The Republic of Dissent

Betraying the tradition of the Enlightenment

I agree with Brendan O'Neill on this:

(...)The great irony of the French government’s restrictions on the burqa in public places, and to a certain extent the Belgian government’s restrictions, is that they have been presented as being in the tradition of the Enlightenment. This is about liberating women from oppression, they say, and therefore it is a good, Enlightened, Voltairish thing to do.

In fact, banning a religious garment is counter to the spirit of the Enlightenment. What these authoritarians forget is that the Enlightenment sprang from a defence of religious liberty. The Enlightenment has its origins, not in any attempt to censor certain minority religious symbols, but in a belief that minority religions, even ones we consider ‘heretical’, should be protected from state intervention, censorship and oppression.

So in calling for the state to restrict a certain form of religious expression, these pseudo-Enlightened censors are doing something that the original men of the Enlightenment would have considered pretty outrageous.

Fraternité to mask fear and impotence

Marc DeGirolami has a convincing rebuttal of Jean-François Copé's, the majority leader of the France's parliament, op-ed in the New York Times justifying the intent of his party to pass a law banning the burqa. Sugary excerpt:

It would be more honest of Copé simply to admit that France (like much of Europe) feels itself and its Western culture under threat by Muslims and their ways.  Copé does not want to ban the veil because he feels a fraternity with that population, or because he is acting with a view to their own "real" happiness, a happiness which they just can't see right now (oh, but they will!).  He wants to ban the veil for reasons which satisfy the French and the Belgian majorities because he wants to stigmatize what he deems to be a condemnable way of life -- to punish people whose ways of life he finds inimical to the survival of French culture. 
To put all of this in the language of "fraternity," and to claim, as Copé does, that this legislation "is aimed at no particular religion and stigmatizes no particular community," or that it is really aimed at helping his fellow man, is the worst sort of self-deluding lie.  It is doubly false.  First, Copé does not feel fraternity toward the Muslims whose practices he aims to criminalize.  He feels enmity toward them.  And second, if he really wanted to make them happy, he would let them do as they wish -- rather than imagine that he actually knows more about what their religion demands of them than they do. 

What strikes me most about the arguments used to ban the burqa is they are both illiberal and ahistorical. They glossed over the fact that throughout history liberal societies have faced greater and more legitimate threats and have never been able to resolve existential or identity issues by using laws. The most dangerous thing that the drive toward burqa's bans is highlighting is that the descendants of Voltaire and other great philosophers no longer know how to win ideological and political arguments and are therefore forced to act as if laws exist to cement identities and to stifle debate thus embracing falling the paternalistic urge to decide for their societies to remain as it is without having to convince and to teach. In short, Jean-François Copé and the others are acting as if there have never been any evolution in French and other societies and if it is solely necessary to say that the burqa is unacceptable to make it .

Sarkozy, the burqa and the potency of identity politics

Agnès Poirier argues, and I agree almost fully with her, that the ban against the Niqab/hijab/burqa has become a legal nightmare for Sarkozy:

If the niqab ban is passed as law, the question then arises of how you make it effective. Do you also forbid visiting tourists from Saudi Arabia from wearing it? A number of French MPs want to limit the ban to public administrations, but then a law already exists which bans all conspicuous religious symbols from public places such as hospitals, courts and schools. Or do you simply resort to a fine? Even the National Front is against a law: "it should simply be a police regulation."
The ban of the niqab: a fine legal mess.

I don't think that Sarkozy cares about the law because otherwise, he would have been mindful of these complications, which were to be expected. His goal is to change the focus of the political debate in France from his policies and their ineffectiveness to an irrational and explosive one about Frenchness and about the conviction that many French have to all their problems come from the fact that too many French are refusing to be French and to respect French values. The burqa/niqab/hijab debate  provides the best way to do it because it isn't based on facts, but on fears, suspicions and ideology, which suit Sarkozy just fine because it embarrasses the Left and while reminding the right and the lower classes that he is defending their right to who they are and for the others to assimilate if they want to be good citizens of France. In short, Sarkozy must be happy in spite of the legal complications because while the French are talking about the burqa, they aren't focusing on the fact that his presidency has been a disappointment, so far.

