SOCIALISTS TO BOYCOTT BURKA VOTE

France’s opposition Socialist Party will refuse to vote on a bill banning full-face cover, the party’s MPs decided on Tuesday ahead of the opening of the parliamentary debate on the much-publicised proposal.

“We are against the burka but we believe that the means chosen to outlaw it are not good,” party leader Martine Aubry said after telling deputies that they should not take part in the vote scheduled for 13 July.

Earlier the Socialists were against passing a law on the question, arguing that the perceived problem is “marginal” and that President Nicolas Sarkozy was exploiting it to continue the “nauseating” debate on national identity.

But, after a year of intense debate and with opinion polls showing support for the move, they have backed away from outright opposition…

That’s it. Instead of at least taking part in the discussion, put your head in a sack and sulk.

I mean, franchement, if you hate the fucker, vote against it. If you think it’s an expression of personal liberty, vote for it. If you’re all je ne sais quoi about it, share your uncertainties in the political arena. Saperlipopette.

… continues the fight against reactionaries on campus.

… I was 13 when I came to hate the Taliban and knew that someday I would have to fight them. A woman who lived on our street was walking home, with her baby in one arm and her shopping in the other. Her little daughter was close behind, holding on to her mother’s covering. My neighbor was having difficulty walking because of the mud and lifted her burqa for just a moment so she could see better how to cross the road. Taliban members ran up from behind and began to beat her head and back with a long length of thick, metal cable. I watched as she dropped her own baby in the ditch and screamed from the pain…

Khoshal Sadat, New York Times

Soon I won’t have anything burqa-related to complain about.

The New York Times covers Pakistan’s ban on a play called Burqavaganza.

The article and film clip make clear that the play’s writer recognizes not merely the repressive nature of the garment, but its power as a “metaphor for hypocrisy in a ‘hidden nation.'”

[Take the case] of Amel Marmouri, arrested for wearing the burqa at a post office in Novara, Italy… There was nothing left for it, said her husband; he would have to keep her at home “night and day”. His reaction seems extreme, perhaps even cruel, to more liberal people…

Nazar Online

Spain joins many other European nations. Catalonia got there ahead of everyone else.

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Update: A past president of the Canadian Muslim Congress weighs in on a legal case there.

… Why is the law even considering accommodating a symbol of women’s subservience?

… For groups who fear forced sequestration of women as a result of state legislation, suffice it to say they are assuming the worst. Their conclusion is based on the flawed assumption that niqabi women will invariably refuse adherence to the legislation. Even the woman known as N.S. has agreed to testify without her veil if she loses [her legal effort to testify while wearing it]. She must be encouraged to overcome her discomfort in facing her alleged attackers. She cannot live her entire life hiding behind her niqab…

… A society that permits the marginalization of women is indeed a dysfunctional society. The proliferation of the niqab, and all it stands for, spell serious repercussions for Canadian society and its values built on gender equality.

Canada’s courts must set precedents discouraging this trend rather than accommodating it to satisfy the most retrogressive segments of Canadian Muslim society.

Feminists in Canada defend the right of a person testifying in a trial to hide her face behind a niqab; Muslims in Canada oppose the feminists.

A precedent-setting case that could determine whether a woman can wear a niqab while testifying in Canadian courts has a leading feminist group and a national Muslim organization on opposite sides of the contentious debate. But their respective positions, outlined in written arguments filed with the Ontario Court of Appeal, may come as a surprise.

The Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) is arguing that an alleged victim of sexual assault must be permitted to wear the Muslim veil if it is part of her religion.

… Requiring a Muslim woman to remove her veil while testifying “could very well be seen and experienced as an act of racial, religious and gendered domination,” [said LEAF].

Before we hear what the Muslim organization has to say, let’s stop there for a moment. Listen to what LEAF is saying. Asking a woman to show her face, even for a few minutes while testifying in a trial, is a form of domination over her.

In contrast, the Muslim Canadian Congress maintains that religious freedoms are not absolute and must be balanced against the long-standing right of a criminal defendant to see his accuser in court and assess demeanour. As well, the Muslim group argues that … “The covered female face is a reminder to the wearer that she is not free and to the observer that she is a possession…”

The founder of the organization, Tarek Fatah, said yesterday that it is not trying to make it more difficult for Muslim women to testify in sexual assault cases. “They should be treated like any other woman and receive the same protections,” he said. (The Criminal Code provides for witnesses to testify by closed circuit television or behind a screen where they can be seen, but they cannot see the accused).

… LEAF counters that fair trial rights are being used as an excuse to justify stereotypes. “In the current political climate of fear and distrust of veiled Muslim women, courts and juries need to be alert to existing prejudices that a Muslim woman who covers her face cannot be believed,” writes [a lawyer representing] LEAF.

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UPDATE: Doublespeak.

According to written arguments filed by one of her lawyers, she is on par with female heroes of the civil rights movement: “Henrietta Muir Edwards just wanted to sit in the [Canadian] Senate. Rosa Parks just wanted to sit at the front [of the bus]. N.S. just wants to sit in the witness box wearing her niqab.”

Comparing N.S. to Ms. Edwards, Ms. Parks or any women who fought for sexual or racial equality takes us to heights of doublespeak. These women struggled to escape the shackles of discriminatory laws that kept them out of their chosen professions, restricted their ability to vote, forbade them from owning property, or banned them from even drinking at the same water fountain. Now, a woman who wants to cover herself from head to toe in a manner that excludes her from the mainstream of society is striking a blow for women’s equality?

