posted
Link. Personally I am very disappointed. But I do find it very interesting that there are majorities in Germany, Great Britain, and Spain that support the French ban and yet in the United States we are 66% against it. Who knew?
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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I suppose we're only for burqa bans around ground zero.
I too am disappointed, but I'm not in the least possible way surprised. The ban affects a nanoscopic portion of the population, giving few real voices of defense in protest. The small size of those affected also lessens the impact to many, whereas forcing this on a larger population might have been met with more general resistance.
The french are hyperagitated about integration. They aren't really big fans of multiculturalism. A majority of the population in France is very leery of immigrant populations, especially Muslims, and figure if they are going to stay, they need to quickly and fully assimilate into French society, and wearing a burqa is both a literal and virtual barrier to integration.
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I'm pleased that we're against it in the USA, but I have to admit I'm uncertain if we're really that much more respectful of civil rights here...or if we're just not as much in contact with new Middle-Eastern and Asian Islamic immigrants as folks are in parts of Europe? I'll have to look up the statistics. I think, given the numbers involved, though, that that isn't the explanation.
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quote:or if we're just not as much in contact with new Middle-Eastern and Asian Islamic immigrants as folks are in parts of Europe?
Stats won't help you. I suppose a higher percentage of the population over there is Muslim than here, and France is roughly the size of Texas, so, I suppose you're more likely to run into someone, but, there as here, immigrant Muslim populations tend to cluster geographically. One of the bigger problems in France over the last couple years has been rampant unemployment in Muslim immigrant communities in France, leading to riots and general unrest, but geographically they're clustered outside of city centers and other more affluent or middle class areas where "ethnic white" French people live. In other words, it's not a constant contact. You're only going to see sizable populations of Muslims in America in either major urban centers, or in some of the few places where they've clustered in large numbers, like here in southeast Michigan, where I'd really be surprised to meet anyone who doesn't at least know a Muslim, or someone whose parents are "off the boat."
This is a cultural issue. French people are even more xenophobic and protective of their culture than we are. I suppose I can't really blame them to a degree. Their culture is a lot older than ours, and they never had to deal with the kind of cultural integration that's happening there in any real numbers until the empire started to fall apart and post-colonial subjects flocked to France. They weren't prepared for it, and are ill-equipped to handle it. We have a century head start on them.
Don't get me wrong, I don't hold illusions of America as a place of cultural immersive harmony. But we've gotten over a huge chunk of it in the last century. While we're dealing with a new version of it now in Latino immigrants and Muslims, we have a set of tools to deal with it that the French don't. I mean cultural tools, rather than legal ones, though you could argue that our legal tools are stronger as well.
Every country is going to have that sizable population that says "you have to respect our ways, you have to speak our language, stop taking our jobs." It's a human reaction to the unfamiliar and to scary situations where we look for a source to vent our frustrations. Immigrants are just such easy targets for those frustrations, especially when political demagogues want to make a name for themselves.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Hmmm, weird, I remember posting something about this but I can't find it in search.
Anyways, the gist of it is that this burqa issue is actually something that many places are grappling with. Syria bans the niqab in universities, Egypt seems to be grappling over the issue perhaps settling on bans during examinations, Michigan allows judges to forbid veils when testifying in court, and Quebec is moving toward banning the niqab when accessing government services like driver licensing and schooling.
In the end, I don't think it is as simple as drawing a line in the sand and saying that X set of bans is reasonable and Y set of bans is clearly a civil rights violation. I think the issue is grey enough to allow for a wide variety of approaches in how to manage the problem in each area and see what happens.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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See, I can kind of see where they're coming from. I think the fact that some fundamentalist sects require women to wear the burqa, using the misogynistic logic of "women as protected possessions," is pretty terrible too.
But seriously, they can't think of a better way to combat this than to ban the burqa? I see that they at least tried to pin the punishment appropriately by mandating a 100x higher fine for forcing a woman to wear a burqa than for a woman to wear a burqa. But in terms of actual enforcement, they're still targetting the women. The women are not going to admit that someone forced them to wear a burqa, oftentimes because no one did: it's their culture and they want to wear it. So what's going to result from this heavy handed law? Not a total dismantling of the culture of these sects. Most likely many burqa-wearing women just won't go out in public anymore. And that's kind of the opposite of what the French profess to be supporting with this law.
Posts: 241 | Registered: Nov 2009
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As for the issue of why isn't it happening "here", the thing about illegal Mexican immigrants, they pose a demographic challenge but they're still largely Christian. Muslim immigrants pose a religious challenge but they're demographically tiny.
I submit that if you combined the antipathy over 9-11/The Ground Zero Mosque/Tennessee mosques and the antipathy over illegal immigrants/Arizona "papers please"/English-first into one population of immigrants that is both sizable and a religious challenge, it would be happening here, regardless of "cultural tools."
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Hmmm, weird, I remember posting something about this but I can't find it in search.
Anyways, the gist of it is that this burqa issue is actually something that many places are grappling with. Syria bans the niqab in universities, Egypt seems to be grappling over the issue perhaps settling on bans during examinations, Michigan allows judges to forbid veils when testifying in court, and Quebec is moving toward banning the niqab when accessing government services like driver licensing and schooling.
In the end, I don't think it is as simple as drawing a line in the sand and saying that X set of bans is reasonable and Y set of bans is clearly a civil rights violation. I think the issue is grey enough to allow for a wide variety of approaches in how to manage the problem in each area and see what happens.
I wonder what Turkey's laws are regarding the niqab and the burqa. Given the fight between secular and Islamic forces there, I'm wondering if they have a ban in place as well.
It's an interesting point you make about the gray areas in bans. I remember reading about the Michigan court case about the ban in court. The rationale for the ban was that being able to see the face of the person testifying is important in a number of ways, including the right to face your accuser, and the right of both the prosecution, defense and jury to be actually able to see the face of the person testifying being important enough to overrule the full-face veil's use. Women can still cover themselves from head to toe with the exception of the face while they are testifying.
I think in principle that there are occasions when what we think of civil rights have to bend to allow for specific instances. In this case, not being able to wear a face veil in a court is, to me, a reasonable rule. We have to do things all the time that we don't like for the sake of upholding our end of the social contract with the society we're in.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: I wonder what Turkey's laws are regarding the niqab and the burqa. Given the fight between secular and Islamic forces there, I'm wondering if they have a ban in place as well.
Looks like it:
quote:Turkey also bans Muslim headscarves in universities, with many saying attempts to allow them in schools amount to an attack on modern Turkey's secular laws.
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