The patriotic French burqa

No comment necessary after this pic from Retrofuturs.

The freedom to be veiled and liberal society

I agree with Norman Geras on this point clarifying his position against a ban of the burqa/niqab/hijab/veil in Quebec, France and in any society, which proclaims itself as 'liberal':

In a liberal society, however, there is nothing at all reasonable about this balance. If individuals have extensive rights and freedoms, as they ought to have - up to the limit where their actions harm others - then, in one critical sense, all of us are indeed obliged to accept things which affront us, provided these do not also harm anyone, violate their rights or liberties. Of course, we don't have to like what affronts us, and if we dislike something enough we don't have to tolerate it in spaces over which we have exclusive rights. You don't want someone wearing the niqab in your house or your car? You don't want a crucifix or a yarmulke or a shirt bearing the logo of French Connection UK worn there? Then you aren't obliged to accept any of them. But in spaces over which you don't have rights of control you can't forbid them. And there's a second sense in which you needn't accept what affronts you. You don't have to pretend to be happy about it. You're free to tell the bearer of the affront what you think of it, and of her for putting the affront your way. But, once again, you do have to accept that she may go on putting it your way in shared spaces, and in that sense you are compelled to accept it - or should be in a liberal society.

Don't mess with veiled women

Via Feminist Philosophers an image, which I approve. No other comments necessary.

Something is rotten in Québec

Another 'veiled' woman taken away from a French class in Montreal:

One morning recently, a young Muslim woman whose face was hidden by a religious covering was pulled out of her government French class near Montreal and told to unveil or leave the course.
But, while Ms. Ahmed was portrayed in media accounts as difficult to accommodate, Aisha, as she has asked to be called to shield her identity, didn’t make waves.
According to former classmates and officials at the suburban centre she attended, the young woman was a model student who placed no demands on others and even teamed up with male students for class assignments.

I'm just wondering if the burqa/niqab/hijab/islamic veil is the biggest threat to Quebec society. It is of course a rhetorical question for history shows that it is easier to pick on women when a society has no easy answers to complex identity issues and yet feels threatened by change whether perceived or real. I'm just waiting for the Quebec to show its manliness to the end and deport these women from their province to show that they mean business instead of once again, using them as political tools.

When feminists ally themselves with bigots

Quote of the day from Haroon Siddiqui commenting on the recent controversies around the Niqab in Québec:

We are witnessing an unholy alliance of leftist feminists, right-wing bigots and Quebec nationalists. That's why Lucien Bouchard, former PQ premier, publicly warned his party last month against playing identity politics, something he said René Lévesque would never have approved of. Picking on Muslim women smacks of hypocrisy or, worse, the pathology of "bigots and chauvinists who, like bullies, direct their vitriol toward the weak,"

Burqa-free Belgium

Belgium has moved closer to passing a law banning the burqa:

Belgium today moved to the forefront of a widening campaign to restrict the wearing of the Muslim veil by women when a key vote left it on track to become the first European country to ban the burqa and niqab in public.
The home affairs committee of the Brussels federal parliament voted unanimously to ban the partial or total covering of faces in public places.
"I am proud that Belgium would be the first country in Europe which dares to legislate on this sensitive matter," the centre-right MP Denis Ducarme said.

I would give this more than a thought except that it's all for show for the European Court of Human Rights will strike it down if it is even passed and becomes a law. In short: the law will never be applied and is a political version of showing off. I will take this ban seriously when I hear that the Belgian police arrested a woman for daring to provoke/shock the poor streetwalkers by wearing the burqa.

The freedom to wear the niqab is as simple as...

Clifford Orwin has a blunt take on the whole niqab controversy in Québec:

Yes, Canada, some of those fellow citizens, being Muslim, dress so as to conceal more of themselves than do their sisters of other faiths. And yes, their veil bears a name so unfamiliar as to sound downright un-Canadian. They pay taxes, however, in the very same currency as we do, and are entitled to the very same services. They cannot be denied these for exercising their religious freedom.
Yes, their religious freedom. Forget about “multiculturalism”: The issue here is both older and more fundamental. It's the right of every resident of a liberal state to conduct herself as she thinks pleasing to God, on the sole condition that such conduct not violate the rights of others. And while wearing a niqab may send some observers into a high dudgeon, it impairs neither their civil interests nor their religious ones. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, whether their neighbour wears no niqab or three niqabs neither picks their pocket nor breaks their bones.

