Something aggressive about veils
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Something aggressive about veils
| Sat, 12-06-2003 - 10:38pm |
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1101321,00.html
Jacques Chirac hinted strongly yesterday that France will soon introduce legislation banning Muslim girls from wearing headscarves to school, saying most French people saw "something aggressive" in the veil and that the secular state could not tolerate "ostentatious signs of religious proselytism".

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Which is it?
Can it be both aggressive & submissive?
>"French people saw "something aggressive" in the veil and that the secular state could not tolerate "ostentatious signs of religious proselytism"."<
My problem with headcoverings is that they are forcibly imposed on women in Islamic countries like Algeria, which is where many French African immigrants are coming from. I think the use of the word "proselyzation" here was unfortunate. The French are afraid because some women are being gang-raped and otherwise abused in France if they do not dress according to Islamic modesty codes. The average French woman is seen as a sort of slut by traditional Algerian men, simply based on their Western dress.
Even traditionally Muslim countries like Turkey and Egypt have placed limitations on hijab. The problem being, I think, that if the government permits it, women will quickly find themselves in a position where they cannot refuse without endangering their safety or relationships. It presents an impossible situation where the religious freedoms of SOMEONE or other will be compromised no matter what you do, simply because it is the culture of fundamentalist Islam to transform society according to Islamic law.
Habits and priest's collars are specific items of clothing worn only by people in the ministry, and only those people are expected (allowed really) to wear them. That is not in any way analogous. I could, and would, be proselytized into wearing a headcovering in Saudi Arabia, forcing me to wear a religious symbol of a religion that is not mine. Nuns, as we all know, do not force anyone to wear the habit.
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The French have 8-9 million African immigrants. These are not "pockets" for a country like France.
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The United States is a nation of immigrants, has extensive experience integrating new groups and even then has had problems with every new major wave of immigrants. Italians, Irish and Russians are all European Christians with Western sensibilities. There is no comparision between them and people from a place like Algeria, a violently unstable country of increasingly fundamentalist Muslims who live according to African/Middle Eastern tribal traditions. African immigrants practice forced arranged marriages, honor killings, gang-rape "sexual initiations" against girls who don't observe traditional customs, fgm and many other customs that have shocked the French. Those traditions will never be compatible with Western culture. They must be wiped out of the immigrant population. The French have no idea of how to do this, and I see disaster looming in the future.
London has not achieved a melting pot culture with its immigrants and there is a "white flight" phenomonon of native English out of high immigrant areas. For that matter, neither has the multiculturally-minded USA. A hospital in a major city in the United States actually debated doing modified female circumcisions on Somali girls, after mothers requested the operation. The mothers were disappointed that female genital mutilations, as per the traditions of their culture, were not covered by medicaid insurance. After the hospital decided not to do the modified procedure, the community imported a few Somali "midwives" from California to do the procedure (presumably in full) to their daughters. Is this what we want for our country?
Renee
Get a grip. Is forced secularism what we want for our country!!!??? What happened to freedom OF religion? While you may see nothing wrong with this practice because it is aimed at a group whose practices you may find deplorable, think about the ramificatons this kind of legislation has on everyone else. This is exactly the kinds of things we saw in NAZI GERMANY before the war. This kind of intolerance is intolerable and, frankly, dangerous. Moreover, if you were a Muslim, what would this mean to you? What kind of response to the government telling you that you can't practice an important part of your religion would you expect? I expect an increase in terrorism. It's like they are poking the bear to reduce the appearance of the threat of the bear. Totally backwards and stupid. Moreover, if I were Muslim, this is exactly the kind of thing is what would send me to the "defend Islam at all costs" camp. I'd bet my pinky toe that this legislation will cause more young Muslims to be recruited for Jihad. When are people going to understand that hatred and intolerance is NOT THE ANSWER to hatred and intolerance?
I found crictor's post to be very informed and in line with many of the truths of the problems in France, which I studied rather extensively some years ago. I have not really kept up on this issue since then, but the problems of the African nation immigrants integrating into French society and culture don't take to a quick fix, as pretty much all states/countries with large numbers of immigrants face and struggle with similar issues.
I suspect from your brief post that you know very little about this issue, but you just couldn't pass up getting a dig in about the French.
RM
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No. I never suggested any such thing. I said that I do not want religious/cultural practices such as female genital mutilation, gang-rape punishments, honor killings and forced veiling in my country. We have always had limitations on religious freedom in this country. That is why Mormons do not legally practice polygamy and Satanists cannot legally practice human sacrifice.
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It is perfectly legal to veil here in America. Is that what you are talking about? In France, they do not have the same degree of religious liberty, by the decision of their democracy, and they are making a decision about hijab in their public schools in mind with the legal religous freedoms the country grants. Just as I would not move to Saudi Arabia knowing I would be denied my religious rights, the onus is on the Algerians to make sure they are willing to live under French laws or work to change them before they move to France.
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You don't have to go that far back. There are many Middle Eastern and African countries that are completely lacking in religious freedom as we speak. Of course, using the phrase "NAZI GERMANY" sounds really good in a rhetorical sense, doesn't it?