Worse yet is the logic employed by the feminist legal advocates LEAF (the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund), which is intervening in this matter in support of N.S. Because she is Muslim, they question the entire value of her “demeanour evidence” (the usual in-person testimony which allows the court to judge a witness’s body language and facial expressions). LEAF submitted that “In this case, the sexual assault complainant is a woman of colour from a stigmatized racial/religious minority. The value of her demeanour evidence, already deeply suspect as a sexual assault complainant, is thrown into further question by the inevitable influence of prejudices (whether overt or hidden) relating to these additional markers of discrimination.”

By this logic, why should any woman have to testify in person in a rape case, particularly if she isn’t white or Christian? Why not put all women in a niqab so that their demeanour won’t be held against them in court?

Tasha Kheiriddin
National Post

A new crackdown on even minor alterations of the hijab is taking place in Iran. Guards are appearing at the gates of universities. They turn away insufficiently hidden women.

“I believe Hijab is an invisible political tool for the stagnant, patriarchal politics… a view that gives priority to woman’s sexuality over her other human dimensions,” [a student said] in a telephone interview from Tehran.

“Undoubtedly, the totalitarian system’s patronising way of thinking encourages people to deny their bodies, wear unkempt clothes, and gravitate toward sadness, and it has no room for human health and development. This thinking cannot be effective in reducing abnormal behaviour in the society,” she said.

Not merely because she’s learned a lot from his scholarly work, but because of his attack, last year, on “the arrogance, self-indulgence, and recklessness” of Harvard’s managers as they speculated away massive amounts of its endowment.

Now, via James, a reader, she sees she has a third reason to admire Higgonet. He writes in today’s Harvard Crimson:

… [The French have a] highly communitarian definition of what citizenship should be… [P]ublic space in the French scheme of things is not just a non-private and therefore public space by virtue of default. It’s a universalist space where citizens interact. From a French perspective, refusing to show your face in a public space is a refusal not just of custom, but of interactive citizenship.

… In my head and in my heart, full as it is with the memories of a French childhood, I do so dislike the burka that outlawing it in France seems to me to be more or less acceptable, even if that should not be the case in the United States. It has no place in French life and history, and outlawing the burka might well have been one of the very few items of public policy on which Robespierre and Marie-Antoinette, or Joan of Arc and the Marquis de Sade, would have readily agreed.

Wanting to wear the burka seems to me to be a self-inflicted wound that I just can’t accept. In this symbolic matter, the French tradition seems to me to be for France, at least, the more plausible alternative: for France, and eventually, for all women everywhere…

What happens to women who might just be habituated to covering up? Will there be any help for them if they experience agoraphobia and panic?

An Australian writer worries about what will happen to a class of women who have been so smothered all their lives that the very act of being in the world of humanity will cause them to need mental health treatment.

I mean, I see her point. Far kinder to keep them covered up.

… Barcelona.

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… We know there is no Koranic injunction to cover the face, and we watch helplessly as organised brainwashing is leading to the blanking out of female Muslim presence and individuality from the public space.

… For me, the overwhelming argument against the burka (and various coverings for children, another growing abomination) is that there is such a thing as society. Community fetishes cannot override social communication, connection, obligations, equality, duties and understanding. Security and safety-measures too require facial identification. Politicians need to get assertive and argue that they believe in non-racist, universal human development. Effective policies to halt the spreading habit (in both senses) will then naturally follow.

And reformist Muslims too should speak up more frankly without fear or favour. A traditional Pakistani friend of mine – who always wears the shalwar kameez – recently refused service from a burka-ed librarian in one of our big libraries. The next time she went in, the face was no longer hidden. Maybe our new government should consult her. She could teach them how resistance, not acquiescence, gave us our past freedoms and will preserve our present ones.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Independent

Graeme Wood describes teaching at a totally burqa’d university in Yemen:

… When I entered the classroom and saw fifteen students who looked identical in every way, I burst out laughing, and never totally regained composure. The utter neutrality of their aspect was disarming to say the least. After a few minutes, I started asking them questions in English about their lives and why they wanted to learn English. “I am a pharmacist!” chirped one of the bolder students, so I turned to look through her eyeslit and ask whether she thought Yemeni honey had medicinal properties. Instantly fourteen black-gloved hands shot out to point at one of the other women in the room: I was talking to the wrong student, six desks away. This drill happened about twenty more times in the next hour, and even though my sonar triangulation improved a little, even by the end I could narrow down blurted answers at best to a clump of five or so students. I ended up accidentally excusing women with no cars to check on their parking, and letting women with empty bladders go to the lavatory. In every case the errors lasted only seconds, but the experience was still totally bewildering.

Only Samuel Beckett, or perhaps Monty Python, could do justice to this scene.

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Beckett’s friend James Joyce captured the inner truth of these students, each one of them “a batlike soul, waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.”

An Andrew Sullivan reader writes:

I live in the extremely multi-ethnic Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. The high-rise across the street from me has a large fundamentalist Muslim community living in it, and there are several dozen fully-veiled women who live in the building. I run into them at the bus stop, the grocery store, McDonald’s – pretty much all over my ‘hood.

And although I’m an uber-liberal urbanite who embraces my multi-culti neighborhood, I have to confess: there is nothing creepier than having a burqa-wearing woman coming at you in the cereal aisle. I’ve lived here for years and see them all the time, but I can’t help but find them spooky. They’re wraith-like and eerie. I know I’m not supposed to admit that, but it’s true.

I understand that it is (theoretically) their choice to wear the veil, but the same is not true of their daughters. I have seen few sadder things in my life than the day I ran into one of my neighbors at the store, and saw that her adorably goofy and energetic little daughter had suddenly been converted into a somber, ghostly, black-clad shadow of herself. That was the first time I felt like a burqa ban might not be such a bad idea….

But surely the daughter chooses to wear it.

… the burqa.