Sarkozy’s burqa ban panders to racism, not feminism

Rod Liddle says that the French President may be right about Islam’s ideological content but that his proposal is shockingly illiberal and wrong-headed

I’ve been in the Middle East for the last three or four days — just trying to help out, you know, anything one can do — and staying in a hotel which is renowned for its profusion and diversity of whores. Stick a pin in one of those United Nations lists of comparative prosperity, healthcare, life-expectancy rates etc, and I guarantee that a female representative of that country will be — as the Bangladeshi bellhop put it — ‘slinging pussy’ in the lobby or the late-nite bar, or as you are forlornly requesting hot coffee at breakfast time.

This is all a problem for me, because while I would like to talk to some of these whores — just to be companionable — there are also plenty of normal non-whore women staying in the hotel. And it is impossible for me to tell these two very different classes of people apart: they seem to me to be dressed identically. I daresay for someone more observant there would be differences of nuance, but nothing that I can discern. What should I do? Mistake some middle-class fraulein for a 30 quid an hour slapper and I could be in serious trouble. They should have little plastic ID tags, the whores, like the ones worn by people attending conferences about dental hygiene and what have you.

I was mulling over my problem when I read in the morning newspaper that the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, has told the French parliament that he intends to ban the burqa from his adopted country, because he believes it is symbolic of the subjugation of women.