The Rise of Islamic No-Go Zones

In these areas they are left to themselves
The Power of the state is completely out of the picture

Welcome to Tower Hamlets

by Esmerelda Weatherwax (September 2011)

Why I am going to Tower Hamlets on Saturday.
I am of an old East End family. We define the East End as the three old boroughs of Bethnal Green, Stepney and Poplar which since 1965 make up the current London Borough of Tower Hamlets, plus that area of Shoreditch around Shoreditch Church which since 1965 is part of the London Borough of Hackney. Although my mother was born in Hoxton (which is adjacent to, but not part of, the East End) where my grandfather had a market stall, her parents were born in Bethnal Green as were all of my father’s family. My cousins and I have traced many lines of our families back to the 18^thcentury. We span 4 centuries and 10 generations in the area, at least. Welcome to my ancestoral homeland.
The East End encompassed London docks which meant that people have always arrived from all over the world and many settled nearby. Just in the relatively small circle of my own family history, through blood, marriage, kinship or family friendship I know of Irish, Welsh, Italian, Scottish, Jewish, Polish and Russian, French Huguenot, Indian, West Indian and Yorkshire. Every group that came to the East End brought their own customs. The Huguenot influence can be seen in our love of bright colours of clothing and the flowers of our little gardens, even if the only garden available was a yard or a veranda. The Jewish influence is famous and goes far beyond the food and the delicatessens (and bread). Limehouse was Chinatown for many years although it is now in Gerrard Street W1. They integrated while giving us the best of their culture. Until recent years. 
Sylheti speaking seamen from the nation now called Bangladesh came through the docks even before the Second World War. During the war a mosque opened along Whitechapel Road for their use and that of other Muslims. From the late 1960s onwards more came and brought their families. But they didn’t integrate. The East London Mosque now covers the whole block between Plumbers Row and the Whitechapel Bell Foundry to the east, New Street to the west, Whitechapel Road to the north and Fieldgate Street to the south, other than the small and valiant Great Fieldgate Street Synagogue which the mosque covets but cannot have.

It isn’t the size of the Mosque complex (they are now building upwards, nine floors and counting) which is cause for concern, however, but the nature of their speakers and preachers, the malign influence of the Islamic Forum of Europe, the corruption of local politics and the imposition of Sharia law. The Telegraph Journalist Andrew Gilligan chronicles this regularly.
The following are a few the reasons why the English Defence League will be rallying in Tower Hamlets next week. The Home Secretary Theresa May, at the request of the Metropolitan Police, acting under the orders of the notorious Lutfur Rahman, the Mayor (for elected mayor, read Islamic dictator) has banned any march for a month through 5 London boroughs, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest, Hackney and Islington. So the demonstration will be a static one, which is our democratic right from which we cannot be banned.
Imposition of a Sharia controlled Zone.
 
I photographed these in Ford Square and nearby Sidney Street.
The treatment of Women
The hijab is near universal. The niqab is imposed on women in greater numbers than in Bangladesh itself.

In April a pharmacy assistant, not a Muslim and married to a Christian was threatened, as was the chemist shop where she worked under Hindu management, if she did not adopt a veil and Islamic dress code. “If she keeps working here and continues to dress like that, then we will boycott you because this is a Muslim area,” the chemist’s owner was told. 
Advertising posters for swimming costumes have had burkas painted on to them. The same young man responsible for some of the anti gay stickers we spotted in October last year, about which more later, has also been convicted of criminal damage to advertising hoardings. But he is not alone. 
The niqab is imposed as compulsory school uniform on girls as young as 11 at the Madani Islamic girls school in Mrydle Street behind the East London Mosque. I witnessed a young girl tearing off the face covering as she turned the corner of the road when I was there last year. At the time I thought she was waiting until she was out of sight of the mosque; I now suspect she was hurrying out of sight of her school.

I photographed these women entering and leaving the pupil's gate of the school before the summer holiday began in July. Inset top left, the school address.
I can only conclude that this arrangement below which I photographed in Poplar in July is designed to allow the women of this ground floor flat to reach the veils and other garments just visible on the washing line at the far left above the curtains without having to don a previously laundered niqab before venturing into the sunshine.

