A solution to a non-existent problem

Kenza Drider, wearing a niqab, leaves a shop in Avignon, southern France

Cynical, desperate electioneering fuels growing Islamophobia in Europe

From the beginning of next month, it will be illegal for a Muslim woman in France to wear a full-face veil (niqab) in any public place. An opinion poll last week suggested that Marine LePen, the new leader of the far-right National Front, could win the first round of next year’s presidential elections in France. These two facts are not unconnected.

President Nicolas Sarkozy is in a panic as the National Front gains in the polls, for his own core vote is also on the right. He has responded by ordering a countrywide debate on Islam’s place in secular France, and he has made it quite clear which side he is on: he wants no minarets in France, he tells journalists, and no halal food in school canteens. But the new anti-niqab law is the centrepiece of his strategy.

It is a solution to a problem that does not exist. There are around five million Muslims in France, about 8 per cent of the population, but only a couple of hundred Muslim Frenchwomen wear the niqab in public. They probably shouldn’t drive, since all that paraphernalia severely restricts their field of vision, but in what sense is their occasional presence in public spaces a threat to society?

There are probably more British women wearing niqab in my small patch of London than there are French women wearing niqab in the entire country. In Camden Town, I see them in the supermarket, on the bus, in the street — and when I overhear them talking to their husbands or their kids, I notice that most of them have London accents.

That’s because most of the niqab-wearers are not immigrants. They are the British-born daughters of immigrants, and the fact they now appear in public wearing this extreme garb — which was not normally worn by women back in Pakistan, or Algeria, or wherever their parents came from — is part of the crisis that always affects second-generation immigrants everywhere.

The men of the conservative older generation are horrified as their daughters absorb the values of the larger society around them, and try desperately to isolate them from those influences. It was a losing battle for Italian and Jewish fathers in New York a hundred years ago, and it’s a losing battle for Algerian and Indian fathers in London and Paris now.

But these things take time to work out, and in the meantime a tiny minority of British Muslim women wear niqabs, and an even tinier minority of Muslim Frenchwomen. So why would a French government ban women wearing niqab from taking a bus, entering a shop, or even just walking down the street, on pain of a 150-euro ($200) fine?

In addition to a fine, the wicked transgressors will be obliged to attend a citizenship class that stresses the egalitarian values of the French republic, including gender equality. This is a very large sledgehammer being used to crack a very small nut. But it will have served its purpose if it gets Sarkozy re-elected.

The right is in the ascendant in French politics, and this has unleashed a wave of panic-mongering over “multiculturalism.” Assimilation of second- and third-generation immigrants is actually proceeding at the normal pace, but in the midst of the process it is possible to believe that the cultural turmoil is leading to a permanently divided society. Most people on the right do believe that.

Whoever can more convincingly claim to have the solution for this imaginary problem wins the right-wing vote, and the National Front is drawing ahead of Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). Under the leadership of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front came second in the 2002 presidential election; under the leadership of his daughter Marine Le Pen it could do even better.

The recent opinion poll commissioned by Le Parisien newspaper gave her 23 per cent of the vote, while Sarkozy’s party and the Socialists got 21 per cent each. She has ditched the National Front’s neo-fascist and racist rhetoric in favour of a low-key, “common-sense” style that is having a real political impact.

But all she can do is force a run-off second round in which, like her father in 2002, she would be overwhelmingly defeated. French political parties are divided on many things, but they would all unite to keep the National Front from power.

The tide of Islamophobia is running strongly on the European right at the moment. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been trumpeting the failure of multiculturalism for the past six months, and British Prime Minister David Cameron recently added his voice to the chorus. It is only a cynical political stratagem, but it could have real consequences.

Left to their own devices, the various immigrant groups in these countries, including the Muslim groups, will assimilate to the general society in a couple of generations, as immigrants generally do. You can accelerate the process a little with the right government policies, but not much. However, you could stall it entirely by attacking the minority groups and driving them into cultural ghettoes. That’s the game that Sarkozy is playing now.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist who is published internationally.

thespec.com

Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker trying to ban burqas

A Dutch rightwing anti-Islam politician on Thursday submitted new proposals for a law banning burqas after an earlier attempt failed.

