France condemned for religion attack

France condemned for religion attack
Wednesday 17 December 2003

An international human rights organisation has condemned France for attacking freedom of religion.

The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights said on Wednesday a proposed new law which would ban Islamic headscarves and other religious insignia in schools would contravene the most basic human rights.

The stinging criticism came after French President Jacques Chirac backed the proposed law because he said France needed to safeguard its secular identity.

But the IHF said wearing the hijab is an essential part of a Muslim woman's religious identity, and the state cannot tell people how to dress unless others' human rights are being violated.

--snip--

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/68D2C9C0-2E3C-4B69-8216-5401E2A5D0EC.htm

But it's their country and not my place to tell them how to manage their internal affairs.

Still, I can't help but think that many American conservatives would be just fine with laws restricting Muslim women from wearing traditional outfits, so long as such laws only applied to non-western religions.

clothing and regalia as well eg skullcaps (dont know the proper term) and crucifixes. which is only fair.

Who cares? you don't need any of that to be a christian or jew but Muslims require females wear that dress, just remember that even though france is far more enlightened that american society but its still mostly a jewdeau christian society and therefore minorities would feel threatened just by there numbers and so care must be taken to ensure Muslims dont feel threatned by the majority that is part of the real violent religions in the world!!!

Orthodox Judaism has equally strict requirements of dress and Chassidic Judaism even moreso. There are also Christian sects that have similar dress requirements such as the Amish and Mennonites.

Who cares? you don't need any of that to be a christian or jew but Muslims require females wear that dress, just remember that even though france is far more enlightened that american society but its still mostly a jewdeau christian society and therefore minorities would feel threatened just by there numbers and so care must be taken to ensure Muslims dont feel threatned by the majority that is part of the real violent religions in the world!!!

In the news recently too. I think it's going overboard. Such drastic measures for the sake of secularism, will make them look too much like communists. They need to find a balance. Their drive to become totally secular is akin to the neocons drive to make this a theocracy. It's all relative...the same difference.

TOO much liberty is being taken away from people these days..sad to see it in France now also.

Should be an interesting experiment, but I'll be surprised
if anything good comes of it.

a moderate and secular country (although 98% muslim), Turkey bans its women from wearing headscarves to government jobs.

Also, talking about restricting freedom of religion, would the USA grant a muslim man the right to marry 4 women?

the Sikh requirement to alway carry a knife (even on an airplane)

Having 4 wives is not a form of dress.

...in fact, I think it went overboard.

But what I want to point out is that there is a fine line where religion and secular governments intermingle...and policies will always be controversial here.

European countries are finding it out now...since they are experiencing increasing presnce of non-christians amongst their midst.

some of the burning issues in Europe:

- arranged marriages

- religious dress codes

- marriage and divorce laws

My point, in a way, was that simplistic solutions
can make more trouble than problem they are supposed to
fix. My theory is to not make a fuss about minor things,
like how one chooses to dress or look. If people want to
distinguish themselves in inoffensive ways, let them.

should push the belief of secularism on people by restricting basic rights of the relegious. I'm a Christian and in my school Muslims wear the hijab and Christians wear crosses. Also a huge majority of people wear sexually explicit shirts with slogans that are no doubt in contradiction to many relegions. I would say that Christans do not care anymore about what is worn in school since they know they can't change it. And the relegious right, as stupid as they are, thinks they can, though I'm guessing secularism is a bigger threat to them than other relegions.

:)

looks like the bush administration has concocted a situation to make the french look like the intolerant a-holes that the bush administrations cruscade against Islam has made all americans. Wearing the hijab is important to female Muslims and Chirac must have of had alot of restless nights trying to get out of this trap set by the bush administation. he was screwed no matter what decision he made instead of focusing on this little bump for france we should look at our own mountain bigotry and intolerance., economic discrimination

the Bush administration make Chirac do this? Seriously? And this is no little bump in France, if this happened here, the ACLU would be all over the government (they fervantly oppose this French move). And ignoring everyone else and concentrating on only ourselves isn't exactly a way to ever learn from mistakes, not to mention it's what Americans are despised for doing. So yes, do take a look at other countries and see the results.

I mean, I'm sure the French are awfully impressed and all with the prospect of ACLU storming out to chew them a new one, but there are different premises running through the constitutional make-up of the US and France. More to the point: separation of state and religion doesn't have the symbolic nature it has in the US. For one example, look at how oaths are pledged on the Bible - from the President accepting the office, down to citizens in court. More on the money: "in God we trust" - and I could cite many, many examples that show a quintessentially Christian foundation for the American public psyche.

(BTW - as a sidebar: the fact that Christian "revivalists" have a vested interest in portraying a so-called "Judeo-Christian heritage" for the US has more to do with the relative absence of Muslims in the US, than a deliberately implicit rejection of Islam. Undoubtedly, had there been many more Muslims in the US, they'd be more than welcome to join the fundamentalist Judeo-Christian "crusade against ungodliness.")

That's very different in the case of a much more secular French constitutional context, much more so given the French demographics.

Besides, let's not get overboard here. "Religion attack" has the distinct ring of a Religious Reich aficionado sound-bite. The "French" idea isn't to ban religion; it doesn't want to discourage it, either. The idea is, instead, to ensure that the public space (we're talking public schools here, remember - try selling the "voucher" nonsense in France!) remains a public space, devoid of anything that can flare up symbol wars. One major consideration here is that school has to be a safe place - a consideration that isn't all that far from our hearts and minds in the US.

We're not talking about confrontational politics, in the sense of promoting "social segregation" as was the case in not too distant a past in the US, where Protestants and Catholics lived in a semi-invisible variant of apartheid (not to mention the virtual silence in which many Jews retreated, not always by their volition.) It's merely a pro-active interpretation of government's role in ensuring that the public domain remains a neutral zone, not unlike creating symbolic DMZs in public schools.

That all said - do I agree with this proposal to enact strictly fear-driven neutrality? No - I don't. But then again, as I said earlier, the situation in France (with its very different religious demographics) is not quite the same as in the US.

There's really (really!) a slight difference between showing criticism / skepticism toward the French forced neutrality proposal, and becoming gripped by some absurd panic that wearing publicly visible denominational tokens in France will be punished by summary executions. It is a rather amusing form of self-deprecation to use terms such as "religious attack" in reference to the pertinent discussion in France... It's not as if public sightings of yarmulkes, crucifixes and head scarfs will receive the same treatment as, say, almanacs by the FBI here...

Yes, I see a lot of visceral knee-jerking in response to this issue, and I just had to get this patronizing taste out of my mouth. It's bad enough that moronic media parrot drivel without as much as feigned objectivity - but I do expect better here on DU.

So... Apologies for my angry tone, but not for my message: don't measure the French situation up to American values. They don't do inches!