medium.com blogger ‘Sened DHAB’ gives Fox News the backhand:

This is Paris

I have lived in Paris for most of my adult life. Whenever someone asks me where I’m from (my name doesn’t sound “franais d’origine”), I’m always tempted to answer “Paris”, because this city is as much part of my identity as are my nationality (French), my origins (Tunisian) and my religion (Muslim). Over the years I have moved 8 times within the limits of Paris. Hopping from arrondissement (the 20 numbered districts of Paris) to arrondissement, I studied in the 16th, and lived in the 15th, 6th, 9th, 17th, 18th, 10th and, most recently, settled down in the 20th, a few blocks away from Porte de Vincennes and Porte de Montreuil. As with any big city, Paris has its difficult neighborhoods, those few streets when one would feel uneasy walking alone in the middle of the night. Those kind of streets can be found in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, London, Roma, Milan, Barcelona, or any medium-sized city in the world. Some of these blocks are called ZUS — Sensitive Urban Zones, so-called because they’re part of a nationwide plan of prioritized security, education and urban amelioration efforts. Not because, as a few journalists and editors on Fox News seem to think, the “government has abandoned them”.

Apart from the usual delinquency found in any poor part of any urban center on the planet, the tableau portrayed by Fox News and “Warzone expert” Nolan Peterson, and the deceiving name the network has coined for the occasion (“No-Go Zones”) seems like a complete fabrication of what’s really going on there.

Let’s take a look at this map, aired numerous times on Fox News in the past few days:

Image: 1*SRF6YpATD9F8M_FUU5U-CQ.jpeg

Those red circled parts of the city contain the districts of Porte Saint-Denis, Porte Saint-Martin, Belleville, Mnilmontant and La Goutte d’Or, among others. Many of those are supposed to be (and I’m quoting) “governed by Islamic Sharia law”, and “off-limits to non-Muslims”.

I lived and worked in all of those districts. All of them.

Read on for some nice pictures and stories about parts of Gay Pariee that have a rich life and some things worth a visitor’s time.