Oh, ffs. How many spurs to blog ranting can a woman take before noon on a Sunday morning?<\/p>\n

The Big Question<\/strong> on BBC is debating the question “Should Britain ban the burqa?” (The basis of the topic is French president Sarkozy’s burqa ban) The answer is so obviously “NO” that you wonder how small a question has to be to qualify as “big.”<\/p>\n

There follows a fair bit of debate about the burqa and its religious and social significance. There’s a burqa-clad woman saying it’s a religious issue for her. Another one defending wearing a veil as a personal choice. A male muslim scholar saying that burqa-wearing is not an integral part of Islam, anyway: it’s purely a cultural, rather than religious, garment. Nobody really deals with the implications of a ban.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there are no overt BNP speakers, this week, but the show does bring on Peter Hitchens… (Mail on Sunday columnist. Paleoconservative, scourge of political correctness<\/a>. Christopher Hitchens’ brother – could be seen as almost his Evil Twin.)<\/p>\n

The discussion never focuses much on what the concept of a burqa ban really means.<\/p>\n

You have to dismiss instantly the argument that banning burqas will somehow “liberate” muslim women. In Europe, there must be already be many avenues of recourse for women who feel that they are pressured into wearing islamic dress, without having to compel those women who want to wear it – for whatever reasons – to abandon it. (Just like the careworkers who feel their very being is threatened if they can’t wear crosses at work.)<\/p>\n

It doesn’t matter if their choices are incomprehensible to the rest of us.
\nDress or ornaments are forms of communication. If the things being communicated seem absurd or offensive, surely we can challenge them or – Toutatis forbid, on current showing – just live and let live. <\/p>\n

If the state gets engaged in ruling about what communication is acceptable, it comes bang up against the concept of freedom of expression. <\/p>\n

And Sarkozy as feminist spokesman, indeed. A man whose only interest to the non-French world is his trophy wife. <\/p>\n

(A wife who seems to have blithely overlooked Sarkozy’s lack of physical or mental charms, on the basis that he was the French president, in a way that seems unlikely to have happened if he was a shop assistant. Which makes even his wife seem like an odd feminist, unless you can expand the meaning of “feminist” to imply – “does whatever it takes to get wealth and power for herself”.)<\/p>\n

Even a Spectator columnist, Rod Liddle, <\/a> pointed out that
\n“Saqrkozy’s burqa ban panders to racism not feminism.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Spot on. A burqa ban is a symptom of racism, not secularism, nor feminism. <\/p>\n

Indeed the whole idea could be designed to polarise French society and provide new recruits for muslim extremism – in the same way that the Xian fundies are using every worker who’s told to remove a cross or promise ring to recruit people to their mad groupings. <\/p>\n

As if the world isn’t dangerous enough, without creating more and more intolerance. Ah, there’s finally a convincing explanation on NewsBiscuit<\/a><\/p>\n