Anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller joined Florida conservative radio host Joyce Kaufman earlier this week to discuss the controversy over Fox commentator Steve Emerson’s statement that Birmingham, England, had become a “no-go zone” controlled by Islamic law. Emerson retracted his statement and Fox issued a series of apologies for his remark and for other statements on the network about the myth of “no-go zones” in Europe.
Geller, who has been warning of European “no-go zones” for years, acknowledged that Emerson’s statement about Birmingham was wrong but was outraged that Fox had taken its retractions even further, agreeing with Kaufman that their opponents are winning “the propaganda war” and that Fox’s apologies were “egregious,” the result of a liberal ideology in which “Islam trumps gay.”
“Look, any time anybody approaches this subject — you know and I know because we have suffered it for a decade —we are demonized, smeared and libeled,” she said.
“To be clear, there are absolutely no-go zones,” she said. “In parts of London, there are absolutely religious police that beat and wound and seriously attack anyone that doesn’t dress according to Islam.”
Geller went on to site a Daily Mail story about a small fringe group that had put up posters in a London neighborhood declaring it a “Sharia Controlled Zone” — not an actual designation observed by actual authorities. She also cited a Guardian story about a self-proclaimed “Muslim patrol gang” that harassed a number of people, including a gay man, in east London. Contrary to the “no-go zone” myth, the perpetrators were not given control of the area, but were arrested by actual British law enforcement officers. These stories illustrate the fact that, as a number of fact-checkers have noted, the supposed European Sharia zones are simply high-crime areas.
But Geller smelled a double-standard in the media: “Here we have the media, which is so pro-gay-issue it’s blinding, that you can’t turn on a television show or series or movie where there’s not some advancement of the gay agenda…and yet, Islam trumps gay.”
Kaufman, for her part, cited the killing of 13 people by ISIS in Syria as evidence of the existence of these no-go zones in Europe: “They killed 13 teenagers for watching a soccer match in Syria, obviously that’s a no-go zone.”
