… Badenov.

‘People logging on to Russian state-owned news agency Tass to get the Kremlin’s version of events in Ukraine got a shock early Monday. Instead of the latest lies from the Kremlin, the site showed an anti-war message that condemned President Vladimir Putin for forcing Russian journalists to lie. “Dear citizens. We urge you to stop this madness, do not send your sons and husbands to certain death. Putin makes us lie..”.‘

… the latest European confection, served very cold.

And I’m following the mess closely. I haven’t written about it yet because I need to know a lot more about the particular circumstances, regions, histories, politics, before I venture an opinion. I’m reading, reading, and reading.

Rama Yade rose to the position of a junior minister in a recent center-right French government; she even ran for president. But when she failed to win that election, she left France for good and got a think tank job here in DC.

In France, in other words, she had a high-level government position; in the States, she’s an administrator at one of dozens of research firms. Why did she leave France?

When Ms. Yade — born in Senegal in a Muslim family — was appointed a junior government minister in 2007, she believed it would be a “starting point.” But after an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2017, she left for the United States.

“My glass ceiling was political,” said Ms. Yade, 45, who is now senior director of Africa at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.

For a lot of people, a ministerial position wouldn’t be a bad ending point for a career, but let’s go with her reasoning. Because she couldn’t get past the barrier to being president of France, she left the country and took an administrative position here…

Sorry, I can’t go with her reasoning. The current French government has a respectable number of high-ranking people who were born into Muslim families, or who have some form of Muslim identity, including the Interior Minister. It looks as though Emmanuel Macron will be re-elected, so there would seem to be opportunities for Yade – and Macron is center-left.

So here’s the deal:

To [Rama Yade, a junior minister for human rights during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy], the [current French] presidential race’s focus on immigration was the “consecration of 20 years of deterioration” in a political culture obsessed with national identity. She had quit her political party — for which [Valerie] Pécresse is now the candidate — because, Ms. Yade said, it had become “very hostile to anything that did not represent a fantasy version of French identity.”

Yade is certainly right to notice a rightward tendency among some in the French public, and indeed growing hostility toward Muslims. Millions of ordinary French Muslims have taken the hit for terrorist bloodbaths in the center of Paris, and for the growing religious radicalization of cities and towns located in one of the most proudly secular countries on earth.

For many non-Muslim French, it’s an obsession with religious identity that has messed things up; and as for fantasy versions of French identity — all nations pump themselves up with glorious versions of themselves, and I’m not sure the French form of this syndrome is worse than anyone else’s.

This rally tells UD all she needs to know about the future of this country. If the youth of deepest darkest West Virginia have the clarity, have the balls, to defend our fundamental principles this fiercely, if they still believe, despite all, that their teachers and administrators and superintendents are educable, WE ARE GOING TO BE OKAY.

You want to see a true revival assembly? This is a true revival assembly. Someone send this to Timothy Snyder, so he can stop worrying.

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And a shout-out to the science faculty at Huntington: Your required preacher, Nik Walker, has a lot to teach your students about empirical method!

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UPDATE: The superintendent will investigate, yada yada. Keep in mind this is the second time this school has foisted a mentally challenged fanatic on its students, so it’s clear we have a … structural problem.

The principal attended the required revival, so if the reason this keeps happening is that the person calling the shots keeps making it happen, this person must I think be put out to pasture.

As the Supreme Court today rejects without comment ISIS propagandist Hoda Muthana’s appeal of the decision to declare her not an American citizen, we do well to recall Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli’s comment about self-exclusion.

And listen. It’s just Muthana’s bad luck that the political and judicial establishment of this country has its hands full, at the moment, with January 6 domestic terrorists. We can’t get rid of those assholes. Apparently we can rid ourselves of Muthana.

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Here are my Muthana posts.

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It is time for Muthana to do what she should have done long ago: Look for alternative citizenship. She has claims on Yemen through her parents. And slavery is still quite popular in Yemen, so as an ISIS slaveholder, Muthana would feel right at home. Through her son, she has claims on Tunisia. Several countries offer citizenship for a price, and they may be willing to take a chance on her. Letting her innocent son grow up in the squalid prisoner camp they now inhabit is pretty vile behavior; even if she cannot accompany him to, say, Tunisia (his father was Tunisian), she should, for his sake, allow him to go.

