Nothing Here, Move Along

Equivocating to Save Face

One of the most puerile of all informal fallacies is the fallacy of equivocation.  A protagonist attempts to advance his argument by wilfully (or mistakenly) changing the meaning of key terms, thus failing miserably in the attempt to prove his case.  Here is an example: "all banks are beside rivers; therefore, the financial institution where I deposit my money is beside a river."

Political partisans are notorious for this kind of verbal legerdemain.  We were treated to the ignominious spectacle recently when someone had the temerity to suggest that Islamic enclaves in various European countries had created "no-go zones" for the rest of the population.  The resulting brouhaha and explosions of self-righteous umbrage were worthy of Krakatoa.    Fox News staff were forced to retract and apologize for allowing interviewees to utter such tosh without correcting them on the spot.  The Mayor of Paris insisted that nothing even resembling no-go zones existed in France.  A complete and utter fabrication, she fulminated.

But the fallacy of (wilful) equivocation was at work again.  The Mayor of Paris and her attendant Greek chorus were insisting that nowhere in France was there to be found a spot where one would be confronted with barbed wire, fifteen foot tall electrified fences, barricades and tank traps with armed guards at gates, and signs on the gates saying: "Islamic Only Zone.  All Infidels Forbidden Entry."  On this basis, one may safely conclude that Islamic No-Go Zones indeed do not exist in France, nor in the Seychelles, nor in Mecca, nor on the moon.

A senior British police officer was talking about this. He was saying, he wasn’t calling them no-go zones. He was putting it in a sort of positive way, that these communities prefer to police themselves, as it were. And that’s why we just leave them to get on with it.

But of course those arguing that infidel no-go zones certainly do exist throughout Europe were using the term in a different sense.  In these areas infidels (that is, non Islamics) suffer harassment and even persecution should they dare to cross into the supposedly public streets and alleyways.  Author Mark Steyn describes the reality of such Islamic, infidel-free No-Go Zones throughout Europe.

I’ve walked around the East End. I’ve walked around, for example, past what used to be a famous gay pub on, just off the Commercial Road that is no longer there, where what they call the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets is, now holds sway. A couple of years ago on Holocaust Memorial Day, a group of Jews were touring the old Jewish West End, where fellows like Lionel Bart, the composer of Oliver, came from. And they were greeted by youths of a certain persuasion who pelted them with stones, and a Canadian tourist and an American tourist wound up being taken to the hospital. That’s Jews stoned on Holocaust Memorial Day in the East End of London.

Likewise, there are no-go zones in parts of Birmingham in the Midlands, where in nothing flat, a city that was 0% Muslim 50 years ago now is 22% Muslim. They’re the demographic energy in the city. A senior British police officer was talking about this. He was saying, he wasn’t calling them no-go zones. He was putting it in a sort of positive way, that these communities prefer to police themselves, as it were. And that’s why we just leave them to get on with it. And one consequence of that is that nobody who isn’t a member of those “communities” likes to go there. But those no-go zones are not as advanced as they are in France, but they are real and they are growing in British cities.

They’re true in Sweden. I walked through Rosengard in Sweden. And I was warned by the two lovely, leggy Swedish blondes I was having a cup of coffee with twenty minutes earlier not to go there at dusk. And you go there at dusk, and it’s all fiercely bearded young men and covered women who came from Muslim countries where they didn’t have to be covered, but they emigrate to Sweden, and suddenly, not to get into any trouble from those bearded, young men, they’re forced to go covered. Those no-go zones are real in almost every country in Western Europe now.

Anyone who has the slightest working knowledge of Islamic theology and doctrines will be saying, "Of course."  Physical territory, land, buildings, streets, neighbourhoods, and countries are all regarded in Islamic ideology as being Islamic territory, or not.  It's one or the other.  Pluralism does not exist.  Multi-culti is a doctrinal no-go zone in Islamic theology.  Once a piece of land is claimed for Islam by erecting a mosque or any other institution owned and operated by Islamic believers, that piece of territory belongs to Allah--forever.  It can never revert (in theory).  That is why Israel has to be wiped off the political map, because once it was Islamic land.

Rotherham in the UK is a city where such an informal, but very real no-go zone has operated.  The community--or at least the Islamic component of it--were left to police themselves.  And they did.  Raping and pillaging young infidel girls at will, with the silent complicit consent of the authorities.

One other location that should be highlighted on any map of no-go zones is Rotherham, in South Yorkshire, England. Rotherham was more precisely a didn’t-go zone. Over 1,400 girls, as young as 11 years of age, were sexually abused in Rotherham over the course of 16 years by a “grooming gang” of mostly Pakistani Muslim men. (In fact, the UK Daily Mail reports that, as more victims keep coming forward, Labour MP Sarah Champion recently said she thinks the final total will be well over 2,000.)  The girls were threatened with harm, and harm to their families, if they spoke out… but some of them did contact the authorities, only to be roundly ignored due to politically-correct blindness.  The fear of being called out as racist or bigoted paralyzed local authorities.

Even after a bombshell report made the dimensions of the Rotherham horror clear – including gang rape, human trafficking, and such disciplinary measures as dousing a young girl with gasoline and threatening to strike a match unless she kept quiet – resignations and reprimands came at an agonizingly slow pace.  In fact, the Daily Mail quotes one of the victims saying in December that she thinks the grooming gangs are still in business, perhaps worse than ever, but slightly more circumspect about hiding their activities from marginally less blind authorities.  “I’m still seeing my abusers driving young girls in their car. They’re untouchable,” she complained, adding that six months after the scandal broke, “we’ve had no arrests, we’ve had no charges, evidence is still being lost.”

As Breitbart's John Haywood put it:

When the mayor of Paris threatened to sue Fox News for “slandering” her city by reporting on Muslim-dominated “no-go zones,” liberal media outlets forgot their own years of reporting on those zones.

But this can be easily settled.  Let the Mayor test her fallacious argument by some peripatetic locomotion in one of these no-go zones that the Mayor insists do not exist.  One has little doubt what the outcome would be.  Steyn describes what it was like nearly fifteen years ago--and by now, it would likely be much worse.

In his decade-old book America Alone, Steyn related an incident that illustrated the informal, but very real, understanding that non-Muslims are not welcome in certain Muslim-dominated districts:

When Martine Aubry, the Mayor of Lille, daughter of former Prime Minister and EU bigwig Jacques Delors and likely Presidential candidate in the post-Chirac era, held a meeting with an imam in Roubaix, he demanded that it take place on the edge of the neighborhood in recognition that his turf was Muslim territory which she was bound not to enter. Mme Aubry conceded the point, as more and more politicians will in the years ahead.

Those declaiming the existence of Islamic no-go zones in Europe are appeasers and deceivers, nothing more.  They are already capitulating.  Their spurious argumentation gives them away.