With France enacting, or attempting to enact, much tougher anti-veiling legislation, UD has been grappling with the question of how far a secular state (or province – Quebec has also been passing increasingly restrictive legislation) can legitimately go in the anti-clerical direction … in the direction of banning, in public spaces, symbols of religion. Human Rights Watch, from which I’ve drawn my headline, takes a firm anti-anti-religious position: absolutely whatever an individual asserts as religious clothes or jewels or weapons always goes; it’s none of the state’s business what people claim as religious self-expression. As Katha Pollitt once wrote: “[R]eligion is what people make of it.”

Yet how can this be true, really? On the most fundamental level, no state with any sense of self-preservation is going to cede legitimate religious self-designation to groups that in fact constitute state-reviling cults, like radical Salafists. For extremist Muslim women resident in France, the burqa virtually all of them wear communicates above all that “one does not belong to other groups, but only to Islam.” Their clothing conveys “complete loyalty to God, Islam, and fellow-Muslims and their utter rejection of everything else.”

(“These outfits are also available for children as young as two,” explains a writer visiting the Hijabi Store in Germany.)

I’m not seeing much in here touching even lightly on being a citizen of France, with even a rudimentary sense of affiliation with or responsibility toward France. (Does HRW absolve religious people of any responsibility to consider the meaning of state symbols?) It seems to ol’ UD that it is definitely up to the state to be aware of markers of perilously corrosive anti-state convictions among people who live in your country. (‘The national authorities say that the networks that once recruited jihadists have been weakened or have disappeared. The most visible signs of fundamentalism in [the once jihadi-rich city of] Trappes have also diminished, like the wearing of full-face coverings in public, which is illegal in France,’ a New York Times writer notes matter-of-factly.)

HRW does not seem to have glanced at human history; if it did, it would discover that plenty of religions – groups of people who called themselves religions – have been plenty dangerous to civilization, and civilization has every right to detect them and protect itself from them. Hell, religions have every right to protect against them. Think of the long history of the Vatican, or of Mormons, guarding against extremist offshoots.

UD also understands that free states should go as far as possible in the direction of neutrality in regard to belligerently non-assimilationist, and even extremist, groups within them. It is a sign of the strength of democracies that they can tolerate weird, utterly uncooperative sects like ultra-orthodox Jews and their fellow insurrectionists, the worshippers of Hitler. Spiritual extremity makes for strange bedfellows, and confident democracies can keep an eye on their zanies even as they trash the Capitol. But keeping an eye is the point I’m making – if a democratic state would like to do something other than roll from one street beheading and congressional beshitting to another, it would be wise to identify people who are likelier to behead and beshit than other people.

People who are pissed with Paris because it’s not a caliphate do indeed tend to dress in a certain rather rigorously invisible way on its streets. Not all of them; some burqa wearers don’t think this way at all. But some do, and the state and its citizens have a right to be unnerved by them. When you parade opposition to every foundational value of a secular state, you shouldn’t be surprised when people look at you funny. Doesn’t matter if you’re not a Salafist. I’ll quote Pollitt again: Religion is what people make of it. Goes both ways, see.

One of those foundational values, yes indeed, is neutrality in regard to religion; but what I’m trying to argue here is that not every cult should be accorded the status of a legitimate religion. So that is my first problem with HRW‘s argument.

[W]e uphold the right to express opinions which some deem contrary to the principles of human dignity, tolerance and respect, and which may deeply offend, because of the fundamental importance of freedom of religion and expression in democratic societies.

Of course no one’s talking about opinions here; we are talking about the symbolic action/expression of dressing in a certain very public, evocative way. And here again UD’s willing to be way offended by the enactment on the streets of her cities of female submission (remember: what people make of it. Yes? UD makes of entirely covered women an undignified statement of submission. On what basis does she make this judgment? Well, she listens to what women in burqas – and women who no longer wear them – say to interviewers; and she reads what Islamic texts and clerics tell women about submission.). She ain’t happy to be offended, but okay. Her daughter’s elementary school classroom, though? No. Her daughter is young, impressionable, just learning. She will take her daughter out of any school that normalizes the idea that an entirely blacked-out woman – with cloth over her mouth – is a role model.