I agree with Orwin. However, the matter to me isn't about religion. It is about women's choices and their right that they have, as individuals, to do whatever they choose with their body, to dress however they choose even it means sending messages society is not comfortable with.  I have never bought the whole sacredness of religion argument it isn't very convincing. I believe in individual rights for everybody even people who are still viewed as sexual objects or as people who either have to be invisible, transparent, hidden or just good to look at  In short, the niqab/hijab/burka/burqa/veil is about equality and liberty

Burka, right wing ideology and feminism

Mona Eltahawy on the ban of the Burqa/burka,right-wing Muslim Ideology and women's right(hat tip: Norm Geras):

I abhor the rightwing Muslim ideology behind the veils but I equally abhor the political rightwing xenophobes of Europe. The European political right – be it President Nicolas Sarkozy, his ultra-right rival Jean-Marie Le Pen (who did alarmingly well in the first round of those regional elections) or Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders – do not give a rat's ass about Muslim women or their rights: they are merely using the issue in an attempt to win votes.
The racism and discrimination that Muslim minorities face in many countries — such as France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and Britain, where two members of the xenophobic British National party were shamefully elected to the European parliament — are very real. But the silence of the left wing and liberals isn't the way to fight it. The best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both the racist right wing and the niqabs and burkas which are products of what I call the Muslim right wing. Women should not be sacrificed to either.

My disagreement with Eltahawy comes from the fact that I don't view women as victims or particular creatures that have to remain clean, pure, and always make good choices. I consider that they have the right to be whoever they want to be even if it means becoming an object and making disturbing choices. My point on the burka/burqa/niqab debate is simple, women are instruments to fight Islamic ideology or to promote secularism, they are normal individuals whose rights to individuality should be judge by the usual criteria used in a society to decide when individuality becomes criminal and dangerous to a society. I'm not against a burqa ban in France and elsewhere in the name of feminism, because I don't think that women's rights (whatever that expression means) is the issue, but that the right of women as human beings to define their womanhood and their femininity is in question. I'm still waiting for somebody to tell what is the male's equivalent of the burqa to reconsider my position.

Niqab and normality

Telling anecdote from Lysiane Gagnon:

A reporter from La Presse spent two days walking around Montreal dressed like a fundamentalist Muslim, with a long black robe and a niqab that covered everything but her eyes, but in most places – in the Metro, fast-food restaurants or on the streets – she went rather unnoticed and was not subjected to any aggressive reaction, except a few hard glances.

Is it possible that the debate about the niqab/burqa/burka/islamic veil isn't about the niqab/burqa/burka/islamic veil but about something else?

Marshmallow multiculturalism

Sugary excerpt from Les Perraux's essential article on the different perceptions in Québec and the rest of Canada on the burka/burqa/niqab and what it says about Canada's brand of multiculturalism:

Prominent Quebeckers known for promoting equality, including Mr. Taylor, Mr. Bouchard and Ms. McAndrew, argued the gender segregation that comes with the niqab – along the practical barrier of a covered mouth – was too much to expect from a provincial Immigration Ministry class designed to teach spoken French and help integration.
In the rest of Canada, it was often the mainstream view in Quebec that was shunned.
One Toronto television commentator linked Quebec's fertility subsidies to the banishment of Ms. Ahmed – a barely disguised suggestion that Quebec wants women to be uneducated and pregnant.
Ms. McAndrew argues Canadians looking down on Quebec should consider why debate seems impossible outside the province.
“Public debate in Quebec is vigorous, and the level of the debate is complex. On diversity, the debate is very poor in Canada. It's marshmallow multiculturalism. You're okay, I'm okay,” she said.
“It's tolerance, but it's very soft and will face its own challenges at some point.”

