Sarkozy’s burqa ban panders to racism, not feminism

Paul Watts

Typical chattering classes PC claptrap. Many moslem and other women wear scarves and no on one turn a hair, no should they, the difference with a burqa is that it hides a persons face and hence their identity. In the case of a women who is forced to wear it it steals their identy. The burqa is abhorrent to most westerners, What ever you may think of Sarko at least he had the guts to say so despite him probably expecting the knee jerk reactions of racism from people like this writer.

Ganpat Ram

Typiccal of Rod Liddle.

He is very happy to advocate bullying the weak - fat people - but shies away from confronting aggressive Islamism.

If you have read Rousseau's "Social Contract", you will know the famous conclusion whereby Rousseau states that if people choose tyranny, for the sake of humanity they must be FORCED to be free. Period.

I love the French for the tough, unsentimental, sharp-as-a-gullotine republicanism they uphold. Such a breath of fresh air among all those feeble Westerners going to every ridiculous extreme to please Islamic incursions into the West's free way of life.

The burka DOES threaten freedom. It instills fear in Muslim women and even those who would want to dress in a modern style feel psychologically forced to adopt either it or the hijab. Anyone who knows the immigrant areas of Europe knows about this kind of ruthless cultural pressure.

If the state forbids this horrible outfit, Muslim women will feel freer to reject it.

Otherwise, new generations of Muslims will grow up in a fetid ghetto atmosphere, and they will put pressure on French political parties to make France more and more an Islamic society.

This trend must be stopped before it is too late.

thecomebackid

Sorry Rod, but I stopped reading after the Bangladeshi bellhop's ‘slinging pussy’ in the lobby quote.

After that, the rest of the article was bound to be an anti-climax.

Al Frick

Burqas are abhorrent. They remind me of the dementors of Harry Potter fame.

It's essentially creating a sub-class of humans that mingle with the rest of us. Not to mention the security risk of someone wearing a burqa. You could have five men armed with ak-47's walk right into a bank and none the wiser until the very last moment.

Brian Smith

I have a feeling that what you and I might think about such issues could be out of our hands in a few years. I have just read that 40% of Londoners under 20 are from ethnic backgrounds, with no doubt a large proportion of them Muslims, who know how to organise themselves through their mosques. If these trends continue, rather than us discussing banning the burqa, it is more likely that the elected representatives of the future will be discussing how to widen the use of the burqa. I do wish I was wrong.

lyca

One aspect of religious thought, Christian as well as Muslim, is that subservience is a richer and more interesting experience than authority. This is hard for liberals to grasp as we have become obsessed with rights and power.

Adrienne

Very well thought out Rod. I like your style.

A. MacAulay

As usual Rod Liddle creates a little confusion with his intro before passing obliquely to the controversial point he wants to make. This sticks and frisbee tactic is very entertaining and leads to a wonderful diversity of contributions as each catches, or is caught by, their favourite theme.

However his observation of women's relationship to clothing is partial because he does not point out that the main function of clothing for women is to demonstrate status to other women, and not to please men. Ask any man who the best dressed woman was at last nights party, and he will remember the deepest decolleté. Then ask a woman the same question and you will hear a detailed description, a catalogue of everything, especially jewelry, that all other ladies were wearing. It's true! And also that women will put on anything, literally, no matter how idiotic and tasteless including a Burqua, to show that they've made it.

Besides, that women exchange sex for goods and services, and men exchange goods and services for sex is a basic fact of human existence and without this our species would have died out long ago. Prostitution, then is a partial aspect of inter sexual relationships wherein all other social relationships beyond the commercial are excluded.

Lastly, the article is spot-on about Sarkozy who clearly suffers from a profile neuroses.

John Mullen

It would be bizarre and extremely worrying to have the police (never racist, as we know) intervening to arrest women wearing burqas, or ordering them not to leave their houses.

There are extremely few burqas in France, and I have never heard of a single woman wearing one to school or university (and I've been following the issue very closely). In a time of mass redundancies and spending cut, Sarkozy is delighted to have a diversion.

stephen bull

This is all rubbish. 60 deputies signed a proposal made by a Communist deputy to set up a commission to study wearing the burqa and the niqab. All Sarkozy said was that such clothing will not be welcome in France. It is a question which deeply divides opinion in France and it is just simplistic nonsense to suggest that Sarkozy is leading an anti-islam crusade. He is smarter than that

Brian Taylor

Brian Smith writes that he has just read that 40% of Londoners under 20 are from ethnic backgrounds, with no doubt a large proportion of Muslims.....
If those now discredited MPs - who still maintain that the expenses scandal is the ONLY thing to raise the electorate's ire - had listened and debated with the general public on mass immigration policy, that 40% would now be more like 10%.