This is the root of the legislation we are seeing. We shouldn’t be surprised. Most of us don’t like lies, or exposing our children to lies. Everyone outside of certain adherents knows that “The burqa is a vehicle of personal liberation” or “self-expression” is a terrible lie. Our children are going to have enough politically correct twistedness to negotiate as they grow up. Enough already.

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UD thanks David, a reader, for linking her to the NYT story about Trappes.

In every country that has passed one, ideologues tried frightening people about how destabilizing it would be. Riots street violence blah blah. Country after country has seen calm and orderly implementation of a law that no doubt makes many otherwise swaddled women and children very grateful.

As for the fanatics out there who can’t imagine life unswaddled, or whose husbands threaten them unless they swaddle, there are so few of them that they are, I suspect, simply pitied and accommodated.

If I were anointed the PM for a day, I would put a ban on burqa and hijab for women in the country. … During my posting in Sawai Madhopur, I used to see women draped in burqa walking with four kids in scorching heat with their husband.

It was disgusting to look at their plight as her shameless husband walked along with her with all the unwanted and unnecessary pride. I always used to think if I can ban the burqa for these women …

A media executive in India gets it said. There’s no way around the word “disgusting” in regard to such sights, and it’s good to see her use it.

Quebec is now ground zero for the fight between state and sect, having recently passed Bill 21, which bans all religious clothing and accessories among certain public sector employees in the workplace, and also having begun a Superior Court trial in a case brought against the province by an ex-hasid for educational neglect. Fiercely secular, Quebec followed France (which it sees as a model in the matter of laïcité) in banning burqas and niqabs from much of the public sector; Bill 21 extends this government constraint of religious expression (let’s be generous and agree that the burqa/niqab have something to do with religion – even though it’s more persuasive, it seems to me, to characterize them as pre- or even anti-Islamic and tribal) to things like hijabs and turbans and crucifixes on people who are working in the state sector. The ongoing Superior Court trial reveals that although Quebec claims to be quite secular, it’s not vigilant in secularity’s defense: If the complaints at the trial stand up, the government was perfectly aware for decades of the Tash cult, which kept its children in abysmal ignorance.

Jewish cultists all over the world, including the United States and of course notoriously in Israel, practice appalling educational malpractice, and although the court cases and school inspections and for real and we really mean it this time national education standards keep coming, the cultists persist in turning out unemployably ignorant people whose lifelong dysfunction our welfare payments support. No doubt the outcome of the Quebec trial will be a concession on the part of the province that they certainly fucked up in letting Canadian citizens raise their children according to thirteenth century standards; but without severe and unremitting penalties (school closures; unpleasant financial implications) nothing will change.

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And as to the business of believing horseshit — the sort of thing the professor quoted in this post’s title mentions — well here’s how ol’ UD feels about that.

Our current vice-president doesn’t believe in evolution. Millions of Americans don’t believe in evolution along with him. Pence is leading the coronavirus effort, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally disbelieved the germ theory of disease.

The vice president thinks smoking doesn’t kill, condoms are “very poor” protection against disease, and the best way to curb an H.I.V. outbreak is through prayer.

Mehdi Hasan, whose opinion piece on the burqa I linked to up there, thinks Muhammed flew up to heaven on a winged horse. Plenty of competent, upstanding citizens who went to good colleges believe a crapload of horseshit. UD has some pretty weird articles of faith – or call them intuitions – herself, come to that… I mean, not as weird as the stuff I’ve been citing, but pretty weird.

