Almost every idea that ever came out of France has been bad for America, from the structuralist philosophical gibberish which has poisoned US academe to the grotesquely over-regulated tax and spend socialism which is now ruining the US economy. But if there’s one area where the French do get it SO right it’s in their uncompromising approach to Islam.
President Sarkozy once again showed the way yesterday when in a presidential address to France’s two houses of parliament, he said the burqa is not welcome in his country and should be banned.
As he rightly went on to say the full-body garment which makes women in Afghanistan look like a cross between a prison cell and a walking tent is “not a sign of religion” but a “sign of subservience.” He added: “We cannot have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social ife, deprived of identity.”
Compare and contrast, the appalling cultural appeasement of President Obama’s speech in Cairo on June 4 when he boasted that the United States prized freedom of religion and would not “tell people what to wear.” And there was I thinking it was the French who were supposed to be the surrender monkeys, not the Americans.
Was there ever greater proof that, where the great clash of civilisations is concerned, President Obama is turning out to be the Islamists’ useful idiot par excellence?
Does Barack Hussein Obama really not understand that supposed “freedom” he is granting US Muslim women to wear the veil is in fact the most surefire way of guaranteeing their continued subservience to their men folk and their failure to integrate with the broader society?
It’s for precisely this reason – would that the rest of Europe had the courage! – that France bans religious head coverings in state schools. France understands, as so many in the pusillanimous, multi-culti West do not, that female Muslim girls of school age need protecting from the heavy pressure put on them by male relatives to wear the veil. Banning the veil in French schools is not the sign of an oppressive state taking away religious freedom. It is a rare example of a government setting a moral example and standing up for freedom: a girl’s freedom to choose whether she wants to spend the rest of her life in a kind of religious apartheid or whether she wants to integrate more closely with the host culture.
That President Obama cannot understand this reflects disgracefully on his supposedly vast intelligence. As a Democrat, he ought at the very least to be championing progressive values, and foremost among those values – for which generations of feminists have fought so hard – is female equality. So here, just to remind you, is what he really thinks about female equality – at least where America’s Muslim girls are concerned:
“The U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality.”
In other words: typical Obama lazy moral equivocation and disingenuous fluff. These “some in the West” who believe that “a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal” are straw men. They simply don’t exist. In parts of the Islamic world, on the other hand, such men are rife. And hair coverings are the very least of their women folks problems. How does being dressed head to toe in a sack compare with being banned from driving; or murdered for trying to attend school; or being stoned to death for adultery because a bunch of local lads have decided to gang rape you?
America, you won’t often hear me say this but in this particular case it’s true. Where Islam is concerned, you have a lot to learn from those pesky cheese-eaters.
Getty Images