Through her philosophically committed, extreme, and persistent violence against the US and other democracies, Hoda Muthana has certainly destroyed her own life. No one can be surprised if a person this depraved decides to go ahead and ruin her child’s life too. But it would be nice if she decided not to.

This angry pointless diatribe about wearing a hijab does absolutely nothing to push the discussion along. But that’s because you have to acknowledge there’s a discussion to be had. You have to be willing to move away from neurasthenic victimology/finger-pointing and actually debate. You can’t debate when you snivel, and when you mischaracterize your opponent.

You can’t write, for instance, that a doctor described the hijab as an “instrument of oppression” when in fact he wrote that for adult women it is a perfectly acceptable personal choice. The doctor wrote that in several countries in the world the enforced hijab is an instrument of oppression – an obvious truth – and that since three year old girls have no choice at all in the matter it is objectionable when their parents make them wear it, as some do in Canada and various European countries. (Do some parents in the US do this to their children? Probably.)

The fact that you’re pissed off and exhausted because the world makes wearing hijabs and burkinis difficult and unpleasant is not an argument, and people will understandably read it and shrug. When you complain of Trudeau’s “very tepid” response to Quebec’s Bill 21, it only raises a question in your reader’s mind: Why? Why has Trudeau been tepid? Oh, because he’s a racist. He’s part of “an already intolerant country” which includes a “province even less tolerant.”

Well, babe, if Canada is an intolerant country I’d invite you to find a country more tolerant. Go ahead! Find a country more tolerant than a country that routinely lands on the top of World’s Most Tolerant Countries lists.

No, your problem is that you won’t ask even basic questions about escalating worldwide restrictions on various forms of covering. Until you calm down and start thinking rather than reacting you and your cause will really suffer.

… shushes the holier than thou hysteria in Canada by reminding the opponents of Quebec’s secularity bill that if they want to defend hijabis there are better and worse ways to do this.

Ben Woodfinden points out that the likeliest prospect for Bill 21’s demise lies in gradual changes in the government:

Bill 21 enjoys widespread support in Quebec, especially among francophones. But it is not universally supported in the province and there has been plenty of opposition to it since it was proposed. Both the Quebec Liberals and Québec solidaire oppose the law. Combined they got more votes than the governing Coalition Avenir Québec in the past provincial election.

Bill 21 passed in the National Assembly with a vote of 73-35, with the Parti Québécois joining the [Coalition Avenir Quebec] to support the legislation. If current polls are to be believed, the CAQ is on track to win a big majority next year, and the storied Parti Québécois is on the verge of electoral oblivion. This matters because the PQ doesn’t think Bill 21 goes far enough and wants to expand it further. The CAQ will likely win again, but it will not govern forever, and a successor government is the most likely way Bill 21 will ever be changed. Given that the law has to be renewed every five years because of the use of the notwithstanding clause, the debate over Bill 21 in Quebec is not a dead one regardless of the outcome of the legal challenge.

Woodfinden doubts any legal challenge will work; further, he points out that all the rageful disdain from non-Quebec Canada about that province’s passage of the bill

… play[s] right into the hands of those in Quebec who would seek to turn this into a debate not so much about Bill 21 but about a divide between English and French Canada. As André Pratte wrote in these pages , “All this noise now allows the distinct society’s nationalists to claim that the province is again subject to ‘Québec bashing’ … Bill 21 will become even more entrenched into Québécois identity.”

In short, if you want the (very limited) restrictions on the hijab in Quebec to disappear, cool it. Let the political process play out.

Lise Ravary, in the Montreal Gazette, weighing in on the hijab thing, reminds us that there are important differences between French and English Canada.

In 2016, a developer wanted to build up to 80 homes on the South Shore of Montreal intended specifically for Muslims. He had even specified that women should dress modestly when outside their home. Pressure from all sides, even the local imam, quickly put an end to that. A separate religious neighbourhood would be heretical to Quebecers.

But in English Canada, it seems, most people don’t … have a problem when public schools close their cafeterias for prayers, with the sexes segregated and girls relegated to the back of the room. I can’t understand why such nonsense is tolerated.

