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  • French Ministry of Equality of Territories and Housing

Yesterday, I heard from a French acquaintance over Facebook who was upset that Fox News had reported on a scourge of alleged "no-go zones" throughout France following the Charlie Hebdo attacks "where neither tourists nor cops dare enter" and "poor and alienated Muslims have intimidated the government into largely ceding authority over them, prompting fears that the kind of jihad that gave rise to last week's attack in Paris is festering unchecked." My friend lives in one of these alleged zones, and told me that this odd designation didn't at all line up with his firsthand experience.

That's because all evidence suggests that no-go zones aren't real. First discussed by British politicians Nigel Farage and Steve Emerson in guest appearances on Fox News this week, the existence of "no go zones" in Europe has been debunked by the French embassy in London, earned its own Snopes.com page, and seems about as credible as Emerson's comment that led British Prime Minister David Cameron to call him "a total idiot."

That didn't stop Fox from running with the story, and even going so far as to link to an alleged list of no-go zones. When I dug into the list Fox sourced, it turned out to be something entirely different: a list of areas identified by the French government as "sensitive urban zones." A little digging and you'll find that these areas weren't singled out as sites of potential terrorism, but for public support and development due to high concentrations of public housing and high unemployment rates (kind of the opposite of lawless). In fact, I know one of these "no-go zones" very well—I worked in the Parisian suburb of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois as an English teaching assistant for the better part of 2009. One of the elementary schools I worked at is in a sensitive urban zone. It's an economically and ethnically diverse, relatively quiet neighborhood with some odd public art and reliable public transportation, which is to say, it's like many French neighborhoods. It is not, as Fox put it so delicately, a "jihad incubator."

This information, by the way, can be found on Wikipedia. It's not hard to find. This story takes about two minutes to fact-check, leaving me to wonder what exactly the motivation behind it was. Following the porridge-choking incident, Steve Emerson has apologized for his remarks. Farage has not.