Giorgios Orwelliopolis

Any religion should be allowed. All freedom for all French people should be allowed. But everyone knows who the real French people are, and they are not the ones wearing Burkas. Burkas are not the problem, Islam is not the problem, nor are massively increased rape and the ultra-security necessary for banks in downtown Versailles. Ultimately they are the symptom and multiracialism is the problem. Here's a thought experiment: how many articles would be unnecessary if non-indigenous populations did not exist in France? Or quangos, lawsuits and bombs?

Manolo

Rod, you try walking down Rhiyad's or Mecca's high streets on any day wearing a Catholic priests garb, or a religious Jew's outfit of choice, oh and also dangle a cross from around your neck. See what happens to you then.
Why should we in France, Britain and other western countries be expected to be 'easy' when it comes to women, whether by choice or force, 'strutting' our streets with no faces?
The burka is threatening and intimidating to the wider population and a security threat.It ensures the wearer remains a complete outsider, will never be able to communicate with the wider population. Is that what WE want? Is that what WE want our countries to become?
The west has welcomed refugees from the trouble and underpriveledge spots on earth, in return for our offering security and a chance of a decent life, the immigrants must be required to play an open part in our countries, not hide evermore behind the burka barrier.
Sarkozy is right, it is an affront to women everywhere and inhibits harmonious inter-race/religious relationships, resulting in ever increasing race/religious tensions.
It is about time our main party politicians had the moral fibre to follow Sarkozy's lead and confront these devisive issues.

rick

here's an excellent article that outlines both sides of the debate. it's also very interesting that Mohammed Moussaoui, the President of France’s Representative Muslim Council, supported Sarkozy's statement that women shouldn’t wear the burqa. http://www.mindreign.com/en/mindshare/World-Politics-and-Current-Events/Sarkozy-3a-e2-80-9cMuslim-Burqas-are-Unwelcome-e2-80-9d/sl34045952bp295cpp5pn1.html

GD

If there was an amendment to include baggy trousers and baseball caps I'd sign up!

I think Islam should be questioned directly. It has too many abhorent associations for coincidence, and I'm tired of the Westerners worst fears of being labelled as a racist being used to smokescreen everything from hate fueled oppression to beheadings.

Silke

Sorry - maybe I am a backward country bumpkin and too old to understand the global village of Rod Liddle - but I stand by it that all my life hiding your face has been full of meaning as well in fiction as in actual life - remember our executioners used to wear hoods - if I would encounter a person with nothing but eye-slits visible I would feel very scared - and I stand by the old saying "when in Rome do as the Romans do" (I do, I covered my arms when travelling Greek villages) and those who want to burqa themselves should not roam the streets of not-burqa countries in such outfits. Their insisting to do so for whatever reason I find highly impolite and reckless and I insist that I was in "Rome" before them and therefore have a bit of a say in what is "Roman"

HFC

The burqa is an affront. Not just to women but to all who wish to live in a society where normal communication is not inhibited by any peculiar form of dress.

Al Frick got it spot on. Highwaymen of old and people nowadays who threaten violent harm to others invariably conceal their faces.

Executioners, too.

HH Ogden

Mr Liddle.
I share your core point that "the ...thing to do is to make it ... plain that there is no compulsion to respect Islam as either a religion or a political ideology".
Nor indeed any other religious or non-religious belief or view, however fatuous or insane that’s put forward, even if its argued by the highest and most trusted in our society, not even the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Prime Minister. That is the right of us one and all. The inevitable conclusion is that people should be free to believe, do and say anything as long as they are polite about it and don't cause injury or harm to others. This approach works in a society where your ethics and mores are derived from a common, tolerant ‘live and let live’ tradition and society. To be that it has to be relatively homogenous. Unfortunately this dialectic process is not understood, practiced or tolerated by a great many of those to whom we have extended it. I hate to mention it but there weren’t too many militant Muslims in the UK 40 years or so ago, they seem to have arrived unexpectedly, rather like the mother-in- law on Fathers Day. Their reaction to many a thesis is often an abrupt and violent antithesis. Synthesis can be achieved only by acceptance of their view and not by a simple acceptance of their right to it. We have colluded with this destruction of our tradition by the creation of laws and enforcement organisations, such as the equality legislation and the EHRC, which, while created with the laudable intention and purpose of protecting minority rights, have in fact had the effect of destroying a great many of rights of others and which are also moving us towards a stunted intellectual capability for honest debate and towards a overpowering dictatorship of our very thoughts.
If its not already too late to reverse this smothering of debate the only solution can be to massively reduce the state’s intervention in our lives. It must stop telling us how to behave and to let us get on with it by ourselves. Intervention, through the criminal law, should occur only after the first punch has been thrown and landed and then the charge and sentence should be in respect of the physical injury sustained and not the emotional affront to religion or politics of whatever belief. Once the state tries to start interfering in our personal judgement of the respective rights and wrongs of any argument its only option is to criminalise those say anything with which it disagrees.
Welcome to the new 1984, where the argument is the crime and the state is the judge of the argument.

