More than seventeen years ago I wrote about the Zones Urbaines Sensibles, or Sensitive Urban Zones (ZUS), in France. They are dangerous culturally enriched neighborhoods that firemen and ambulance drivers won’t enter without a police escort, and which the police themselves avoid unless they absolutely have to go there. In English they are commonly referred to as “no-go zones”.
Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote in 2007:
The ZUS represent the perpetually inflamed tissue of the French body politic, with the nightly count of burned vehicles showing up as one of the green squiggles on the vital-signs monitor. Two hundred burned cars, and the youthful patient is having a good day. Five hundred, and the nurse is called to administer a sedative.
But it’s not the patient who goes to sleep; it’s the French public. Everyone is aware of what’s happening, but the magnitude of the crisis and the specifics of the situation are hidden behind a wall of official obfuscation and government-mandated censorship.
Within the ZUS, the gangs of Muslim youths have a free hand to loot, rape, and burn. Police are not allowed to use their weapons to enforce the law, or even to defend themselves. Trying to do his traditional job can put a policemen’s career in jeopardy, as the officers who chased two young criminals into a power substation back in October 2005 discovered.
What is not acknowledged is that France has lost sovereign control over large swathes of its urban territory. The only solution envisioned by French bureaucrats is a quintessentially bureaucratic one. The layers of jargon and classification and commissions and acronyms are like the wall of scar tissue that forms around a foreign substance that can’t be assimilated.
The areas designated as ZUS are effectively acknowledged to be dead. They are no longer part of France. They no longer possess any of the functions of a civitas.
They are the scattered pieces of la France Morte.
In the years since, Sweden has developed its own ZUS, which are now rife in the suburbs of a number of cities and towns, and rival anything that France can boast.
And last night a ZUS made itself known in a neighborhood of Leeds, in West Yorkshire.
In the late 1960s I lived in Harrogate, which is a spa town about twelve miles north of Leeds, in what was then the West Riding. Leeds was the nearest big city to Harrogate, and I visited it occasionally back then. It hadn’t yet become culturally enriched, although its sister city Bradford, just to the west, was the butt of jokes due to the presence of recently arrived “Pakis”. Nowadays, of course, it might as well be a district of Karachi.
The district of Harehills lies near the city center, just east of the A61, the route I used to take to Leeds. Mark Steyn points out that Harehills is also the constituency of a Green Party councilor named Mothin Ali, who recently shouted “Allahu Akbar” after being elected to the borough Council, declaring his victory a “win for the people of Gaza.”
Last night the good “English” people of Harehills got a bit hot under the collar. It seems that some social workers arrived at a home with intention of removing some children and placing them into care. The family raised an uproar, and the neighbors took exception to the government’s actions. They showed their displeasure in the time-honored Muslim fashion: they threw paving stones at the police, overturned a police vehicle, set street furniture on fire, and burned a double-decker bus. The police and the social workers were forced to vacate the area for their own safety, and it wasn’t until several hours later that order was restored.
The Hindustan Times provides a useful summary of the evening’s mostly peaceful events.
The BBC report on the incident is bland and restrained, but I found these pieces interesting:
The press conference heard that Ms [Mayor Tracy] Brabin had been involved in an earlier meeting with “key partners” and a plan was being drawn up to keep Harehills safe.
Ms Brabin said: “The imams and the faith leaders are also getting the message out there that we need to stay calm and ensure we don’t have what we saw, which was frightening, horrible and unacceptable.” [emphasis added]
And also this:
Leeds City Council said it was “immensely grateful” to the individuals who stopped the situation from “worsening”.
The “individuals who stopped the situation from ‘worsening’” are undoubtedly the imams. And when Mayor Brabin met with them — her “key partners” — I’m sure they explained to her what the civil authorities needed to do (or stop doing) to prevent any mostly peaceful incidents in the future.
This process is an example of what used to be called “community cohesion”, which people like Tommy Robinson were always accused of damaging. Community cohesion means that Muslim areas are de facto sharia zones, and lie beyond the reach of English Common Law. Anyone who wants affairs to run smoothly in the Harehills ZUS must negotiate with the community leaders — which means the imams, together with their designated appointees to political positions.
From a practical standpoint, of course, the result will be that children are less likely to be removed and placed into care within the boundaries the Harehills ZUS than they are elsewhere.
Below are two videos with clips of last night’s ructions in Harehills. The first is from the Indian news channel WION:
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