These incidents do not stand alone. Others can be found by searching my blog articles going back to 2006.
Treatment of gays.
The most obvious example is the declaration, some months prior to the Sharia Controlled Zone, that Tower Hamlets is a “Gay Free Zone” My daughter spotted this sticker left at the Aldgate end of Whitechapel in October, and right in Sidney Street in August.

In 15 years the number of gay pubs in the borough has declined from flourishing to three. They have been targeted for harrassment and intimidation.
Even at council meeting supporters of the aforementioned Lutfur Rahman hurled homophobic abuse at opposition councillors, one openly gay, the other Jewish. 
The Islamic Forum of Europe regularly hosts preachers whose preaching includes such teaching aids as the “Spot the Fag” contest.
A Gay Pride march against the Gay Free Zone campaign did not take place as proposed. The excuse given was alleged links by one of the organisers to the EDL. 
Treatment of Jews
There are very few Jews left in the East End; most have moved into the general East End diaspora in Essex. As I said above a Jewish councillor is regularly abused, even during council meetings. The East London Mosque would love to get its hands on the land occupied by the Great Fieldgate Street Synagogue .
In 2008 Jewish tourists on a walking tour of the historic East End were pelted with stones and abuse by ‘Asian Youths’ with a ‘narrow religious view’. This made the national press but I gather that it was not an isolated incident.
In 2005 the then MP, black and Jewish Oona King was attending a memorial service to commemorate 60 years since the Hughes Mansions Disaster in Bethnal Green, when 134 people, almost all Jewish, were killed by the last V2 missile to land on London. ‘Youths’ pelted her and mourners with eggs and rotten vegetables. 
To quote one of the ‘youth’ “We all hate her. She comes here with her Jewish friends who are killing our people and then they come to our back yards. It is out of order. What do they expect?"
The ‘youth’ were believed at the time to be supporters of George Galloway who was later elected MP for the constituency, saying after the election that he owes more(of his election) to the Islamic Forum of Europe ‘than it would be wise to admit’.
In 2009 following Israeli action in Gaza a petrol bomb was hurled at Starbucks in Whitechapel and Tesco’s stores and delivery vans were attacked. “Kill Jews” was daubed on a children’s playground at the Chicksand estate.
Treatment of Christians and Christianity
Attempted Murder of English Christian RE Teacher
Gary Smith, Head of Religious Studies at my cousin’s old school, Central Foundation Girls' School in Bow, was attacked by four Muslim men, (already under surveillance suspected of a terrorism plot) because 'He's mocking Islam and he’s putting doubts in people's minds...How can somebody take a job to teach Islam when they’re not even a Muslim themselves? . . . This is the dog we want to hit, to strike, to kill.’
Attacks on historic churches, Christian clergy and congregations.
In 2008 Canon Ainsworth of St Georges in the East Shadwell was beaten seriously enough to merit time in hospital after he asked some ‘Asian youth’ to behave.
The church had previously been targeted when a brick smashed a window during a service. Allan Ramanoop, a member of the parochial church council, said: “On one occasion, youths shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque, you should not be here. The youths are anti-Christian. It’s terrible what they have done to Canon Ainsworth’. 
The boy convicted walked free; the prosecution decided that the attack was not racially or religiously motivated and decided that a beating which put a man in hospital for 12 days was mere ABH (assault occasioning actual bodily harm) instead of the more serious GBH (grievous bodily harm). 
This summer ‘youths’ put parents and children in fear at a toddlers sports day at the Montessori nursery at St George’s. 
St George’s in the East is a 17^thcentury Hawksmoor (pupil and colleague of Sir Christopher Wren) church. When we visited in August all was peaceful at midday during Ramadan; just one elderly Asian man having a quiet smoke between the gravestones. But there was graffiti.




Also in 2008 the Rector of St Matthew’s in Bethnal Green was assaulted by three youths he had asked not to bend the churchyard Cross out of shape and use it as a basketball hoop. This was not the first time they had abused him and he described a history of religious and racist taunts.