Recall what happened in a British university a few years ago when an Islamic student group set up separate seating areas (women in back, and keep quiet) at an on-campus event. People always seem shocked when it turns out that – as in this latest case in Quebec – the public realm of secular egalitarian cultures actually matters to secular egalitarian people.

Bastion of women’s rights, Iran, rushes to the defense of hijab-wearers in Quebec.

The optics really aren’t great when the first foreign power to come to the defense of protesters against Quebec’s secularity law are authoritarian mullahs.

Unfortunately, however, the rest of the world has so far responded to some public workplace restrictions on the hijab with a deafening silence.

…it’s time to hear from the law-abiding citizens of Quebec. Here’s one.

It would be safe to conclude that a statement of identity for many Muslim women who promote the hijab is perhaps more important than following religious dicta. One can, for example, easily argue that many of these women don’t believe the hijab to be a religious requirement. They could easily remove the piece of cloth while at work but choose not to. One must ask why... Why the restrictive, chauvinistic, and patriarchal garb has assumed this much importance for these individuals is a puzzlement.

Indeed, nuns, priests and even monks are perfectly able to remove their religious garb; why not non-clerical women? What makes these women more rigid in their refusals (in Quebec, they are asked only to remove it while in the public-facing act of public positions) than clericals?

The hijab is undoubtedly a garb rooted in patriarchy. It should be discouraged rather than enabled, touted, and promoted wherever possible. Bill 21 seeks to do precisely that…

Touted reminds us of the recent hijab-promoting ad campaign in Europe that came to grief. Western democracies are willing to tolerate the hijab, but – in Quebec, and in Europe – not in all settings, and not in all forms of its presentation.

The New Democratic Party leader in Canada is refreshingly honest about his view of federal/provincial powers. By an impressive 65% majority, Quebec’s citizens favor a recently enacted secularism bill which enforces religious neutrality on some categories of public employees for the daily duration of their public duties. As in: For the hours during which you are teaching, or presiding over a courtroom, you must remove your hijab or other form of religious garb.

As Boucar Diouf notes:

“How would an immigrant of Palestinian origin, contesting a conviction, feel in front of a judge wearing a kippah? Inversely, how would a young driver wearing a kippah feel faced with a policewoman wearing a hijab who just gave him a ticket?”

A minority of Quebecers disagree with this approach, and the NDP guy thinks federal Canada should just go ahead and align itself with them. Screw the strong majority of people in that province who think some secular workplace rules are reasonable.

What do you think are the chances federal Canada will prevail? For background, recall what’s going on elsewhere.

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Justin Trudeau will not intervene; and asked whether “he thinks Bill 21 fosters ‘hatred’ and ‘discrimination’ against minorities, Mr. Trudeau answered straightforwardly: “No.”

If you’re going to be a professional specializing in inclusion, you need to know something about exclusion, yes?

Fatemeh Anvari, a third-grade teacher removed from the classroom for refusing to take off her hijab while teaching, was asked to respond (see my headline) to the fact that 65% of Quebecois support Bill 21 – which says that no religious symbols may be worn by people during the time in which they are engaged in high-profile public positions (teacher, judge).

Her answer? No answer. She totally whiffed it (“I can’t speak for those who agree with it.”). Her new job at the same school involves finding strategies of inclusion for students; yet she is not even able to take on her opponents. She says nothing about the very significant – overwhelming majority – challenge of her fellow citizens who clearly do not believe in all forms of inclusion.

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Her interviewer might have mentioned that “In Quebec, among the most vocal supporters of Bill 21 are Muslim women.” Mixes it up a bit, doesn’t it?

Her interviewer might have quoted Boucar Diouf:

“How would an immigrant of Palestinian origin, contesting a conviction, feel in front of a judge wearing a kippah? Inversely, how would a young driver wearing a kippah feel faced with a policewoman wearing a hijab who just gave him a ticket?”

As with the mention of majority support, this is what’s known as a challenge – most appropriate, given the big ol’ controversy at play here.

As UD has so often pointed out, in a world of escalating niqab/burqa/hijab restrictions, your worst possible move is failing to engage, dismissing huge chunks of populations as bigoted, etc., etc. Engage. Try to figure out why reasonable people might want some restrictions on religious garb. If you’re not willing to go there, to try to change minds, you’re going to see more and more of these legal moves across the world.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted. 

DR. FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?