As Miranda explained yesterday, right-wing anti-Islam activists have been spreading a myth for years that radical Muslims have taken over entire parts of European cities and neighborhoods and turned them into “no-go zones,” which are controlled by Sharia law and are off-limits to police officers and non-Muslim citizens
This claim is nonsense and is based entirely upon a deliberate misrepresentation of a “sensitive urban area” designation made by the French government, targeting certain areas for urban renewal. This myth is so obviously false, in fact, that even the conservative commentators at Fox News were forced to apologize for spreading it.
Glenn Beck, of course, is totally outraged that anti-Islam activist Steve Emerson apologized for the inaccurate claim he made on Fox that the British city of Birmingham is a “totally Muslim” no-go zone, fuming on his radio program today that Emerson is an “American hero” who deserves to be remembered in history but is instead being targeted for destruction over some piddling “political nitpicking.”
Beck brought Emerson onto his program this morning in an effort to salvage the Fox commentator’s reputation and sought to do so by insisting that the “sensitive urban areas” are actually the “no-go zones” that Emerson said they were.
“What this is is areas that the police avoid if they can,” Beck said. “They try to stay out because it’s a sensitive area … It’s almost like an Indian reservation to where the government goes into Indian reservations if there’s a murder or something like that, the government will go into it. But generally speaking, they police themselves. Same kind of thing”:
