Year: 2016

For many today, French secularism is an anti-human rights ideology, a kind of moral deformity close to racism.

How can a free country, they ask, even think of doing such a thing as trying to ban a veil or a burkini — the full body covering for women to wear on the beach? How, they ask, can the French Republic call itself free and remain free when many of its citizens would like to rob Muslim women, peacefully obeying their own religion, of the freedom to choose their own clothes?

The current radicalization in France is not like that of the recent migration of Muslims to other European countries. Muslims have been coming to France in large numbers since the French left Algeria in 1962. The French never made any distinction between the French of “Gaul” and the French of North Africa. The current radicalization is not of those who came then, but of the younger generation — of French Muslims. They were born in France, speak French, were schooled in France — but they are not at ease with the values of France.

Islamic fundamentalism in France has been imported from the outside — by avenues such as Al Jazeera and Muslim wars in the Middle East. Now, therefore, these young French Muslim citizens have a real wish for secession from the rest of the population — like the wish of the Confederate states for secession from the United States, before and during the U.S. Civil War. These young French Muslims apparently do not want to live in the same country anymore. They seem to want a separate country, or a different country.

For more than 25 years, the French Republic, right and left, has been trying to disentangle the country from the “Muslim textile problem” (hijab, niqab, burka, burkini and so on). When the problem began back in 1989, the head of Creil College expelled three Muslim girls for wearing the Muslim veil, the hijab. A strong debate followed: pro-veil vs. anti-veil. Same arguments: as usual, tolerance, freedom of choice, and freedom of religion were on one side, secularism and respect for rules on the other side.

Rules? What rules?

Central to the history of France, is that, in the republic, state schools were built to fight the grip of the Catholic church on the whole of French society. At the end of 19th century, until the First World War, republican teachers worked hard to build schools separated from the Pope and the church. The thinking was that Darwin is better at explaining the origin of the human race than the Bible’s crediting God with creating the world in seven days. To build a country of free citizens: knowledge first; belief only if you insist, and even then, only by yourself.

The Islamic veil at school, or the burkini at the beach, seems an attempt to “re-religiousize” France and break the French consensus for secularism. For a hundred years, the consensus has been accepted by everyone — Catholics, Jews, Protestants — except for Muslims.

Four policemen in Nice, France, are pictured forcing a woman to remove part of her clothes because her outfit violated the city’s “burkini ban,” on August 23. They also fined her for the violation. (Image source: NBC News video screenshot)

The consensus can be summarized like this: Religious beliefs cannot belong to the public sphere without risking tyranny or civil war. If French citizens want to live in peace democratically, all disturbing subjects — especially faith in a country of multiple faiths — must remain strictly private.

For almost 30 years now, Muslims organizations in France have been telling everyone they do not accept this old private-public rule. Even at public schools, there are constant attempts to remodel the curriculum to align with religious faith.

Continue reading What the burkini does to France

It’s not a bad joke; it’s a very bad joke. Turkey, where all variants of ethnic and religious xenophobia are a national pastime, is accusing the West of being racist.

Speaking after a spat with Austria and Sweden over news reports and tweets from those countries that accused Turkey of allowing sex with children under the age of 15, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu claimed that the behavior of European countries reflected the “racism, anti-Islamic and anti-Turkish (trend) in Europe.”

He is talking about the same Europe where the inhabitants of one of its biggest cities, London, recently elected a Muslim as its mayor. In Turkey, not even the smallest village of a few hundred inhabitants has a non-Muslim mayor.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu (left) blasted European countries for “racism, anti-Islamic and anti-Turkish (trend),” partly in response to a tweet by Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom (right) that read: “Turkish decision to allow sex with children under 15 must be reversed. Children need more protection, not less, against violence, sex abuse.”

In “racist” Austria, the police immediately arrested two suspects in connection with an attempt to set fire to a Turkish cultural center in the northern Austrian town of Wels — and at a time of rising tensions with Turkey. By contrast, Turkish law enforcement officials arrested five former gendarmerie intelligence officers just recently — nine years after the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. These officers would probably never have been implicated if the two Islamist allies, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Fethullah Gulen, his staunchest political ally when Dink was assassinated, had not turned into each other’s worst nemesis in power-sharing fight in 2013.

Yeni Akit is an Islamist newspaper and one of Erdogan’s media darlings, a kind of Turkish Pravda in its fanatical support of the president. Its editors always find a seat in the elite group of journalists who accompany the president in his private jet traveling to foreign capitals.

Continue reading A Look Into the Mental Abyss of the Mohammedan Turk