Fuck France
France’s national railway company banned its black and North African employees from working during President Shimon Peres’ visit last month over fears they “might be Muslim,” newspapers in Britain reported overnight Monday.
Ahhhhhh France. So civilized. And hellooooooo Israel. So civilized!!
(Source: aloofshahbanou)
When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burqa rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her, but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. It’s not about the burqa. It’s about the coercion. Coercing a woman out of a burqa is as bad as coercing her into one. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy-cutters on them was not going to solve their problems.
(via moniquill)
Socialist candidate Francois Hollande won the French elections
And yet, I am highly skeptical of anything meaningful or valuable coming out of this. Why you may ask? Because this is the same Socialist Party that wanted Dominique Strauss Kahn for a candidate and lamented his “sex scandals” (i.e. multiple accusations of rape, harassment and abusive behavior) that prevented him from becoming the Party’s presidential runner. Also, DSK and socialism? LOL. The guy that was head of the IMF would surely uphold values of social well being. So, you know, if these are the values the party has displayed so far, I am not exactly hopeful they will rule in a manner that is opposed to what they have done so far.
Al Akhbar | Sarkozy and Hollande on Middle East: La Même Chose
Hollande’s public statements indicate striking Middle Eastern policy similarities to the current government. Like Sarkozy, Hollande has declared that an Iranian nuclear missile would be unacceptable for Europe. Like Sarkozy, Hollande has called for a two-state solution in Palestine while trumpeting Israeli security as a key French concern.
The Socialist leader has been necessarily vague over French foreign policy. He currently lacks a dedicated adviser for overseas affairs. Instead of laying out detailed plans for France’s global relations, the Socialist challenger has made a point of criticizing Sarkozy in this regard.
Looking ahead to the next term in office, Hollande has struck a remarkably similar tone to the current government.
Sarkozy and French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe have been among the most hawkish European officials to address the Syrian crisis, closing the French Embassy in Damascus and calling multiple times for President Bashar Assad to leave office. Sarkozy has issued incessant calls for a full ceasefire in Syria, and has somewhat ominously compared the restive city of Homs to Benghazi, Libya’s erstwhile rebel stronghold.
Hollande, for his part, declared last month that he would support military intervention in Syria, “if done within a [United Nations] framework.” Juppe has offered words to the same effect in recent weeks.
I’m a party pooper.
not surprised. I have been sour on this dude since someone in his party suggested that they building camps for the Roma. same old bullshit
(via genderbitch)
Student Beaten Outside Jewish School in Paris
This happened at Ozar Hatorah school in Paris, “about 100 yards away from the school, out of sight of police who have been guarding the school since last week’s attack in Toulouse.”
I wish I had something profound to say but I’m too busy banging my head against the wall until I knock myself out.
Fuck this and fuck all the fake-ass sj blogs purposely ignoring Europe’s glaring anti-Semitism problem
(via karnythia)
This is Rachid Nekkaz, the French businessman who announced he will pay all fines for women who are charged with wearing the niqab — not just in France but “in whatever country in the world that bans women from doing so”.
The niqab is a filmy cloth attached to the headscarf that covers all but the eyes. Any woman found to be wearing the niqab in France in public can be fined upto €150 ($200) and ordered to attend ‘re-education classes’. Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland all have — or are planning — similar legislation.
The businessman has already paid fines for women in both France and Belgium where wearing the piece of cloth is outlawed. He said:
I’m in favour of a law to convict a husband who forces a women to wear the niqab and who forces her to stay at home. But I’m also for a law that lets these women move freely in the streets, because freedom of movement, just like any freedom, is the most fundamental thing in a democracy.
He is pictured above with Kenza Drider, the longshot “freedom candidate” for French presidency, after accompanying her to a police tribunal in Paris where she appeared for violating France’s niqab ban. Drider told The Associated Press in an interview:
When a woman wants to maintain her freedom, she must be bold. I have the ambition today to serve all women who are the object of stigmatization or social, economic or political discrimination. It is important that we show that we are here, we are French citizens and that we, as well, can bring solutions to French citizens.
Nekkaz put up a €2m ($2.5m) property to fund his campaign.
Photo credit: Getty
Ball so hard motherfuckers wanna fine me
Like let’s applaud him ( hard) but can we take a minute and appereciate the sheer force of her ?!?
Thank you, BA. Because I love this man for what he is doing. I do. And I hope someones take him as an example. BUT, you know, really, all the focus is on him and none on women who actually brave this world dressing as they believe, following their convictions. People just don’t even know the level of abuse that is hurled on women who wear the face veil. Just in this “thread” of reblogs, there are people saying that a woman CHOOSING to dress this way is sexist, for example. The whole point of covering is to allow us to interact in the world - not to shut us out. We merely take control of what level of interaction that is and how much of ourselves is out there. To dress like that and be out in the world is pretty brave and amazing, especially with everything stacked against us. This woman is amazing. But women don’t have to be getting into politics to be amazing in niqab.
(Source: eastlondoner, via poemsofthedead-deactivated20120)
I feel that I now know what Jewish women went through before the Nazi roundups in France. When they went out in the street they were identified, singled out, they were vilified. Now that’s happening to us.
Kenza Drider, a 32-year-old mother of three, was famously bold enough to appear on French television to oppose the law before it came into force. She refuses to take off her niqab – “My husband doesn’t dictate what I do, much less the government” – but she says she now lives in fear of attack. “I still go out in my car, on foot, to the shops, to collect my kids. I’m insulted about three to four times a day,” she says. Most say, “Go home”; some say, “We’ll kill you.” One said: “We’ll do to you what we did to the Jews.” In the worst attack, before the law came in, a man tried to run her down in his car.
Since France introduced its burqa ban in April there have been violent attacks on women wearing the niqab and, this week, the first fines could be handed down. But a legal challenge to this hard line may yet expose the French state as a laughing stock.(source)
The recipients of these fines say that they will take this all the way to European Court of Human Rights if they have to - according to my newspaper. Oh, I do SO hope that they’ll go ahead and do just that. Legally there’s very much doubt as to whether the French law will stand up to scrutiny in a Human Rights Court.
(via jemimaaslana)
(via jemimaaslana)
France continues its crackdown on Islam: Praying in the streets of Paris is now illegal.
Claude Guéant said that ban could later be extended to the rest of France, in particular to the Mediterranean cities of Nice and Marseilles, where “the problem persists”.
He promised the new legislation would be followed to the letter as it “hurts the sensitivities of many of our fellow citizens”.
“My vigilance will be unflinching for the law to be applied. Praying in the street is not dignified for religious practice and violates the principles of secularism, the minister told Le Figaro newspaper.
“All Muslim leaders are in agreement,” he insisted.
In December when Marine Le Pen, then leader-in-waiting of the far-Right National Front, sparked outrage by likening the practice to the Nazi occupation of Paris in the Second World War “without the tanks or soldiers”. She said it was a “political act of fundamentalists”.
More than half of right-wing sympathisers in France agreed with Marine Le Pen, at least one poll suggested.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s party denounced the comments, but the President called for a debate on Islam and secularism and went on to say that multiculturalism had failed in France.
Following the debate, Mr Guéant promised a countrywide ban “within months”, saying the “street is for driving in, not praying”.
In April, a ban on wearing the full Islamic veil came into force. Holland today became the third European country to ban the burka, after Belgium, despite the fact fewer than 100 Dutch women are thought to wear the face-covering Islamic dress.
Yesterday, Mr Guéant said the prayer problem was limited to two roads in the Goutte d’Or district of Paris’s eastern 19th arrondissement, where “more than a thousand” people blocked the street every Friday.
However, a stroll through several districts in Paris on a Friday suggests that Muslims spill into the streets outside many mosques.
Under an agreement signed this week, believers will be able to use the premises of a vast nearby fire station while awaiting the construction of a bigger mosque.
“We could go as far as using force if necessary (to impose the ban), but it’s a scenario I don’t believe will happen, as dialogue (with local religious leaders) has born fruit,” he said.
Sheikh Mohamed salah Hamza, in charge of one of the Parisian mosques which regularly overflows, said he would obey the new law, but complained: “We are not cattle” and that he was “not entirely satisfied” with the new location. He said he feared many believers would continue to prefer going to the smaller mosque.
Public funding of places of religious worship is banned under a 1905 law separating church and state. Mr Guéant said that there were 2,000 mosques in France with half being built in the past ten years.
France has Europe’s largest Muslim population, with an estimated five million in total.
…the only reason one would have for praying on the street is if the mosque runs out of space for a major prayer.
Yet again, France shows how dedicated it is to showing that the principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité applies to everyone to those filthy subhuman goat-fucking bacon-avoiding towelheads.
Of course multiculturalism has fucking failed in France. But blaming it just on the Muslims? Is basically pointing out splinters while there’s a huge motherfucking turd in one’s eye.
So, Muslims can’t pray on the streets, but they also can’t get permits to build bigger mosques. I see what you did there France.
(Source: letthetruthlaugh)
French women become first to stand trial for wearing niqabs
A court this week heard the first case against women for wearing the niqab – or Islamic face veil – since a ban came into force in April. One of the defendants was banned from entering the courthouse because she was still wearing the niqab.
The two women on trial were stopped in the street on 5 May near the town hall of Meaux, east of Paris. The mayor, Jean-François Copé, is an architect of the ban and head of Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling rightwing UMP party.
The women were wearing their niqabs during a demonstration against the law. They were supported by the Don’t Touch My Constitution group, which has led protests against the ban.
