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French Shenanigans

11th April, 2011 - Posted by Wolf Paul - No Comments

Today in France a law went into effect which bans from public spaces such as the streets, buses, trains, restaurants and hotels, and official buildings any item of clothing which covers the wearer’s face. The law does not mention either women or Muslims, nor the words “burqa” or “niqab”, but everyone knows that it is aimed at the few hundred Muslim women in France who choose to wear such veils. That was clear from the arguments used in the run-up to the law’s passage last year which can be reduced to “the dignity of women” and “the secularist values of the French republic”.

Apart from the fact that police have been instructed that they cannot (a) forcibly remove such a veil, and (b) should at all cost avoid anything smacking of force or violence, which makes the law pretty unenforcable, the fact that the law provides for sanctions (EUR 150 fine and compulsory attendance of a course in French citizenship) against the wearer of the garment rather than against the one who supposedly put undue pressure on her to put it on demonstrates that the REAL reason for the law is the anti-Muslim mood in the French population rather than any concern for the dignity of women.

Today Kenza Drider, a 32 year mother of four from Avignon arrived in Paris by train, clad in a “niqab” with a narrow slit for the eyes, for a TV interview. She announced that if she were stopped and fined she would sue the French government in the European court because this law contravenes her human rights guaranteed by European law.

I hope she does, and I hope she wins — not because I think women should cover themselves like this, but because I don’t think the state should have the right to prohibit it. I also hope that some mosque in Switzerland sues against the ban on minarets there, for the same reason.

Once we pass laws like this here in Europe, we have no ground to stand on to protest the ban against Christian church buildings in Muslim countries. But perhaps that is the agenda behind such laws, anyway: ban all manifestation of religion in the public space, starting with Islam because that is relatively easy to do right now, but eventually extending to all spires, steeples, church bells, nuns’ and priests’ habits, crosses, etc, because they offend the secularist sensibilities of modern man.

We probably cannot stop this development, but it is very disturbing to me that some Christians applaud it while it affects Muslims and fail to see that they will be next.

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