Intolerance

"Is the burqa incompatible with French citizenship?"

France has denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman who wears a burqa on the grounds that her "radical" practice of Islam is incompatible with basic French values such as equality of the sexes.

A note to my readers

I have a severe pain in the right arm and the neck preventing me from spending enough time on my blog and in front of the computer in general. The situation is so critical that a simple click on the mouse is directly correlated to an immediate increase of the pain in my neck and my right arm.

I am going through agressive physical therapy right now and will do my best to keep this blog active. My next long posting and commentary will be on Quebec's immigration talk, from the commission on reasonable accommodations for immigrants , to the recent law drafted by the Parti Québécois restricting individual rights for some immigrants, to the province's talk on racism and how the Canadian charter of human rights is seen by many French speaking Quebecers as a threat to their Christian Catholic heritage in the context of a multicultural society. Clearly, Quebecers who agree with Hérouxville's city council are uncomfortable recognising the cultural diversity in their province and uncomfortabkle with the idea of giving cultural minorities some rights pertaining to their culture and beliefs.

This talk on racism and reasonable accomodations for cultural minorities, started with the Hérouxville story, a small municipality in rural Québec whose council drafted a code of life which was seen by many as racist and anti-Muslim. This small municipality which doesn't have one Muslim resident, opened a Pandora's box in the province. Many Quebecers started confessing their racism. Many other Quebecers were schocked by this racist talk.

Listening to the consultations of the Commission on reasonable accomodations was torture for me. My personal story comparing two immigrations persuaded me that total integration, the one I had to go through in France, is possible, but it has its downside, the estrangement of one's own culture. What I loved and still love in Quebec and Canada is the fact that, absent the pressure on complete integration, I was able to retrieve my native cultural roots, while assimilating slowly the local culture. Forced integration has something that one could relate to psychological violence, a violence consented by those who receive it and those who exert it. Living in Quebec and Canada made me reevaluate multiculturalism from my previous French experience of total integration. I thought that, although it had its flaws, Multiculturalism is the only way a globalised world and globalised society can achieve understanding and a good living together amidst diversity.

I am surprised to realise that, although the moment is dark now for multiculturalism, there are Quebecers who think like me. I am most comforted by the intervention of the young mayor of Huntingdon, Quebec, political commentator and radio host,Stéphane Gendron, at the commission for reasonable accommodations. He forcefully argued that multiculturalism is well and alive in Quebec. Drawing on Huntingdon's history, he loathed the province's government for launching a consultation on reasonable accommodations as a way to escape its responsibilities and assume the multiculturalism of the province. I asked him to forward me the text of his memo and he did so instantly and kindly.

I am going through the text now. I would like to expose and compare some interesting views on multiculturalism including Gendron's, Quebec human rights lawyer's, Julius Grey, and philosopher Charles Taylor's position on the subject as glanced at from his book on the self (The sources of the Self, the building of the modern identity). These different but mostly pro-multiculturalist views and positions can help us give a dimension to a phenomenon I hold dear in my heart, from my personal history and experience, and which is under attack from both the right and the liberal left in many parts of the world creating social tensions and feeding the whole flawed concept of the 'clash of civilisations' and 'the war on terror'.

Sarkozy: Going Ugly Early

"Sarkozy had promised to expel 25,000 illegal immigrants from France by the end of 2007. But Hortefeux, who is head of the newly created Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, is struggling to meet the target, with only 11,000 having been shown the door in the first seven months of the year. "I want numbers!" Sarkozy told the minister in a meeting last month, according to Le Point magazine. "It's a campaign commitment. The French are expecting this from me," he was reported as saying.
...Tensions have also been raised after a parliamentary commission on Wednesday approved introducing DNA tests for family members of immigrants already in France. The measure will now be included in a sweeping immigration law to be debated by parliament next week, aimed at toughening visa requirements. "No subject should be taboo," Hortefeux told reporters on Thursday."

Sarkozy is the son of Hungarians who emigrated to France after the end of WWII. And his wife boasts about not having one drop of French blood in her veins. May be she should pass the test, who knows ?

Geneticians and former members of the national council for Bioethics on France's emerging infamy.

Read here my article : Sarkozy and the popular science of genes.