Having addressed this issue several times, I have no doubt that it isn't going to go away because Québec is not going to give up its own views of secularism and integration to please the rest of Canada,. However, the key issue is being ignored in this debate and that is the state shouldn't have the right, any more than religious figures or anybody else, to tell women how to dress and to tell them that they defined by their body and how they present it. Anything else about gender discrimination and equality is gibberish designed  to mask a totalitarian view of gender with popular and seemingly modern principles.

Niqab, assimilation, integration, Québec, Canada,

Interesting: explanation of the different visions that Québec and Canada have on the Niqab, and more importantly on integration:

(...) English Canada embraces a multiculturalist ideal: Come to Canada, and bring your differences with you. In French Canada, you can have your differences, “but please do become a Quebecker.”
Quebec's francophone majority identifies itself as a fragile minority that must be ever vigilant against cultural erosion. In that context, collective rights often outweigh individual ones, especially when it comes to language or schooling. Quebec, like France, is also fiercely devoted to secularism. “We've had a long and painful struggle with the place of religion in this society, and a lot of people feel strongly about the separation of church and state,” says Mr. Lagacé.
The Quebec-English differences over immigration and integration echo those between France and Britain. France is contemplating a ban on the burka and niqab. In Britain, any politician who'd dare suggest such a thing would be denounced as a fascist.
In English Canada, provincial government officials are only too eager to distance themselves from intolerant Quebec. “We are an open Ontario,” said a spokeswoman for that province's immigration minister. “In Nova Scotia, people have a right to express themselves any way they wish around their faith,” its immigration minister said.

It makes sense that Québec would want its immigrants to assimilate in order to be Quebeckers first to increase its population and strengthen its special minority status within Canada and  Canadian second. The issue is whether it is framing the issue the right way and fighting the right battles. The problem is that these differences that exist within Canada are going to be increasingly difficult to coexist within the same country because they are based on very different visions of society and hierarchy of fundamentals value. The whole niqab episode has shown that even the politicians of Québec don't fully know how immigrants can become 'good ' Québécois, but they know what their fears are, which explains why the focus has been placed on the usual and weakest subjects: visibly "different" women.

Aura popularis

Quote of the day from Naema Ahmed, the student who was asked to choose between wearing the niqab and going to class to learn French in Quebec:

It wasn't fair for them to ask me to leave the exam. (...) I feel like the government is following me everywhere.(...) I'll just stay in my house. This will solve the problem.

Burqa wearers

Fascinating stuff from Andrew Brown:

In France, where there is an inflamed debate on the matter right now, the first investigation carried out by the police last year found that there were 367 women in France who wore burka or Niqab – 0.015% of the population. This was so low that the secret service was told to count again, and came up with a figure of 2,000; in Holland there seem to be about 400, and in Sweden a respectable guess suggests 100. The most fascinating figure of all, though, came from the Danish researchers, who actually interviewed some of the covered women. Most were young, or at least under forty, and half of them were white converts. I think this makes it entirely clear that in modern Europe the burka is not an atavistic hangover, but a very modern gesture of disaffection from and rejection of society, which appeals to a certain kind of extreme temperament.

If those stats are right, it means in my opinion that banning the Burka/burqa is even more of an invitation for women who want to make a point to wear it as an act of defiance and of rejection of 'modern' society. The question that I have then is whether the Burqa/Burka becomes less threatening to the usual suspects if it isn't a symbol of women's submision or of a proof of Islamisation, but simply an instrument of rebellion? My answer is that it doesn't matter for what a woman wants to wear is her business and should never become a matter for the state or for a religion.

The French's favored fear

I agree with Patrice de Beer this:

(...) the burqa (like the hijab before it) may be less a genuinely important issue in France than a blanket shrouding more fundamental problems - ones that that French society is unable or unwilling to solve.
There are, after all, other ways of addressing the realities of disaffection and refusal of which such Islamic symbols are seen as the expression (...). If, for example, more serious measures were undertaken to ease the integration into French society of young people of non-European origin (many of them Muslim); if an invisible (and often visible) “glass ceiling” that blocks their access to jobs they are qualified for were lifted; if there were more non-white business executives, top civil servants, or MPs elected from within metropolitan France (at present there is just one in this category). So often, politicians (especially but not only from the government side) prefer to pre-empt criticism for their inaction in such areas by projecting blame for France’s defects onto outsiders/immigrants/others (and Muslims above all).