So what. It’s the essence of personal liberty in the pursuit of happiness within a liberal democratic state that you can dabble in the alchemy of your choice on your own time as long as it doesn’t put anyone in danger, and as long as you fulfill the basic duties of a citizen. Mike Pence’s entry into the age of reason might all be a ruse, but as long as he keeps up the pretense of being one of us I don’t care. We’re onto ye olde private/public distinction here; and the position you take on Quebec’s Bill 21 will ride on whether you regard the outward exposure of your inward, arguably anti-democratic, and often anti-intellectual, beliefs to be damaging to the education of citizens of a secular state, or as undermining the authority and identity of a secular judicial system.

1.) Austria’s Conservative and Green parties have agreed plans to extend a headscarf ban in schools … [Austria’s new Conservative/Green governing coalition] deal includes banning the headscarf in schools for girls up to age 14, an extension of the garment ban that applies until age 10 approved by lawmakers earlier this year.

If women want to cover, they can decide that for themselves; the business of forcing it on children is disgusting. Note too what UD has been saying for years: Opposition to compulsory covering of girls is one of the few issues on which left and right in many countries agree.

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2.)

… “White Wednesday” and “My Stealthy Freedom” campaigns have seen women film themselves without hijabs in public in Iran, which can bring arrests and fines. [Even with the threat of jail] there have been signs of women increasingly pushing back against the requirement.

During a trip to Iran in July, an Associated Press journalist spotted about two dozen women in the streets without a hijab over the course of nine days. Many other women opted for loosely draped colorful scarves that show as much hair as they cover.

While there have been women fined and arrested, others have been left alone as Iran struggles with economic problems and other issues under re-imposed U.S. sanctions …

… the Kurds.

“The most radical women have taken over al-Hol Camp, enforcing a strict ISIS dress code and mandatory Koranic instruction. They burn down the tents of families they consider insufficiently fanatical and have knifed to death several young women who didn’t wear the full black hijab and veil. The annex where the foreign families live is so dangerous that the camp administration was reluctant for us to visit, even in an armored car. Roj Camp is somewhat better. The Kurdish camp administration has successfully banned veils and the wearing of only black clothes, and it is possible to walk around with armed escorts. In both places, radical women are indoctrinating children with ISIS ideology.”

A New York Times writer brings our cool calm collected American sensibilities to those hot-headed French.

… [T]he veil … especially exercised France since 1989, when three children were barred from attending middle school after refusing to take off their hijabs, setting off months of anguished, often hysterical public debate.

It was the first of countless “veil affairs,” and in this century successive French governments passed two laws: one from 2004 that forbids the veil (as well as the skullcap and large crosses) in schools, and another in 2010 banning full-face coverings such as the niqab in all public spaces. And the freakouts keep coming, most recently during a heat wave in France this week. After a group of women defied the city’s ban on the hooded “burkini” bathing suit at a community pool, a government minister for equality said the burkini sends “a political message that says, ‘Cover yourself up.’”

Really, those silly over-emotional French (and Austrians, Danes, Belgians, Latvians, Bulgarians, Spanish, Italians, Swiss, Dutch, Moroccans, Sri Lankans, etc., etc., etc.). have so much to learn from us.

It doesn’t seem to bother them that, even as their defense of full veiling is going down the tubes all over the burqa-banning world, their arguments remain the lazy, unelaborated claims – with broad-brush insults and fear-mongering thrown in – that everyone has heard and dismissed. Behold Zahra Jamal in Foreign Policy.

Her subtitle, in which she evokes the violence of virtually pan-European burqa bans now “crashing down” on these shores (Quebec may soon ban them), sets the hyperalarmist mood of a piece written in the aftermath of countless non-violent and orderly local, regional, and national full-veiling bans. What world is the author living in? And has it not occurred to her that, given present realities, she should make some effort to accommodate herself to ours?

The fundamental polemical quandary the serious burqa defender suffers is this: She seems doomed at once to assert the obviously “sordid” (Jamal’s word) nature of burqa opposition, and to note that huge left and right national majorities, as well as international courts, support bans. To put her position concisely: Everyone sucks.

From beginning to end, Jamal describes enormous populations desperately under the thumb of powerful white nationalists. Somehow these clever charismatic people are convincing mental and moral midgets like Angela Merkel to call for serious restrictions on the burqa.