And here: Les Politiques de l'exclusion

Sarkozy's Politics of Exclusion

Grozbulles, a centrist French blog (from the only real political center in France, not the counterfeited ones) that publishes political cartoons and extensive analyses of French Politics, has featured an article I wrote on the first measure of Sarkozy's infamous ministry of Immigration and National Identity.

Les Politiques de l'exclusion: Dissection de la première mesure du ministère de l'immigration et de l'identité nationale.

Troubled times in Europe

My first week of vacation was spent among my In Laws who live in Belgium. My husband left Belgium to finish his medical studies in France where he became an expatriate acquiring the citizenship and moving later to Canada.
Although a visit to his parents does not leave us time to tour the country, he always likes to check what has changed in his native country since he left. Therefore, the picture of the cooked snails sold on the street in Bruxelles. This was just next to the most famous tourist attraction in Bruxelles: Mannekenpis.
During our stay and outside family conversations, two subjects of concern emerged: climate change and immigration, most specifically Muslim immigration but also Polish seasonal immigration to Belgium. One British blogger had a recent post on the subject. Reading his blog from Canada, these subjects seemed far to me. However they are palpable among ordinary people.
I have never known Belgium before under a constant sun in the summer during seven consecutive days with no rain and 30 degrees Celsius.
My husband's family used to shy away from immigration talk in my presence and I knew that this was an implicit understanding between us. I had arrived this time to Belgium with the magazine 'The Economist' bought at the airport with its cover on EuroIslam and when I left Bruxelles, their first national french newspaper was publishing on a remote page Tariq Ramadan's manifesto for a new Islam in Europe. Opinions diverged in my husband's family about Islam. His cousin and his wife expressed their fear while his brother who lives in the European quartier in Bruxelles told me that the problem with the talk about Islam in Europe was that ordinary people were hearing from the media more loudly about extremists than about moderates.

There was also a discussion between me and my mother in law on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I explained to her my point of view (which every regular reader f this blog knows well by now) and she explained to me hers which is representative of the seventies (my mother in law is 73) point of view of European leftists on Israel and Palestine: 'We are responsible to what happened to jews during the second world war and therefore Israel has the right to exist', typical zionist propaganda. After a 30 minutes conversation we agreed mtually to stop the discussion.

My husband's family is a typical socialist family, half Flemish on his father's side and half Francophone on his mother's side with a grand'mother, now deceased, who was among the rare people who had their Belgian communist party membership during the second WW and after. She was taken prisoner to Ravensbrück by Nazis for 4 years.
I liked the grand'mother. She was quite a character and probably the person in the family to whom I was most close. She died in 1995, after having seen the fall of the Soviet Union and the total demise of the ideals she and others fought, suffered and died for.

There was another problem I noticed in Belgium, the rise of the Facist racist Flemmish party, Vlaams Block, the second largest party in Flandres. In a trip to Bruges, we were greated on the road by a large picture of a smiling blonde on her bicycle. My husband explained to me that she was a Vlaams representative. The Vlaams party people are not only racists but also nationalists and separatists. There is talk in Belgium that if the Vlaams becomes the first party, they may vote separation from the rest of the country, like the people of Montenegro.
And so Nationalism is another problem on the rise in Europe.

This picture is taken from the Bruges beffroi and shows the Cathedral of Saint Sauveur. Another Bruges church hosts what is believed to be the blood of the Christ taken by Beligan crusaders from Jerusalem. I reminded my husband that this was a time when European christianity was even more belligerant than Islam. I remember, when we met, the first thing my husband told me jokingly was that one of his ancestors, Godefroy de Bouillon, had occupied my piece of country, northern Lebanon, and built a fortress that we can still visit to this day in Tripoli. Of course, this is a far away past, but a past that Europe still rely on and a past that is hindering, in my opinion, the understanding of Islam in Europe.
I know that these problems, climate change, immigration, racism, nationalism and Islam are not only specific to Belgium but exist also in other European countries. My feeling is that these are troubled times for Europe. I am writing this while listening to BBC world and the commemoration of the London bombing. My sympathies to the victims and to all random victims of terror. These are not only troubled times for states but also for citizens and ordinary people taken in the spirale of fanatisms and cynical politics.

P.S: I apologize if I will not be able to answer the comments soon but my access to an internet connection is limited.