What happens when BHL slips

Norman Geras gives Bernard-Henri Lévy a beat down for his contention that the burqa should be banned because it is at best an example of voluntary servitude, which of course cannot be tolerated because it justifies all forms of slavery:

What Bernard-Henri Lévy does in the passage quoted above, however, is a disgrace to anyone who purports to be a serious philosopher. It is intellectual trickery, pure sleight of hand. On the grounds that slavery - the institution in which one human being owns another, and has despotic power over them, so that their will counts for nothing - is an infamy, and not to be countenanced in any enlightened society, Lévy is happy to forbid women to wear what they want if what they want to wear is symbolic of some wider oppression. But the symbol in question - however odious you may find it if you do - is what it is; it isn't the institution of slavery. To pretend otherwise is to indulge in a philosophically fraudulent type of metonymy. By the same method you could legally prohibit men from opening doors for women and women from saying 'thank you' and accepting the courtesy - on the grounds that these practices are (just are, note) the oppression of women by men, and consequently servitude. You could legally prohibit people, once they have reached the age of majority, from using parental nomenclature ('Mom', 'Dad', 'Mama', 'Father', etc) to address their parents. You could legally outlaw more or less anything by a chain of incriminating substitutions that link the thing in question with something generally acknowledged to be morally pernicious. Lévy's argument here is a bad joke perpetrated on the profession of philosophy.

Just one short comment: as much as I like and respect BHL, I have to admit that he has stopped to be philosopher to become solely and simply a political/societal commentator as  David Brooks, Alain Duhamel or Melanie Phillips. Thus, the contrary to Geras, I'm not surprised when he defends his viewpoint at all costs even at the one of philosophical reflection and analysis. BHL is too much a product of our time to be a philosopher in the Sartrean sense of the word.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and a piece of clothing

I have been waiting impatiently for Ian Buruma’s take on the French and the burqa. Here it is:

One could take the view that national governments should enforce laws, but not values. But, whereas most democracies are less prone than the French Republic is to impose "national values" on their citizens, the law cannot be totally divorced from shared values either. The fact that Europeans can marry only one spouse is both a legal and a cultural norm. And views on sexual, gender, and racial discrimination, which change with time, are reflected in the laws as well.

On the whole, individual practices, as long as they do no harm to others, should be allowed, even if many people don't particularly like them. It may be undesirable to have people who carry out public functions judges, teachers, or policewomen, for example cover up their faces. But one can impose dress codes for certain jobs, without banning a type of clothing for everyone. After all, we don't have judges and teachers wearing bikinis on the job, either.

There is another, practical, reason why the burqa ban is a bad idea. If we are serious about integrating immigrants into western societies, they should be encouraged to move around in public as much as possible. Banning the burqa would force this tiny minority of women to stay at home, and be even more dependent on their men to deal with the outside world.

So what should be done about practices that are judged to be illiberal, if we don't ban them? Sometimes it is better to do nothing. Living with values that one does not share is a price to be paid for living in a pluralist society.   

I have to say that I'm a bit disappointed with Buruma's take for he uses a lot of mambo jumbo when he should be saying that a society whose slogan is Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité cannot focus on the burqa and ban it especially when wearing it can be a choice, one made knowingly by somebody comfortable with submission or whatever else. In other words,  picking on the way women dress is a reinforcement of the view that they are not  equals to men for afterwards, is there any men’s wear that any government on earth would even entertaining banning by arguing that it symbolizes something? There is none and that is simply because it is accepted that men are individuals and that how they dress  is their business as long as they don’t expose their “best friend.”

