John Derbyshire's September Diary on National Review Online

No-Go Areas... in France:

John Derbyshire points this out today:

In Le Figaro daily dated Feb 1, 2002, Lucienne Bui Trong, a criminologist working for the French government's Renseignements Generaux (General Intelligence -- a mix of FBI and secret service), complains that the survey system she had created for accurately denumbering the Muslim no-go zones was dismantled by the government. She wrote: 'From 106 hot points in 1991, we went to 818 sensitive areas in 1999. That's for the whole country. These data were not politically correct.' Since she comes from a Vietnamese background, Ms. Bui Trong cannot be suspected of racism, of course, otherwise she wouldn't have been able to start this survey in the first place.

The term she uses, 'sensitive area,' is the PC euphemism for these places where anything representing a Western institution (post office truck, firemen, even mail order delivery firms, and of course cops) is routinely ambushed with Molotov cocktails, and where war weapons imported from the Muslim part of Yugoslavia are routinely found.
The number 818 is from 2002. I'd go out on a limb and venture that it hasn't decreased in two years.

Mr. Derbyshire has several other interesting observations in this month's diary. Be sure to skip down to the one on British childhood games, even if you don't read the others.