Three and a half years ago, one of the Church of England's most senior bishops, Pakistani-born Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that Islamic extremists had created "no-go"areas across Britain too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. His politically incorrect concern sparked a firestorm of denial and criticism.  

The Muslim Council of Britain, for example, dismissed it as the Bishop's "frantic scaremongering" and "intolerance," and scoffed,We wouldn’t allow "no-go" areas to happen. I smell extreme intolerance when people criticise multiculturalism without proper evidence of what has gone wrong. 

Well, the evidence of how multiculturalism "has gone wrong" is in. This week Soeren Kern at the Hudson Institute documented the proliferation of such no-go zones throughout Europe -- autonomous Islamic "microstates" under Sharia rule (having rejected their host countries' legal systems), where non-Muslims must either conform to the cultural, legal, and religious norms of fundamentalist Islam or expect to be greeted with violence. As Daniel Pipes puts it, "a more precise name for these zones would be Dar al-Islam" -- the House of Islam, or the place where Islam rules.

England, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands -- in every European country with a large Muslim immigrant population, the story is the same: Islamic supremacists refuse to assimilate into the Western melting pot; instead they carve out a foothold in a neighborhood, and then, through intimidation or outright violence, push out the infidels whose failed secular values are no longer acceptable. Even public services such as police, firefighters and ambulances are often driven out of such neighborhoods with stones, bottles or bullets. Lacking the political and cultural will to assert control in areas that in some cases have become urban war zones, the authorities have simply retreated and abandoned them.

As Germany's Chief Police Commissioner Bernhard Witthaut confesses,In these areas crimes no longer result in charges. They are left to themselves. Only in the worst cases do we in the police learn anything about it. The power of the state is completely out of the picture.

In Britain, where there are already as many as eighty-five Sharia courts in operation, an Islamist group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched an ambitious campaign to turn twelve British cities into independent Islamic states, including Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, and what the group calls "Londonistan."  

In the Tower Hamlets in East London -- or as the Muslims there refer to it, "the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets" -- imams known as the "Tower Hamlets Taliban" issue death threats to unveiled women, and gays are attacked by gangs of young Muslim men.

The neighborhood has been littered with leaflets announcing, "You are entering a Sharia controlled zone. Islamic rules enforced." It was in East London, remember, that the Islamist Abu Izzadeen challenged former Home Secretary John Reid by saying: “How dare you come to a Muslim area?”

In France, there are an astonishing 751 so-called Sensitive Urban Zones (ZUS). "Sensitive" indeed: the nature of the ZUS, and chaos like the nightly burning of cars in Paris, are topics that the French media largely downplay to avoid accusations of racism or Islamophobia -- hence, for example, their generic description of the immigrant gangs running wild in Paris Métro stations as "youth." 

An estimated (as of 2004) five million Muslims live in these ZUS, and there is barely a single French city that lacks at least one.

In Paris and other French cities with a high percentage of Muslim populations, like Lyons, Marseilles and Toulouse, thousands of Muslims make their presence felt by blocking streets and sidewalks for Friday prayers. Some mosques have begun broadcasting sermons and chants of "Allahu Akbar" via loudspeakers into the streets. Local authorities sit on their hands rather than confront this "occupation without tanks or soldiers," because they are afraid of the situation escalating into violence in the streets. 

The Dutch government has released a list of forty “no-go” zones in the Netherlands. In Brussels, Belgium, which is twenty percent Muslim, police have to patrol with two police cars, to watch each other's back.

And yet the multiculturalist mindset is so deeply entrenched in Europeans that it is the police who are expected to avoid offending cultural sensitivities: officers, for example, who frequently are targeted with rocks by Muslim youth, have been ordered not to drink coffee or eat in public during the Islamic month of Ramadan.

In Sweden, which an imam there has labeled "the best Islamic state," whole patches of the city of Malmö -- which is more than twenty-five percent Muslim -- are no-go zones. There and in Gothenburg, Muslim teenagers have been burning cars, attacking emergency services, throwing.stones at patrolling officers and temporarily blinding them with green lasers.

Read the full story here.