Ray Taylor

I always thought that visiting, or emigrating to, another country would involve a willingness to accept and live with the customs and values of that country, not to systematically work to devalue them and overthrow them. If you attempt to do the latter the country has a right to resist, or to expel you.

Randy

Nice piece Rod, but you, too, seem to fall for the politically-correct notion that women are treated as second-class citizens by Islamists.

Yet, whenever, for example, you see BBC reporters interviewing Islamic women and asking them leading questions like, "What is it like to be treated as second-class citizens?", most of these women actually deny that they are treated as such.

Maybe, therefore, you should look more closely at how the Islamists treat their men!

Anthony Price

The problem is not about clothing per se, it is about the Islamic invasion of Europe. Not a 'clash of 'civilisations' but the clash of civilisation (a white European invention) with the mediaeval barbarism of Islam.
Unless the governments of Europe jointly or severally stand up for civilisation then we face a choice of war or extinction. And we are not ready for extinction yet whatever the arch traitor of Canterbury and our gutless politicians think.

Michael J Mullins

"The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men." — Sir Winston Churchill (The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248-50 [London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899]).

Michael Brett

My wife, who is a practising Muslim, is very wary of what she regards as attempts to push Islamic Law into the West, in general. Her question would be has the wearer chose a religious dress out of choice, like a nun, or is someone forcing her into it? Would we allow Sharia courts to enforce Muslim dress codes in this country?I bloody hope not.

M. Rowley

The wearing of the burqa by Moslems is simply an outward manifestation of marking their territory and telling the rest of society that 'we are the masters now' in a particular area. It is just one more step along the road towards the creeping Islamification of Britain, and the country needs to wake up to the fact of what is happening.

The French should be applauded for making a stand that British politicians haven't got the stomach for.

Philip Husband

I'm very dissappointed in you Rod, that you would make such an obviously false conflation of race and and culture. The burqa has nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture, in this case, an Islamic culture that looks back to the days of the prophet Muhammad as its model. Muslim women of all races are coerced into, or choose to wear the burqa. To accuse Sarkozy of racism is as absurd as it is wrong.

Snowman

The burka is to fashion what the Koran is to Magna Carta Libertatum.

Minnie Ovens

Well, Rod Liddle is right and wrong??? No, he's wrong and....oh, I don't know.
Who knows, but Sarkozy's murmurings against the Burkha are cowardly and typical of politician double speak.
Don't critisize Islam just its symbol.
Both the Burkha and Islam are, for the most part, horrendous in their inhumanity to man and certainly women.
Islam has kept the Middle East, once a hugely wealthy, diversified and thriving area, locked in the 12th Century.
Most politicians do not have the balls to say that.
The terrorists acts and threats over 40 years have made them very obsequious towards Arab forms of religion and, of course, oil does not calm turbulent water.
The really despicable acts of cowardice against which we should actively protest are those of our government and default religion which, domestically, will do anything to make certain that Arabs are made to feel at home in Great Britain, subjugating hard worn freedoms and beliefs of Britons, to accommodate them in the hope it looks democratic.

Trish M.

Sorry Mr Liddle, but you are way wrong on this one. Burqas are creepy and extremely offensive to women (in a way that low cut dresses and mini skirts can never aspire to be). Good on Sarko for having the guts to say that in a civilised society burqa's are, and should be, anathema.

rod liddle

Trish M and others: they are NOT creepy to most of the women who wear them; you cannot deny that they wear them out of "choice".

Augustus

Ganpat Ram loves the French for upholding Western values and taking a stand against Islamic incursions into its free way of life. And yet only last year Brigitte Bardot, then 73, had to go to court, and was fined 15,000 Euros and a suspended prison sentence of two months, just because she had written a letter to Nicholas Sarkozy in 2006, then Minister of the Interior, for inciting hatred of Muslims. All she had said in her letter to Sarkozy was that she thought Muslims should stun sheep first before slaughtering them for their rituals in such a cruel way, and that she was getting fed up by them imposing
their ways in her country.

Not much freedom of speech or upholding of Western values in that prosecution, was there?

Man in wonder

Why is it bad to dislike them?
I couldn't bother less what they
wear or not.

Tim G

Rod said, "Trish M and others: they are NOT creepy to most of the women who wear them; you cannot deny that they wear them out of "choice"."

Well said; but, as is typical, many posters round here have bought into the feminist-inspired myth that Islamic women are powerless dummies.

Far from it.

Forget the Taliban, and look at more typical Muslim women.

They are strong, powerful - especially within the family - and while religion does indeed impact upon them in many negative ways, it impacts far more negatively on the men!

Athena

Uhm, I wear what makes me comfortable, not what I think men will like, thank you very much.