The burqa and the fight against Islamism in both France and the US

Strong points (I strongly disagree with them) from .Sadanand Dhume contrasting the French's approach to the burqa to the one of the United States and the effectiveness of their common struggle against Islamism:

(...) from a broader perspective – based less on theoretical abstraction than on practical reality – the pro-active French approach to the burqa is superior to the hands-off stand taken by the United States. First, the French parliamentary report strikes a balance between individual rights and the concerns of the larger community. (According to a poll published in the magazine Le Point, nearly six out of ten French citizens support the ban.) It makes no attempt to ban the burqa at home or on the street, but would curtail it at points of public service where citizens can reasonably expect not to encounter a masked stranger. Parliament has not moved to curb the use of the much more widespread hijab, though since 2004 it has been banned in France’s strictly secular state schools, along with other conspicuous religious symbols such as Jewish yarmulkes, Sikh turbans, and large crosses
Most importantly, unlike the Americans, the French recognize that both the burqa and the hijab can be as much a political statement as a personal one. Islamists around the world – from national governments in Iran and Saudi Arabia to local authorities in sharia-friendly places such as Indonesia’s Aceh province to non-governmental organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami – uniformly demand that women cover their hair. For them, the sight of a burqa on a Parisian bus or in a public hospital in Lyon is a sign that their cause is gaining ground. Like all utopian movements that seek to create the perfect society – in this case by imposing God’s law on earth – radical Islam feeds on symbols that appear to signal its ultimate victory. Rolling back the burqa contradicts this triumphalist narrative.

The problem is  that  in this struggle against a form of fundamentalism, women become, one more time, instruments, toys,  objects, sub-citizens, whom must realize that they are certain choices that they cannot make because it chokes society. Their choice to use their bodies the way they want to use, to clothe their way is taken from them because it is assumed that they are symbols first and people second. If the goal here is to affirm the equality between men and women and to stop religious extremism, it seems to me that the focus ought to be not on women and their choices, but on those who can force them to wear something that they do not want. Why not, pass a law outlawing any religious figure to preach that men are superior, that they can beat their wives, and force them to wear a certain way? Why not focus on Islamism or for that matter on any religion that do not offer women the same status than men? That would mean forcing the Catholic Church to have women priests in France for example or forcing many Imams and Rabbis to let both sexes pray together, which would do more than a ban on the burqa to affirm the idea that men and women are equals..

The ideological warfare over women's bodies

Unconvincing and creepily artificial arguments against the Burqa (burka) from Alice Thompson in the London Times:

Face time, face-to-face, losing face, all these phrases show how we rely on scrutinising each other’s reactions, as do concerns about Botox and facelifts. The burka is not an invisibility cloak, it’s a passive- aggressive statement, a rejection of the community. The person wearing it is signalling that either she or her family wants her to remain apart from society. It implies that wearers believes that British men may become dangerously lecherous if they see their faces and that British women are too provocatively clad. Like smoking, wearing a burka doesn’t affect just the wearers, but those around them, who may feel shunned. With full-body tattoos, face piercing and a hoody, you can still smile to show that you are a friend.
(...)That doesn’t mean that Britain should ban the burka in public places. We don’t want the police stripping off women’s outer garments in the street. The French have gone too far by prohibiting the wearing of a full veil on public transport.
But we should make it clear that people should not be allowed to cover their faces when it impinges on others, That includes women working in schools, hospitals, courtrooms, shops and the service industries.

Yeah right...! In today's modern societies, don't we have the right to be loners and to say "fu*k you" to the majority as long that we don't harm anybody? How come these types of belittling and paternalistic arguments are only used when women are choosing a path that a society believes is wrong not only for her, but for their ideas of what she ought to be? It reminds  me of what too many parents do when their daughters want to assert their individuality in ways, which shock their value system or which they believe which have her labeled and thus scarred for life (she will never be able to get married). In any case, Thompson undermines her own arguments by rejecting a ban on the burqa, which shows that like me, the sight of a woman in burqa makes her feel uncomfortable, but that unlike me, she cannot tolerate/accept that discomfort because she believes that women can't be individuals, but should always be selfless and think about others. I'm tired of the idea that a woman's body is never solely her own, but instead always a vessel or symbol. When I see a woman with a veil, I have to remind myself that she has the right to do as she pleases with her body as long as she isn't engaging in obscene behavior. It seems to me that all of the discussions about the burqa and about whether to ban it in France and elsewhere just show that women are still the main instruments in an ideological, political and religious battlefield where the main combatants don't really care about their self-hood, but solely the preservation of their own misogynistic,but comfortable traditions.

