France: parliamentary mission against burqa promotes anti-Muslim prejudice

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France: parliamentary mission against burqa promotes anti-Muslim prejudice
By Antoine Lerougetel
19 September 2009

The French parliamentary mission of enquiry on the burqa and the niqab
held its second session September 9. Set up by President Nicolas
Sarkozy after he declared on June 22 at a meeting of parliament that
“the burqa is not welcome in France,” it is widely assumed to be
preparing a law banning women from wearing the body-covering burqa in
public.

The commission, which held its first meeting on July 8, represents an
attack on religious freedom, democratic rights, and fundamental
secular principles denying the state the right to interfere in
questions of personal opinions and beliefs.

Recent official estimates put the number of burqa-wearing women in
France at less than 2,000 and demonstrate that the issue of the
wearing by a tiny minority of Muslim women of this full-body garment,
which covers the face, has been artificially blown up out of all
proportion. This is to serve the political agenda of the Sarkozy
government—that is, to victimize Muslims and create an anti-democratic
diversion from the government’s drive to make workers pay for the
economic crisis through mass unemployment and cuts in living standards
and social and democratic rights. Propaganda against the burqa, which
is worn in Afghanistan, also is used to promote French imperialism’s
military intervention there.

According to an opinion poll carried out by the news site oumma.com,
80 percent of French Muslims consider that the mission was intended to
stigmatise Islam and 86 percent opposed a law regulating the
whole-body veil (voile intégral).

The mission is made up of deputies from all the parties in parliament
and chaired by Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français, PCF) deputy
André Gerin. Sarkozy knows that, as with the question of the wearing
of Islamic headscarfs by girl pupils in schools—which was made illegal
in a reactionary law passed with the support of the bourgeois left in
2004—he can unite the “left” and middle-class feminist organisations
behind him on this issue.

Lutte Ouvrière (LO) has stated its support for the mission, whereas
Olivier Besancenot's New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) has expressed its
consent by maintaining a deafening silence on the issue. Both
organisations supported the 2004 law against girls wearing the Muslim
headscarf at school—to the point that LO leader Arlette Laguiller
marched side-by-side on a feminist demonstration with minister Nicole
Guedj of the ruling conservative UMP (Union pour une Majorité Populaire).

The PCF is fully participating in the anti-Muslim campaign. Its daily
l'Humanité gave Gerin a full interview without criticism of his
provocative statements against the burqa, such as: “The full-body veil
in the street is becoming repulsive, shocking.” The Stalinist
newspaper also offered him a stand at its fair last weekend.

The burqa issue is providing the conditions for attempts to witchhunt
the population using the state apparatus. Eric Raoult, a UMP (the
ruling Union for a Popular Movement) deputy and reporter for the
mission, disconcerted by statistics showing the tiny number of women
wearing the burqa in France, stated, “That's why we are also going to
consult the social service providers, very close to the realities on
the ground, or the education authorities, which are aware when there
are problems of the identification of mothers when children leave
their primary schools.”

The conservative daily Figaro September 9 commented, “These
institutions could however be reluctant to gather what is considered
sensitive information concerning families.” Memories of schools and
social services being required to inform on Jews and the Resistance,
under the collaborationist régime of Philippe Pétain during the Nazi
occupation of France (1940-1944), are still strong, and powerful
popular opposition to informing to the authorities persists.

Elisabeth Badinter, a well-known Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste,
PS) figure associated with women’s rights whose husband Robert is
famous for his campaign to abolish the death penalty, gave her
submission at Wednesday’s session of the mission. She said, “veiled
women are the tip of the iceberg of Muslim fundamentalism...the
wearing of the veil is the banner of Salafism.... In France we fight
destructive ideologies which undermine human dignity, we struggle
against sects, Nazism, anti-semitism, fundamentalism must be
combated.” She also urged, in the classical language of the racist far
right, that immigrants should “comply to the practices and customs of
the country they are living in or leave.... Why not go to Saudi Arabia
or Afghanistan where no-one will require you to show your face....”

The Stalinist Gerin told the press August 27, “For me the question of
the full-body veil is a Republican fight. The full-body veil has
nothing to do with Islam. It is the tip of the iceberg of the black
tide [marée noire—a term also used for an oil slick] of the
fundamentalists in some areas of our country.”

Le Figaro of September 9 reports that Fadela Amara, the former leader
of the feminist organisation Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor
Submissive) who joined Sarkozy’s government in 2007, “has come out on
several occasions for a law, is considering a ban on the burqa in the
public services: schools, hospitals, town halls...but also on public
transport. Finally, identity checks would be carried out in sensitive
places such as stations and airports.”

Addressing the parliamentary mission, her successor in Ni Putes Ni
Soumise,s Sihem Habchi declared, “The choice must be made between the
burqa or the Republic.”

An attempt to refute the anti-burqa campaign’s claims by Yazid
Sabeg—the commissioner for Equality and Diversity of Opportunity in
the Sarkozy government—have unleashed a torrent of criticism in the
press. Sabeg asserted that “you can think what you like about the
burqa and its regressive character or not.... It is not up to the
state to regulate French people’s clothing.”

In his interview with the Catholic daily La Croix, he attacked the
confusion being sown by the anti-burqa campaign, which avoids “the
real discussion on the real issues, which are first and foremost
economic and social.” He added, “The crisis is worsening on the
working class estates, and social tensions are at their height.
There’s no more work, no more housing, the education system is no
longer fulfilling its role. Let us take care of the real issues.
Instead of that, the polemic on the burqa is going to open the way to
frustration, racism.”

UMP members of the parliamentary mission issued a statement calling
for Sabeg to resign: “These words directly undermine the work of the
parliamentary mission and trample on sexual equality and personal
dignity. Mr. Sabeg no longer has the credibility to be a minister of
the Republic; he must resign.”

At a ceremony for two French soldiers killed in the neo-colonial war
of occupation in Afghanistan, Sarkozy used the same language as
supporters of the ban on the burqa and the niqab. Claiming that this
war, in fact for control of strategic control of this oil- and
gas-rich region, was a “fight against barbarism and obscurantism.”

He asserted that the current death toll of 31 French soldiers in
Afghanistan was a “sacrifice [that] would have no sense if we allowed
terrorism, if we allowed the medieval faction, barbarians, to triumph.
This sacrifice would have no sense if we were to abandon the Afghan
people to what we can only call its executioners....We shall stay as
long as it takes....”

He made no reference to the thousands of Afghans killed and maimed by
French and NATO occupation forces, often through indiscriminate bombing.

The anti-democratic content of the anti-burqa campaign is further
clarified by a glance at French colonial history. In 1958, at the
height of the bloody repression by the French army of the Algerian
independence struggle, the authorities asked Algerian women to remove
their veils to signify their support for French colonial rule. Many
Algerian women who had given up the veil took it up again as a gesture
of defiance.

Today, French imperialism is again advancing the fraudulent claim that
it is trying to liberate women by banning various forms of Muslim
clothing. In fact, the absence of opposition to this reactionary
campaign inside the political establishment—from the UMP to the NPA
and LO—testifies to the absence of any constituency for democratic
rights in the French bourgeoisie.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/burq-s19.shtml

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