“For centuries, many Western scholars, church elders, and political leaders justified colonial and imperial incursions with the call to save Muslim women from Muslim men, citing the veil as a symbol of oppression. In contrast, in European and Quebecois political and popular discourse over the past decade, hijabs and niqabs have come to symbolize terrorism, thus reconstituting Muslim women from cause to enemy, from subjugated victim to powerful terrorist. According to proponents, bans on religious coverings are meant to liberate Muslim women from oppression, emancipate them into secularism, and deter them from violence. Burqa bans thus simultaneously falsely frame veiled women as security threats and legalize Islamophobia.”

Can you detect an argument in here? There’s nothing ‘in contrast’ about rejecting the burqa as both an instrument of oppression and a security risk. There’s no religious warrant for it, all ISIS, Taliban, and al Qaeda women and girls must wear it, and it has been used to hide the identity of terrorists and ordinary criminals. In its extreme physical muzzling, it creates a population of women overwhelmingly unlikely to become assimilated into modern open European countries. So, nu?

Weirdly, most of the subsequent essay reviews the spectacular success of burqa bans in Europe, across the political spectrum. Surely this amazing massing of votes and judicial decisions against full-veiling demands a powerful counter-response, one that begins with an effort to understand the determination of millions of ordinary people to ban the burqa.

“Ultimately, veil bans are about the sordid view that human diversity is a threat, and—similar to the flurry of state abortion bans in the United States—women’s bodies must be disciplined and regulated by the state rather than by women themselves to safeguard the nation.”

Yeah, if you want to see the flourishing of human diversity at its various best, take a look at a community of burqa wearers… Veil bans are, among other things, a rejection of the sordid practice of trapping ten year old girls under cloth – of men disciplining and regulating the bodies of helpless children.

Jamal’s essay is so lazy that UD begins to think burqa-defense has degenerated into virtue signaling. The author knows perfectly well that the tidal wave (to use her metaphor) of burqa banning is unlikely to be stopped, even if you spit Islamophobia and white supremacy at everybody. In lieu of serious appraisals of the banning trend, and serious arguments against banning, burqa defenders are left with vacuous indignation.

… and we’re off! The French ban (the first of many, UD predicts, in Europe) has really gotten people talking, and UD is thrilled. Time for a real debate on the total cloaking of women and female children.

At the University of British Columbia, Farzana Hassan gave a lecture on April 16 in which she called for Canada to “pass a law denying public services to women in burqas.”

When she was finished, Najma Mohammed of the B.C. Muslim Association stood up and said she felt insulted.

Which doesn’t take us anywhere near a real debate. But let’s see what else Mohammed said.

Mohammed went on to accuse Hassan of “inciting differences” so that she can make money selling books, DVDs, videos, and CDs.

She said she wears her hijab because she wants to; no one insists that she do so. (Hassan’s law would apply only to the burqa.)

… Hassan asked, “Do you have a question?”

To that, Mohammed replied: “I’m not giving you a question. It’s a statement. I don’t think you are worth a question.”

Still not much progress toward a real debate.

Hassan cited the murder of a sixteen year old Canadian girl who refused to wear the hijab; she described “four-year-olds who are being coerced into wearing the hijab because, you know, the philosophy is they need to get into the habit of wearing it so that when they attain puberty — when this becomes mandatory according to them — they will not object to it.”

Mohammed failed to respond to any of this.

Mohammad needs to sit down and think about how she’s going to defend making children wear hijabs and burqas.

But meanwhile, the main thing is that France has galvanized debate on the matter. The university is a very good place to stage that debate.

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Peter Worthington:

What a woman wearing a burqa in a free society is saying, is that she is a repressed individual, the property of a man, someone who believes in sexual mutilation, and is a prisoner of cultural dogmatism.

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(Update: I originally identified the author of this statement as David Frum. UD thanks a reader for the correction.)

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Oh. Whoops! I thought women could debate. Sorry.