Illiberalism and the ban of the Burka

For some reason I can't seem to stop quoting Norm Geras or even to disagree with him so I will stop trying especially when he is expressing perfectly my sentiments on France, and its potential ban of the Burqa:

(...) Banning the burka itself is an indirect way of getting rid of such coercion, and the cost to individual freedom, the freedom of those who wear the burka by choice, is a price that must be paid - by them. OK. Then say that - but acknowledging the illiberal nature of the measure, illiberalism for the greater good so to speak. And, even saying it, one must first produce the evidence that amongst women wearing the burka the proportions are as they need to be, between those forced or pressured and those who wear it by choice. If these proportions aren't heavily weighted in the direction of establishing that there is coercion at work, then Oliver and others of his view have no case.
Another question that I'll just mention in passing. Does the law need to intervene in this matter at all? Why may it not be dealt with by the influence of education, social criticism and the like? Many in Western societies find it an obstruction to interacting with people if their faces are hidden. There is nothing to stop those who feel this way from expressing their preference as and when appropriate.

Becoming Robespierre

Stuart Jeffries on Sarkozy, the Burqa, and its assertion that it isn't welcomed in France (hat tip Arthur Goldhammer)

Sarkozy now goes further, following revolutionary logic in not just chasing those who dress in ways he and French political culture finds intolerable out of public spaces, but pursuing those who dress in a way that is a rejection of western values even into their private worlds. He said: "The burka is not a sign of religion, it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French republic." Even religious justification is bad enough, run the suppressed premises of this argument, but the absence of such despicable justifications is worse.
The woman in a burka is revealed as subservient to patriarchal culture. She must be made free to choose to be more western. Sarkozy proposes, in giving his backing to the establishment ofa parliamentary commission to look at whether to ban the wearing of burkas in public, that such imposed freedom would improve her lot.
French venerate such abstract freedoms. We needn't. They were, for Hegel, the basis of the revolution's collapse into the Terror in which, he argued, individuals were sacrificed to the ill-conceived pursuit of abstract freedoms. Sarkozy is thus a modern-day Robespierre, proposing some women – whom he presumes to have been silenced by patriarchal society and whose voices he doesn't want to hear –be terrorised in the name of the kind abstract freedoms France has venerated for 210 years. Let's see if he succeeds.

Sarkozy and the Burqa

Neil Clark on Sarkozy and his willingness to put the Burqa at the center of the French political debate:

The secret of Sarkozy's success is that he knows how to spot a vote winner. While the left sought to focus on the underlying causes of the riots which plagued Paris in the autumn of 2005, Sarkozy, as Minister of the Interior, simply sent in the riot police and denounced the rioters as racaille or 'rabble'.
Faced with the impact of the global recession, he ditched his flirtation with Anglo-Saxon capitalism and adopted more traditional dirigiste Gaullist policies - in the process completely wrong-footing the left.
Now it seems he's played another trump card by announcing on Monday the establishment of a commission to consider banning the wearing in public of the burka - the garment worn by some Muslim women which covers the entire body, including the face.
His argument for doing so is not just that the burka represents an assault on French secularism, but that it is degrading to women. By championing the rights of women, Sarkozy is able to pose as the defender of the founding principles of the Republic. He also gains kudos for dealing with a hyper-sensitive political issue head-on. And here's the really clever part: he manages at the same time to expose divisions on the left. 

This debate about the Burqa frustrates me because it is clear that it isn't about the burqa, but about something else, about identity politics, defining/redefining what it means to be French and what/who cannot become French. I don't mind having such a debate, but it isn't cheap to confine it to the interdiction of the Burqa of French society when the issue is about finding the balance between liberty and religion, all religions not just Islam for after all, if as Sarkozy asserts the Burqa is about foreign traditions and cultures, then what is the problem? Can women wear the Burqa if they assert that they do it just because they like it, just as they would wear fur or a thong?