French Parliament Bans Islamic veils
meistromoco
953 Posts
Disgusting. This is some shameful shit.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/13/AR2010071301103.html?hpid=artslot
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; 2:33 PM
PARIS -- The French parliament's lower house enacted a sweeping but constitutionally vulnerable law Tuesday barring women from wearing full-face Islamic veils anywhere in public.
The National Assembly's 335-1 decision was scheduled for a vote in the Senate in September. If ratified, the law will make France the second Western European nation after Belgium to ban outright what has become the most prominent symbol of the growing Muslim presence across a continent steeped in traditions of secularism and Christianity.
Similar laws have been discussed, but not passed, in Spain, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. In addition, a number of European cities have enacted municipal bans, prohibiting the veils in public buildings and imposing other restrictions.
Apparently by coincidence, France's nationwide ban advanced on the eve of Bastille Day, which marks the 1789 French Revolution that gave birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and helped enshrine France as a beacon for the respect of human rights.
The legislation imposed a $185 fine or citizenship lessons -- or both -- on women caught outside their homes wearing the full-face coverings known as a burqa in Afghanistan and a niqab in North Africa. It set a fine of $38,000 and a one-year prison term for anyone convicted of forcing women and girls to wear such veils, reflecting a widely shared conviction here that Muslim women are forced to cover their faces by their fathers or husbands.
The law is expected to pass as easily in the upper house, where President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative coalition also dominates, as it did in the National Assembly. But before going into effect, legislators decided, the law will be submitted to the Constitutional Council, France's highest tribunal, to determine whether it is compatible with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.
The Council of State, a prestigious advisory body, has already warned that an outright ban, such as the one imposed Tuesday, would be vulnerable to a challenge on constitutional grounds. Similarly, legislators in the European Parliament have warned it could be stricken down in the European Court of Human Rights, an organ of the European Union.
Citing that danger, the Socialist Party, France's main opposition group, abstained from voting Tuesday. The party's stand, its leaders said, reflected opposition to the full-face veil but also refusal to endorse the outright ban backed by Sarkozy's government. Instead, they explained, the prohibition should have been limited to public buildings such as schools, courtrooms and hospitals.
But Justice Minister Mich?le Alliot-Marie, whose office wrote and shepherded the legislation, said an outright ban was the only logical choice because the values of French society imply living with uncovered faces.
"This is a success for the republic and the values it embodies," she declared after the vote, adding, "It shows France is never so great, never so respected around the world, as when it is united around its values."
The Socialists appeared to be seeking to maintain their opposition role but without confronting the public's strong support of the ban. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed 82 percent of those queried supporting the prohibition. Similarly, the survey found that 71 percent of Germans, 62 percent of Britons and 59 percent of Spaniards would back similar bans in their own countries.
France's Interior Ministry has estimated that fewer than 2,000 women wear full-face veils in France, a country of 64 million people, about 5 million of whom are Muslims. Still, the issue has become a rallying point for those who feel Muslims should work harder to integrate into French society if they choose to live here.
France's main Muslim organizations, while denouncing the veils as out of place in Europe, have expressed concern that Sarkozy's legislation is likely to encourage more discrimination against Muslims. They expressed a similar fear last year during a government-organized series of debates about what constitutes French national identity that swiftly descended into anti-immigrant speeches.
Fran?ois de Rugy, a Green Party member of parliament who cast the lone "no" vote against the ban, accused the government of fanning such tensions in an effort to win support from voters in the anti-immigrant National Front party. Sarkozy's presidential victory in 2007 was due in part to his ability to siphon off such voters, but recent elections have suggested they are returning to the National Front.
"You are throwing oil on the fire," de Rugy said. "You are feeding the fire, and for electoral reasons."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/13/AR2010071301103.html?hpid=artslot
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; 2:33 PM
PARIS -- The French parliament's lower house enacted a sweeping but constitutionally vulnerable law Tuesday barring women from wearing full-face Islamic veils anywhere in public.
The National Assembly's 335-1 decision was scheduled for a vote in the Senate in September. If ratified, the law will make France the second Western European nation after Belgium to ban outright what has become the most prominent symbol of the growing Muslim presence across a continent steeped in traditions of secularism and Christianity.
Similar laws have been discussed, but not passed, in Spain, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. In addition, a number of European cities have enacted municipal bans, prohibiting the veils in public buildings and imposing other restrictions.
Apparently by coincidence, France's nationwide ban advanced on the eve of Bastille Day, which marks the 1789 French Revolution that gave birth to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and helped enshrine France as a beacon for the respect of human rights.
The legislation imposed a $185 fine or citizenship lessons -- or both -- on women caught outside their homes wearing the full-face coverings known as a burqa in Afghanistan and a niqab in North Africa. It set a fine of $38,000 and a one-year prison term for anyone convicted of forcing women and girls to wear such veils, reflecting a widely shared conviction here that Muslim women are forced to cover their faces by their fathers or husbands.
The law is expected to pass as easily in the upper house, where President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative coalition also dominates, as it did in the National Assembly. But before going into effect, legislators decided, the law will be submitted to the Constitutional Council, France's highest tribunal, to determine whether it is compatible with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.
