Nigel Farage on "no-go zones" and "sharia law"

Categories: Latest News
Thursday January 15 2015
Fox News is in the news again this week and not for silly remarks about Birmingham being “totally Muslim” by a guest, Steven Emerson, dubbed a “complete idiot” by the Prime Minister.
This time the US based news channel makes headlines for comments by UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, about “ghettos in most of the big French cities” which are “no-go zones” for non-Muslims and in which “the police and all the normal agents of the law have withdrawn and that is where sharia law has come in”.
Farage in an interview with Fox News said, “In parts of northern England we’ve seen the sexual grooming of under-age girls committed by Muslim men, in the majority, and for all of these things we are seeing the law not being applied equally, we’re seeing the police forces not doing their job because we’ve suffered from moral cowardice.
“So wherever you look, wherever you look you see this blind eye being turned and you see the growth of ghettos where the police and all the normal agents of the law have withdrawn and that is where sharia law has come in and you know it got so bad in Britain that our last Archbishop of Canterbury, the leader of our church, actually said we should accept sharia law.”
The concept of “no-go zones” in the UK was coined by the former Bishop of Rochester, Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, who in 2008 made the claims in an article in the Sunday Telegraph, later appearing in a front page article in the Daily Express.
Farage goes on to claim that the UK has “been turning a blind eye to preachers of hate that have been coming here from the Middle East and saying things for which the rest of us would be arrested”.
And yet, the Home Secretary, before introducing the new Counter-terrorism and Security Bill to parliament last November, gave details on just how many interventions the Government has made to exclude persons from the UK. She stated, “I have excluded 61 people on national security grounds and 72 people because their presence here would not have been conducive to the public good. In total, I have excluded eighty-four hate preachers.”
Moreover, the law on incitement to violence and incitement to hatred is very clear about what constitutes the sorts of “things for which the rest of us would be arrested”. In point of fact, the disparity in the legislation in terms of the criminal offences as they extend to inciting hate against groups defined by race and those defined by religion, means that vilifying Muslims is not likely to see someone arrested unless prosecutors can prove ‘intent’.
Farage goes on to make claims about the law not being applied objectively blaming “moral cowardice” for police not prosecuting “sexual grooming of under-age girls committed by Muslim men”. And yet he ignores that it was a Muslim prosecutor, Nazir Ahmed, who proceeded to bring cases against the gangs involved in child sex exploitation to court.
Farage also carps on about the remarks made by the former Archbishop of Canterbury about shari’ah law suggesting that shari’ah was encroaching on the jurisdiction of English common law because “the police and all the normal agents of the law have withdrawn”.
All this is certainly fuel for the fire that rages on Fox News. One of the channel’s presenters, Judge Jeanine Pirro, made headlines yesterday for an “unhinged” rant in which she said “We need to kill them. We need to kill them – the radical Muslim terrorists hellbent on killing us.”
Media Matters further explores the Islamophobes who have been invited onto Fox News in recent days to offer their ‘expert’ analysis. No surprise that some of them feature in reports investigating the carriers of anti-Muslim prejudice on US media.
Last May, after a string of embarrassing disclosures on the Islamophobic and racist comments made by UKIP members and candidates, Nigel Farage sought to argue that the party “is not racist”.
Difficult to see how that sticks really isn’t it?