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It would mean that I would either need to work within the French government to change the law, move to a country that allowed me to veil, or take off my veil. As I have already said, America DOES grant women the freedom to veil, and I believe they are entitled to do so. The fact that these issues are becoming so prevalant means that both France and the United States have taken in far too many culturally-foreign immigrants than we can handle at this time. Both countries should cut off immigration until these immigrants have been successfully absorbed. To not do so is highly irresponsible.
In order to avoid terrorism, do the French need to concede to the demands of the Algerian community? Frankly, at that point, it is time to deport some terrorists, since they are criminals and should not be allowed immigration privileges to France. Here in America, we deport criminal immigrants, regardless of what age they were when they came to this country. Some countries have hit squads waiting for them as soon as they get off the plane.
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The veil is symbolic, and the Muslim population of France would be angry if they were limited from many other practices as well, including honor killings (aka murder), enforced purdah (aka imprisonment) and female circumcision (aka child abuse and mutilation). The Muslim population will be angry every time laws are enforced and Muslims are punished for committing these crimes. They will continue to seek loopholes and will have to be forced to give up these practices. The French must draw the line somewhere, and the African population will be angry regardless of what they do. The take-home lesson is that secular societies cannot simply import 8-9 million African Muslims and not expect to have a considerable amount of trouble. What were the French thinking?
By the way, I will not mince words with you: I HATE and WILL NOT TOLERATE honor killings, fgm, forced marriages, forced hijab, polygamy and any number of other abusive practices which are tolerated or enforced by Islamic governments. I do not want these practices in my country. What is your position on these issues?
Racial Discrimination: The Record of France, Human Rights Documentation Center (September 2001) http://www.hrdc.net
"France is no exception where an alarmingly strident xenophobia exists among a substantial portion of the population manifest in the attitudes towards immigrants, minorities and foreigners. The trend has been to see immigrants as racial minorities and racial minorities as immigrants - - regardless of these individuals' country of origin or their citizenship - Accordingly, issues facing "immigrants" often relate to the problems of racial and ethnic minorities in France as well."
Here's a description of the French suburbs:
The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important—and what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.
A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them...
Benevolence inflames the anger of the young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is inseparable from their being. Ambulance men who take away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves surrounded by the man’s “friends,” and jostled, jeered at, and threatened: behavior that, according to one doctor I met, continues right into the hospital, even as the friends demand that their associate should be treated at once, before others.
Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably—according to their own fashion—with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks. They believe they have rights, and they know they will receive medical treatment, however they behave. They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parents’ or grandparents’ origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity...
But this is not a cause of gratitude—on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even—or rather especially—of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités...
http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html
Edited 12/8/2003 5:03:11 PM ET by wrhen
Renee
"Of course, using the phrase "NAZI GERMANY" sounds really good in a rhetorical sense, doesn't it?"
If the shoe fits. Wake up and smell the anti-Semitism. As for anti-Islamic sentiment, one would only need to go to your post to see how much hatred is directed to them.
Read this article in Time, about the increases in hate crimes all over Europe:
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/article/0,13005,901031208-552065-1,00.html
"Seven Days Of Hatred
Anti-Semitic attacks have been making headlines, but strikes against many minorities—Jews, Muslims, Roma, gays—are all too common in Europe
"What Yonathan Arfi, president of the Union of French Jewish Students, says about anti-Semitism in France could apply to prejudices underlying other hate crimes: "It's become a banality, part of the atmosphere."
Five days before the fire that ravaged the Merkaz Hatorah school in Gagny, a group of students was taunted by a teenage girl in the subway: "The Jews, we have to eliminate you," she sneered."
Freedom to practice or not practice one's religion as one sees fit is recognized by the UN & HR organizations all over the world as one of the most fundamental rights that belong to every human being.
This conversation is not about coersing any religous practice. It is about restricting the right to practice one's religion as one sees fit, and even if you don't like it, there are millions of women who wear a hajib because they want to or because they want to 'submit' to their husband's wishes.
Renee
Eh? I am not sure that I am willing to call the wearing of religious garb "an inalienable right for every human being" although it is certainly an aspect of religious freedom. Our government does grant that right to people, in the sense that there is certainly the option of not granting that right, and many governments have taken that path. Our government limits many religious practices, including polygamy, human sacrifice, female genital mutilation, sexual abuses towards children, other abusive practices towards children, incest and other activities that are unacceptable in our society due to conflicts with existing laws.
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Please look at my list above and note that any moral society can allow freedoms only so far as they do not infringe on the rights of others and, to some degree, the health of society.
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Good for them. France is rightfully concerned about women being forced into wearing hijab because of pressure in the form of gang-rapes and other violence. I do not agree with their solution, which involves banning headcoverings in public schools. I think instead that they should limit immigration to people that fit in with French society, so that these conflicts do not occur.
To sum up:
1. I think women should be allowed to wear hijab if they wish.
2. Religious freedom is, just for the record, not absolute in any society. And should not be.
3. In order to avoid conflicts, Western countries need to be more selective in their immigration policies.
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