The Council of State, a prestigious advisory body, has already warned that an outright ban, such as the one imposed Tuesday, would be vulnerable to a challenge on constitutional grounds. Similarly, legislators in the European Parliament have warned it could be stricken down in the European Court of Human Rights, an organ of the European Union.
Citing that danger, the Socialist Party, France's main opposition group, abstained from voting Tuesday. The party's stand, its leaders said, reflected opposition to the full-face veil but also refusal to endorse the outright ban backed by Sarkozy's government. Instead, they explained, the prohibition should have been limited to public buildings such as schools, courtrooms and hospitals.
But Justice Minister Mich?le Alliot-Marie, whose office wrote and shepherded the legislation, said an outright ban was the only logical choice because the values of French society imply living with uncovered faces.
"This is a success for the republic and the values it embodies," she declared after the vote, adding, "It shows France is never so great, never so respected around the world, as when it is united around its values."
The Socialists appeared to be seeking to maintain their opposition role but without confronting the public's strong support of the ban. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center showed 82 percent of those queried supporting the prohibition. Similarly, the survey found that 71 percent of Germans, 62 percent of Britons and 59 percent of Spaniards would back similar bans in their own countries.
France's Interior Ministry has estimated that fewer than 2,000 women wear full-face veils in France, a country of 64 million people, about 5 million of whom are Muslims. Still, the issue has become a rallying point for those who feel Muslims should work harder to integrate into French society if they choose to live here.
France's main Muslim organizations, while denouncing the veils as out of place in Europe, have expressed concern that Sarkozy's legislation is likely to encourage more discrimination against Muslims. They expressed a similar fear last year during a government-organized series of debates about what constitutes French national identity that swiftly descended into anti-immigrant speeches.
Fran?ois de Rugy, a Green Party member of parliament who cast the lone "no" vote against the ban, accused the government of fanning such tensions in an effort to win support from voters in the anti-immigrant National Front party. Sarkozy's presidential victory in 2007 was due in part to his ability to siphon off such voters, but recent elections have suggested they are returning to the National Front.
"You are throwing oil on the fire," de Rugy said. "You are feeding the fire, and for electoral reasons."
Comments
This week, French lawmakers are expected to vote on a proposed law that would criminalize the burqa, bringing to a head more than a year of heated debate over the conservative Islamic veil in contemporary France. Although the full head and body covering is worn by fewer than 2,000 of the country's 3.5 million Muslims, the movement to ban it has touched off a volatile discussion about issues of immigration, integration and the rights of women. Nonetheless, a recent poll showed that eight in 10 people in France support slapping a ban on the veil.
On this side of the Atlantic, however, conversations about European burqa bans have fractured more predictably along political lines. You would be hard pressed to find an American feminist clamoring to see the burqa outlawed, and that perspective has certainly been absent from Broadsheet -- until now. Ahead of parliament's vote on Tuesday, we went to Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-born journalist who calls herself "a liberal, a Muslim and a feminist," to better understand the argument for a ban.
Why do you support a ban on the burqa in France?
I support banning the burqa because I believe it equates piety with the disappearance of women. The closer you are to God, the less I see of you -- and I find that idea extremely dangerous. It comes from an ideology that basically wants to hide women away. What really strikes me is that a lot of people say that they support a woman's right to choose to wear a burqa because it's her natural right. But I often tell them that what they're doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman's right to do anything. We're talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I'm really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women's right to do this, because it's basically the only kind of "right" that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.
It seems that if you tried to ban something like the burqa in the United States, you'd immediately have people screaming that it was a huge violation of personal freedom. What makes the European context different?
To be really crude about it, in the United States, if you do anything and say that it's because it's my religious belief, there is some kind of hallowed ground that you cannot touch, because everybody must be able to do what they want in religion. And to make an equally crude generalization of what happens in Europe, they spent some 500 years fighting over religion and trying to get rid of the church in their lives, so the last thing they want is to justify anything in terms of religion. So it's the opposite obsession almost -- to keep religion out of everything.
But what really disturbs me about the European context is that the ban is driven almost solely by xenophobic right wingers who I know very well don't give a toss about women's rights. What they're doing is they're hijacking an issue that they know is very emotive and very easy to sell to Europeans who are scared about immigration, Europeans who are scared about the economy, Europeans who don't understand people who look and sound different than them. They've taken advantage of this and done it very well. I'm very disappointed with the left wing and liberals in Europe for not speaking up and saying, the burqa ban has everything to do with women's rights. We are fighting against an ideology that does not believe in women's rights, and we will not allow the right wing to hijack this issue for their own purposes.
It seems like another group we rarely hear from in this debate is the women who actually wear the burqa.
These women will tell you that they see this as the true Islam. And my response to that would be, who told you that's how our religion wants you to look? Because if you look around, the majority of Muslims in the world do not look like this. I have met Muslim women who have a very elaborate explanation for why they wear the burqa -- they say that women are candy or diamond rings or precious stones who have to be hidden away in order to appreciate their worth. And I'm appalled! We should talk about this because if we're really going to discuss this as feminists, is that something a feminist should be defending? That a woman is a piece of candy?
