid with meaning inherited from nativist discourse (“the boots”) and from Islamophobic conspiracy-theorizing (“the suits”).
It also happens to be factually incorrect, but when has that ever stopped a right-wing "expert," pundit or politician? As Edward May (aka Baron Bodissey) notes in a remarkably candid piece entitled “Overselling the Meme” (21 January 2011) that documents the modus operandi of the Islamophobia Industry:
To push memes like these into mass circulation, they must be oversold. If we spend all our time fine-tuning them, they won’t emerge into popular consciousness. If we include the historical background, the comparative theology, the philosophical references, and all the subtle nuances of the whole truth, the meme will never spread.
As a propagandist, my task is to spread the meme and not to sweat the nuances. Nuances can be argued about and nailed down by scholars in the centuries after Islam—as a culture, a political ideology, and a religion—is totally destroyed. We don’t have the luxury for such finicky scholasticism right now.
"Finicky scholasticism" or, you know, what we might call reality-based discussion. Don't sweat the small stuff? SMH...
Postscipt: a kind and thorough proofreader alerted me to this post at TPM by Catherine Thompson on Wednesday which covers some of the same ground and adds useful detail. A recommended, complementary read.