AnnO'Neemus said:
Y'see that's the kind of attitude that means it's really difficult to address this issue seriously, sensibly, and openly. You've just proved my point. Thank you....
I wasn’t denying that appalling violence towards women exists in the North African communities in France, such violence sadly exists in most impoverished communities throughout the world hand-in-hand with poverty, ghettoisation and discrimination. The dreadful living conditions in the Housing Projects are no doubt breeding grounds for patriarchal violence, frustrated young men taking their anger out on victims who are triply oppressed through class, race and gender.
Failing to place these social problems in some sort of socio-economic context does however play into the hands of the racists because it implies that Muslims are somehow uniquely ‘barbaric’.
Even worse you claim that nothing is done about the alleged gang rapes because of ‘political correctness’ and the French authorities concern with racial and religious sensitivity. This is ridiculous, and frankly something I would expect to hear from a Le Pen supporter I’m afraid. The French state is a racist state which segregates North Africans to the bottom of the social hierarchy. And this is the sort of ‘cultural sensitivity’ you can expect from it’s present leader, Jacques Chirac:
"It is clear that having Spanish, Polish or Portuguese people ... poses fewer problems than having Muslims or blacks. How do you think a French worker feels when he sees on the landing a family with a man who has maybe three or four wives, about 20 kids, who receives around 50,000 francs in social services, of course without working ... and if you add the noise and smell ... no wonder the French worker across the landing goes mad."
How to you square your claim that the authorities do not ‘crack down’ on alleged crimes committed by Muslim with the fact that Muslims constitute the majority of the prison population in France? The reason protection of women in the Ghettos isn’t forthcoming is not because of the ‘political correctness’ of the French ruling class but because Chirac and his Nazi collaborating Gendarmerie don’t give a shit about them. Just like the Bushites don’t give a shit about poor black people in New Orleans and just like how Blair and co don’t give a fuck about immigrant labours exploited by gang masters over here.
With regard to the hijab ban, the official reason for its implementation was the defence of ‘secularism’ and to uphold the values of the republic. Given that the French state generously subsidises the private Catholic sector in education and that public schools officially mourned the passing of the late John Paul II one has to treat these reasons with scepticism.
The quote you have given indicates that the henious crime of gang rape exists within the ghetto’s, it exists here in Britain too, but it doesn’t indicate this specifically in relation to whether or not girls where the hijab but speaks of the problem in more generalised terms. I can’t see how this law will defend Muslim girls in anyway but I know that excluding them from schools, as dozens have been, will only increase their isolation and ghettoisation.
What about those girls who are sent to private religious schools as a result? What about the girls who want to where the hijab? What about the girls who wish to assert their cultural identity in the face of mainstream cultural chauvinism?
So yes let us discuss important issues "seriously, sensibly, and openly", but not in a way the demonises Muslims and absolves the imperialist rulers of France and Britain of responsibility for their crimes. Opposing patriarchal violence in ethnic minority communities does not mean supporting the counterproductive, chauvinist and despotic policies of corrupt, racist Islamophobic pigs like Chirac, the leader of a social system that provides the breeding ground for all manner of such oppressions.
I will leave you with a quote from Salma Yaqoob:
"The real emancipation of Muslim women can of course only come from themselves. In practice the voice of Muslim women themselves – in all their diversity – has to be heard. We have to get past the simple caricatures of the passive victim or aggressive fundamentalist. We have to recognise that while the road to female emancipation in the West has taken the route of the right to not be covered in response to the rigid expectations placed on women historically in terms of dress and societal roles, many women may choose to liberate themselves in different ways, and just because the trajectory of their resistance to oppression is different, it does not make it any less legitimate or significant."
http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Latest/Hijab.html