Do you think that banning the burqa will actually do anything, practically speaking, to help Muslim women from very conservative communities?
What I hope it will do is that it will create a situation where a woman can say to a man, look, you know that I have to go out and work so that we can continue to live here, and I can't go out with my face covered, even though you want me to, because that's what the law says. I hope the law gives women this kind of out. I have no idea if that's actually going to happen or not.
i feel the same way, and ultimately it's a wishy washy liberal stance... at a certain point, you have to say either yes or no...
i think if the french people have decided that veiled women go against their values, then by all means ban it... certainly Islamic countries aren't shy about banning things that go against their values...
Europe is very afraid of this now, so expect more moves along these lines.
One of my female Muslim friends takes wearing her headscarf very seriously. She buys beautiful, expensive and colorful silk scarves and matches her outfits to them. No one forces her, and she's turned her cultural beliefs into a pretty swanky fashion statement.
The French (and many other groups, too) cannot acknowledge that though the symbol of a headscarf is sometimes a manifestation of female inequality, it is not in itself oppressive. The removal of a headscarf is a superficial attempt to deny the cultural, racial and ethnic differences that lie too deep to be erased by bigotry. If you take off the scarf, you'll still have the Muslim underneath. Shame on you, France, and all you other ethnocentric assholes out there.
YES. Because I enjoy having a national identity, one which is generally tolerant. Subversion involves losing freedoms. Freedom to drink, draw humans, and listen to Slayer and Culture Club. I don't want any more martyrs killing in the name of their imaginary friend.
Muslim men and women are not shy about showing their disgust for the dress sense of non-Muslim women. If my gf wants to wear a skirt on a hot day, I don't see why she should be subjected to bitchy comments from Muslim women that see her as some kind of slut.
The left haven't made so much noise about this because they don't want to be tarred with the same brush - this article says that all of this is political hijacking, but I don't believe you'd find many liberals in favour of the full face-veil. It's sooo last millenia. The media is controlling the narrative of this as purely a rightwing, conservative move, but I bet most left-wing politicians are happy to let the right take the fall-out, but equally happy for this to happen.
i suggest everyone read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_scarf_controversy_in_France before really getting stuck in.
it comes down in part to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_French_law_on_the_Separation_of_the_Churches_and_the_State
I don't remember so much when this first hit the news, but it's been running for a while, and I remember at some point during my gf's psychology/sociology degree she was talking about the importance, for a child's development, of learning facial recognition, and how a school teacher should under no circumstances be allowed to wear a full face veil. There's so many arguments against it, and I'm sure I've also heard Muslims saying that this isn't really in the Koran, and that it's a cultural thing that has been enforced by way of religion.
Because, you know, it's not like religion has ever been used as an excuse for some sheisty sh*t.
Anyway, I'm against full face veil. Call me a xenophobe if you like.
The end of party masks?
Thou should not speaketh, of what thou not knoweth.
Call me a xenophobe too, but I can't see the sense in coming to another country with a completely different culture, making no attempt to integrate and whinging on and on until you get to practice and live under your own laws, be they religious or family-enforced.
Rejoice that you are better off over here, get your slapper clothes on and get down the f*cking pub double-quick.
It's not done us any harm.
Will the English govmt consider something similar on 'security' grounds though? As dumb as I think the full veil is, maybe we should be supporting it on grounds of personal privacy, even if we don't agree with it (due to associated cultural 'assumptions' etc). Teh War On Terror may soon move on to party masks, then sunglasses, beards, tattoos...
Words to live by.
Yep, legislation has already been drafted under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, due to be ratified/debated next year.
Can you provide proof of this, please.
I meant, slightly tongue-in-cheek, going to the pub has not done us any harm.
Apart from alcoholism and beer-goggle liaisons.
I personally am spooked by the full-face veil, because I watched some itv chiller back in the 70s with a ghost nun who wore like, this fencing mask. Proper shit me up.
Also...
Partial-veils. Eyes-only bithnith. Whaddup with that?
I always immediately recall two things when I see a bird thus dressed:
1. "Police have issued a description of the suspect: Brown eyes."
2. Billy Idol's "Eyes Without A Face" starts up mentally.
Although...
BITD there was a bird on the checkout in Bahrain Airport Duty Free rocking the eyes-only and they were giggling amongst themselves as I ummed and ahhed about some Versace wallet (as this is how I was rolling). I asked what they were laughing about and she gestured me over to whisper to my ear...
[in secsy whisper]"I like your eyes"[/secsy whisper]
Seems eyes are a big deal over there. Lucky me.
Now you know.
Sleep well.
Insofar as the culture that europeans want to defend from subversion is one based on individual rights, I don't see how you can separate that from women's rights.
On a different note, some people over here in France have argued that there is no need for the ban because the number of women actually wearing the full veil is small. Though true, the ban is still important as a legitimate affirmation of european culture. You don't not ban something because it's marginal. You do so because it's inline with your values. The full face veil isn't.
This asks - did you like hers?
It can be about both.