Fadela Amara, “[French] founder of the activist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises, translated as ‘Neither Whores nor Submissive,’ and later … the Secretary of State for Urban Policies,” spoke a couple of days ago about France’s anti-burqa law at the University of Chicago’s International House (UD lived in an apartment directly across the street from I House when she studied there).
Amara knows France’s fundamentalist ghettos well; she has watched them become cults of “forced marriage, polygamy, [female] circumcision, and violence against women.” Outlawing the full burqa (the law had seventy percent support among the French) has had some effect on
[t]he strategy of radical Islamists … to send in veiled women to force unveiled women to wear the burqa. And this is a real battle that has been going on for 15 years in France. And women who do not wear the veil, who were refusing to wear the veil, have been harassed and attacked, either verbally or physically — verbally by insulting them and calling them sluts, because for them these are not women who are respectable…. So we decided to stop all of this. And to act in a way to protect the women who were resisting in these neighborhoods.
Israel – where any woman who boards certain buses or walks on certain streets can be assured of being called a slut and spat on – could learn from the way France is dealing with its fundamentalist bullies.
June 4th, 2013 at 4:52AM
[…] response to Fadela Amara’s recent talk at the University of Chicago (background here), a UC student (who didn’t attend) […]