Rue de la Honte

Life is full of contrasts, pleasure and pain, beauty and horror. Many times we experience them in sequence, just one after another, and it makes us greater appreciate the good ones and greater hate the bad ones. In last december I was enjoying a beautiful winter afternoon stroll around Paris. I was in one of those many areas of Paris "intra-muros" that don't have any particular attraction for the average tourist but that I profoundly love. Areas where traditional Parisian stone buildings mix with high-rise buildings of the 70's, "quartiers populaires" where you still can feel the positive part of the "mix of cultures" and the mixité sociale, where a higher presence of European, Asian and non-muslim African population has prevented the brutal islamisation process of similar neighbourhoods on the other side of the Peripherique. In this occasion I'm talking about Belleville and Menilmontant.

While walking along the Boulevard de Belleville, when reaching the Couronnes Metro station, out of urban curiosity I decided to deviate a bit and take a look at one of the perpendicular streets. I thought it would be similar to Rue Oberkampf, that is just a few blocks away and I know quite well, but not, this street was pretty different. First thing I saw was an Islamic shop full of shit, where you could find all the elements of Muslim communitarism that you could have nightmares about. The most shocking was to find islamic comics to turn kids into "good (salafist) muslims, to teach them to separate and despise "the others", us, the infidels.

I realised this street, rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud had to be a street I had read about some time ago, a street where bobo's and salafists live against. I continued to inspect the street and it was sickening, nauseating, the street is infested with Islamist shops and libraries and ice of the cake, a salafist mosque, la "mosquée Omar", one of the biggest factories of fanatics and terrorists in France.

I took some pictures, but I was so full of hate that my hands were trembling. As strong as that hate was the feeling of impotence, not being able, not daring, to set on fire that salafist mosque and the Islamist shops in that Street of Shame (Rue de la Honte).