In a letter to parliament, Geert Wilders, who heads the Freedom Party which has nine of the 150 seats in the lower house, wrote that “the burqa and the niqab are a symbol of the oppression of women” and are “in defiance of the democratic constitutional state”. It is not known how many women in the Netherlands wear the face veils but estimates are a few dozen.

Nearly two years ago, in October 2005, a majority of the Dutch parliament voted in favour of a motion by Wilders to ban burqas in public places. However, the then minister of integration, hardliner Rita Verdonk, did not craft the law for a burqa ban after an advisory committee said such a ban could be unconstitutional because it violated the right to equal treatment for all residents of the country.

Now Wilders, known for his harsh anti-Islam rhetoric, has submitted his own law proposal and hopes parliament will agree. It is unlikely that he will get another majority as the November 2006 elections put an end to a centre-right majority in parliament that backed the plans.

Wilders wants to specifically ban burqas and niqabs in public places including stations, stadiums, shops, restaurants, museums, hospitals, cars driving on the public roads and public transports. He proposes a maximum sentence of 12 days in jail or a fine of $4,619.

If the law were passed, it would be a world first. No national government has yet banned the use of face veils in public places although some Belgian municipalities, including Antwerp, have introduced local bans. In his proposal, Wilders also cites Turkey and France. Turkey bans the wearing of veils and headscarves in public buildings while France has banned the use of obvious religious symbols like Islamic headscarves and veils in government buildings including schools and hospitals.

ICARE

BNP jibe at lawyer who opposed veiled judges

A barrister who argued that Muslim judges in Britain should never wear the veil in court has been accused by a fellow barrister of deploying the arguments of the British National Party.

Barbara Hewson was commenting on guidance issued to judges earlier this year by the Judicial Studies Board. The advice did not rule out the possibility that women judges, magistrates or tribunal members might wear the niqab, or veil, in court. Instead, it asked rhetorically: "Is the constituency which is served by the courts entitled to see the person dispensing justice?"

Miss Hewson, writing in the Bar Council's magazine Counsel, said it was worrying that the board's advice contemplated the possibility of veiled judges. Describing the guidance as "astonishing and subversive", she said: "The United Kingdom is not a sharia state."

Responding in the magazine, Fatim Kurji wrote: "As for veiled judges and the suggestion that the 'United Kingdom is not a sharia state', this is what I call 'the BNP argument'. It implies a woman who wears a niqab comes at the erosion of British values. Such an astonishingly offensive remark undermines the long-enduring libertarian values."

Miss Kurji said she was no fan of niqab but even less so of a legal system "that restricts access to justice on the basis of religious expression".

Telegraph

'Quebec's Le Pen' likely to make major election gain

A young conservative populist sometimes described as Quebec's Jean-Marie Le Pen is likely in today's election to throw a spanner into the separatist versus federalist competition that has dominated Quebec politics for decades.

Polls indicate Mario Dumont's Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), a small fringe party for the past three elections, is about to seize the balance of power in the first minority parliament in 129 years. The ADQ has side-swiped the separatist Parti Quebecois and the ruling federalist Liberals, led by Jean Charest, by exploiting a backlash against multiculturism, especially Muslims.

Adebate has developed throughout the province about what constitutes reasonable accommodation to the cultural and social practices of expanding ethnic communities. It was fuelled when, for example, a conservative Hasidic synagogue forced a sports centre to paint the windows of its swimming pool so students would not see people in swimming costumes.

Muslim headscarves and niqabs have also become a subject of controversy, especially when an 11-year-old girl was thrown out of a football match for wearing one. Quebec's chief electoral officer has ordered that Muslim women must bare their faces if they want to vote, after an outcry over his original ruling that face coverings were acceptable.

M. Dumont, who describes himself as an autonomist wanting more power for Quebec, will probably tonight be in a position to implement many of the rightist, inward-looking policies on which he has campaigned. Both M. Charest and the Parti Quebecois leader, Andre Boisclair, seemed oblivious to the issue until polls showed M. Dumont was surging ahead.

Independent