There are many in Europe these days who don’t see their culture as being “refreshed” by a rising tide of poorly assimilated and dauntingly fecund Muslim immigrants, particularly as European governments find themselves having to bend farther and farther backward to accommodate Islamist demands for restrictions on the free press and inclusion of Shari’a law into the civil code. (And your estimate of the relative population of Muslims in France vs. America is way off: the percentage is far higher in France, and growing rapidly indeed.)

Suffice it to say that if France chooses to put out the unwelcome mat for its Muslim citizens – and it’s hard to think of a more in-your-face insult to a people than banning their dress because it is a symbol of their cultural identity – then it has every right to do so. If it chooses to emulate Japan – where the native Japanese rule the roost, foreigners are disdained as gaijin, and everyone seems to look, dress, and act alike – then there is no divine law which would stop them.

Personally, I am much happier living in a country which values diversity and tolerance, and which reaped the considerable benefits of being hospitable to immigrants who arrive with strange dress, culture, and language. I work for a company which was founded by a guy who left Iran after the Shah was deposed, and who now runs an enterprise which employs dozens (most of whom are also foreign born). Our company is next to the Google, one of whose founders was a Russian immigrant. I formerly worked for (and invested in) a company which was founded by an immigrant from India, who later sold the business for $1.2 billion. The joke here in Silicon Valley is that it was built on IC’s (not integrated circuits: Indians and Chinese). Not to mention all of the great restaurants that came in their wake! Whether people emigrated here because of religious freedom or some other reason, the fact that America does not have the fear of l’etranger has brought many of the best and the brightest here. America would never pass a law outlawing burqas, and those who might emigrate here know that, whether they are Muslim or not. That’s why they come here.

My point is simply that a society can be like France and look at a woman in a burqa, and through its (highly) subjective judgment see a threat, or it could be like America and see the woman through the prism of a society which has learned over the past two centuries that the arrival of foreign cultures is accretive, not dilutive, to American self-identity. The percentage of Americans who are Muslim is not appreciably less than the percentage of French who are Muslim, and we have yet to see them destroy the American Way. Some of them even wear burqas! Sarkozy’s speech is emblematic of a country whose economy is sclerotic and whose culture is moribund. I’m much happier to live in a country whose economy is continually refreshed by the entrepreneurialism and hard work of its immigrants, and whose culture is robust and dynamic as a result.

You are right that the true argument is not what the surface argument is about: the real issue is the accelerating Islamization of Europe, against which the indigenous culture has every right to push back. There are very few cultures on Earth that don’t exhibit some sort of prejudice against l’etranger; it’s human nature, and certainly most Islamic societies do so in spades.

And the burqa, your protestations to the contrary, is far more than a religious token like a yarmulke: it is an overt manifestation of a repressive, tribalisitic sexuality that explicitly regards women as property, and is about as alien to French culture as it is possible to get. If the French don’t want to tolerate this offensive display, why shouldn’t they be allowed to ban it? It’s their culture, and their country. What obligates them to indulge this? There are plenty of other places where Muslims can go to enshroud their chattel.

While France may be “the very cradle of the Enlightenment,” it has never been very enlightened about religious diversity. The Catholic majority periodically massacred the Huguenot minority until a century or so ago. France has a long history of anti-Semitism, ranging from the Dreyfus affair to the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis. There is currently a nativist political movement in France which would make Tom Tancredo envious. The “secular Western culture” of France has found plenty of ways to favor the Catholic majority over its minority sects. The French prohibition against school children wearing religious symbols favors the Catholics by default: observant Jews wear yarmulkes and observant Muslims wear their outfits as an intrinsic part of observing their faith, but there is no similar directive for a Catholic to wear a cross. So it is hard to take Sarkozy’s protestations of protecting Muslim women or French identity at face value – it seems to me that he is playing to the bleachers by trying to exploit the embedded French prejudice against l’etranger to his political advantage.

We don’t think twice when nuns wear outfits similar to a burqa, Orthodox Jewish women are covered up, Sikhs cover their uncut hair with a turban, the Amish look like they live in the eighteenth century, or Hasidic men mimic the Amish in dress and appearance. The state doesn’t interfere when women are not allowed to be in the priesthood or the ten person quorum required for Jewish religious ceremonies. I was in Salt Lake City on Monday, and observed how the women there all dress like June Cleaver. People may dress modestly because it is part of their religious practice – as with the Mormons – or they may wear a religious uniform ranging from Buddhist monks’ saffron robes to yarmulkes, which are worn so all men look alike in the eyes of God. There is nothing intrinsically different between the burqa and the outfits which those of other religions wear, either in appearance or intent. These various costumes symbolize humility, uniformity, being identifiably part of a sect, and placing other values above those of appearance and vanity. While the costumes, and the context in which they are worn, may vary slightly from religion to religion, they are far more alike than they are different. They express the eternal over the temporal, the group over the individual, and the spiritual over that which is earthly. While the values they express are not those which I choose to espouse, in a free society they are respected, regardless of sect or religion.

So a burqa is no more “a symbol of control and oppression” than the clothing worn by scores of other religions, and the motivation to wear it is fundamentally the same. Sarkozy’s professed concern for the “dignity” of Muslim women falls flat with the sight of burka-clad Iranian women acting in the most dignified way possible: by taking their fates into their own hands and challenging men with guns. Modern day Thomas Paines. They certainly don’t seem to have a problem wearing a burquaL: why should Sarkozy? For a leader who presides over a population which is complacent, indulgent, perpetually on strike, and with a long and deep history of religious persecution to castigate and denigrate those who choose to wear a burqa is the height of hypocrisy. By choosing to discriminate against a tiny sliver of French society – as the article notes, only 5-10% of the French population is Muslim, and a small percentage of them actually wears a burqa – Sarkozy shows how dim the supposed Enlightenment of France really is.

————
http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/3am/2009/06/22/modesty-forbids-ms-hilton-115875-21461156/

Saucy minx PARIS Hilton has been given a major dressing down for, er, dressing down.
TV producers had banned the airhead heiress from wearing a bikini while she is in Dubai shooting the third series of My New BFF.
But within hours she was posing for photos in a skimpy twopiece.
Brilliant. Our source says: “Paris had made a big public speech, saying how much she loved the Middle East and respected its culture. But the following day she was prancing around on the beach in her bikini and posing provocatively.
“Bosses warned her Western tourists have been jailed for flouting the rules.”

I believe nearly all of the women wearing burqas with whom I deal every day do want to… That’s fine with me, because I and (I think) the women in question don’t see the burqua as the “overt symbol” it represents to Malcolm. Of course, it does also function as a symbol, in multiple ways and in multiple contexts. But burqas are like cigars — sometimes they’re just what they are.

Can we find the word “Hijab” in the Quran? The word “Hijab” appeared in the Quran 7 times, five of them as “Hijab” and two times as “Hijaban. None of these “Hijab” words are used in the Quran in reference to what the traditional Muslims call today (Hijab) as a dress code for the Muslim woman.

Hijab as it appears in the Quran has nothing to do with the Muslim Women dress code. Stop this practice, it has nothing to do with Islam. The best garment…is the garment of righteousness

But yes, in fact I do look at women in burqas as similar in many ways to dogs on a leash. It is an overt symbol of possession and control. That, having been born into servitude, they may successfully have been conditioned to want such treatment makes it no less abhorrent, and no less at odds with secular Western culture.

Take a look at the Iranian women in burqas standing up to armed soldiers, such as those pictured on http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/23/iran.women/index.html. Would you characterize them as dogs being led on a leash?

My view is that the government which governs best is usually the government which governs least. The state has no right to tell its citizens what to wear.