No, Jack Straw is not islamophobic! The veil excludes women from society
Written by Franck Biancheri
Saturday, 14 October 2006
EDITO - If the war on Iraq was the worst idea ever to establish peace and democracy, the niqab (large veil covering the face too) is definitely the worst mean to integrate Muslim women into Western European societies.
And if it is indeed unfortunate that Jack Straw did not dare denounce the first lie (about the war on Iraq), it does not mean that he should not been supported for telling now a useful truth to British society: the niqab indeed prevents women’s integration (and simultaneously increases xenophobic feelings among mainstream population by making those women and their beliefs even more alien to the society they live into).
From Germany to France, Jack Straw’s finding is already a well known fact and has been handled with no serious difficulty. The main reason is that besides a few extremists, Muslim women do not dream of being 'jailed' within their own clothes.
The question now for UK is to know whether it will be able to get out of the intellectual ghetto where political correctness has trapped it for at least one decade and which can be summarized this way: - a good leftist mindset should be: pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, pro-multiculturalism, pro-minority (whatever they are or ask for), anti-American and a bit pro-European - a good rightist mindset should be : pro-Israeli, anti-terrorist (especially from Muslim origin), pro-multiculturalism, pro-minority but nationalist too (understands who can), Americanist and very much anti-European.
The problem is that British society is moving in a complete different direction. Its 'multiculturalism' is in pieces (if it ever existed) as shown by all recent surveys[1] indicating that the British Muslim population shares the same convictions regarding Western values as Muslim populations from the Middle East (while on continental Europe they share the same opinions as the people of their own country, the European country they live into).
British elites are totally colonized by US interests and values; and since the Iraq war, the country has lost any international visibility worldwide, being now taken for a mere subsidiary of Washington Inc. Britishness is becoming a key asset for xenophobic political movements which are getting an increasing popular support. And the negative fallout of the Iraq war, together with Blair’s belief that there is such a thing as a ‘war on terror’, obliges British authorities to constantly use double standards speeches: pretending to be very opened to Islam whatever form it takes, while pursuing a very aggressive anti Muslim activists policy.
Such a context does not help to generate a productive intellectual environment to deal with the Muslim veil complex issue as it lacks a constructive debate on the issue. For Newropeans, in line with its recently adopted proposal regarding Immigration, each EU Member state has to find its own balance between its tradition in matter of relations between religious and public behaviours, and the immigrants’ religious traditions. But it has to be a policy aimed at integrating the immigrants, and especially their children. Therefore all factors whose effects are to discriminate or to separate the immigrants and their children from mainstream population have to be forcefully opposed. UK is not France, nor Germany. It has to find its own way to deal with the veil issue. One lesson though: in places where the policy starts at school, when people are young, it definitely increases the chances to limit in the future the problem with adults!
In anyway, Jack Straw has brought the UK debate on that issue closer to the continental one. And UK elites could be well inspired to look at other European experiences in that field rather than at US ones, because whatever they may believe, they belong to a European society fabric, where there is no ‘free space’ available (contrarily to the USA) to let immigrants develop their own way of life.
I always remind my audiences when such questions are raised, that within Europe, our history teaches us one terrible lesson: we have inside our own European civilisation dark forces, nurtured by the fear and hatred of the ‘Other’, which are always sleeping just beneath the surface of our ‘open societies’. The most efficient way to wake them up is to ignore them and pretend that we are ‘angels’. As Pascal once wrote, ‘who wants to be the angel becomes the beast’[2]. Though it is a French philosopher’s opinion, I do believe that it is a sentence which British opinion leaders could right now usefully meditate upon.
Conférence 'Italie/Europe: La démocratie en danger' avec Beppe Grillo, 6 février 2010 - Paris Marianne Ranke-Cormier, directrice de publication de Newropeans Magazine présente Franck Biancheri, président de Newropeans, un des pères fondateurs du programme Erasmus et directeur de recherche de LEAP2020.
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EDITO - If the war on Iraq was the worst idea ever to establish peace and democracy, the niqab (large veil covering the face too) is definitely the worst mean to integrate Muslim women into Western European societies. 
The three post-war scenarios regarding EU-US relations