One of the women, Hind, who is 31 years old, was not allowed into court because she refused to remove her niqab at the request of a police officer. She offered instead to lift it for an identity check. “I can’t be present at my own trial. I’m being denied the right to express myself,” she said outside. The other woman was not present.
Under the controversial law backed by Nicolas Sarkozy, any Muslim woman wearing a face veil is now banned from all public places in France, including streets, trains, courts and school premises.
The state prosecutor requested that each woman be fined €150 (£132) and made to attend a citizenship class. The women’s lawyers argued that the law was politically motivated and “inapplicable”.
The court will give its judgment on 22 September.
(source)
(via hinduthug)
For the last six months, I’ve felt a rise in Muslims being stigmatised. People in the street have said to me: “Go home.” I say: “I am home. My family have lived in this region since 1600.” I’ve stopped shopping at big hypermarkets. I noticed more aggression in the street as soon as [Nicolas] Sarkozy announced a consultation on the burqa. Suddenly, security guards started watching me, old women accused me of deliberately provoking them by standing in a queue. People look at my children differently. When we’re out and my husband calls me by my very French first name and maiden name, people are shocked. They realise they’ve fallen for a cliche and I’m not what they think.
(via kadalkavithaigal)
'Burqa ban' in France: housewife vows to face jail rather than submit: Muslim woman says that she will not accept pressure from mosques or state over 'burqa ban' that begins on 11 April
It is not the potential effectiveness – or otherwise – of the ban that bothers Drider, however. It is the principle. “This whole law makes France look ridiculous,” she says. “I never thought I’d see the day when France, my France, the country I was born in and I love, the country of liberté,égalité, fraternité, would do something that so obviously violates people’s freedom.
“I’ll be getting on with my life and if they want to send me to prison for wearing the niqab then so be it. One thing’s for sure: I’m not taking it off.”
[….]
“I would never encourage others to do it just because I do. That is their choice. My daughters can do what they like. As I tell them, this is my choice, not theirs.”
She adds: “I never covered my head when I was young. I came from a family of practising Muslims, but we were not expected to even wear a headscarf.
“Then I began looking into Islam and what it meant to be a Muslim and decided to wear a headscarf. Afterwards in my research into the wives of the Prophet I saw they wore the full veil and I liked this idea and decided to wear it. Before, I had felt something was missing. Then I put it on and I felt serene and complete. It pleased me and it has become a part of me.”
Drider says it is only since Sarkozy’s government began discussing the veil ban that she has been subject to insults, harassment and death threats. “When President Sarkozy said: ‘The burqa is not welcome in France’, the president, my president, opened the door for racism, aggression and attacks on Islam. This is an attempt to stigmatise Islam and it has created enormous racism and Islamophobia that wasn’t there before.”
Drider says the issue is bigger than her, bigger than a “piece of material”, and laughs at the threat of “citizenship courses” and fines, which she says she will not pay. “This is about basic fundamental human rights and freedoms. I will go out in my full veil and I will fight. I’m prepared to go all the way to the European court of human rights and I will fight for my liberty.
“Fines? They don’t bother me. What is the state going to do, send a policeman outside my front door to give me a ticket every time I go out? For me this is women’s liberty, the liberty to wear what I wish and not be punished for it.
“If women want to walk around half-naked I don’t object to them doing so. If they want to wear tight jeans where you can see their underwear or walk around with their breasts hanging out, I don’t give a damn. But if they are allowed to do that, why should I not be allowed to cover up?”
THIS. WOMAN. IS. AMAZING.
61 arrested over banned Paris Muslim veil protest - Yahoo News
PARIS – Police on Saturday arrested 61 people — including 19 women — for attempting to hold an outlawed Paris protest against France’s pending ban on face-covering Islamic veils, a top police official said.
Fifty-nine people were detained while trying to demonstrate at Place de la Nation in eastern Paris, as were two others while traveling there from Britain and Belgium, said Nicolas Lerner, chief of staff for the Paris police chief.
The arrests come amid in a rising, if small, groundswell of controversy over Monday’s start of an official ban of garments that hide the face, which includes Muslim veils such as the slit-eyed niqab and the full face-covering burqa. Women who disobey the law risk a fine, special classes and a police record.
The demonstrators rallied in defiance of a ban of the protest ordered Friday by Paris police on the ground that a Muslim group’s call for the rally was “clearly an incitement to violence and racial hatred,” said Lerner.
“The demonstration was not banned because of the practice (among some Muslim women) of wearing veils, but because of the speech,” he said, adding that Jewish groups and others had planned counter-protests — raising the prospect of public disorder.
Most of the would-be protesters were released after being taken to police stations, though six remained in custody — mostly on suspicion of being in France illegally, Lerner said.
The two would-be protesters who had tried to arrive from Britain and Belgium were known to French authorities. Police were under existing orders to stop and expel them, if they tried to reach France, Lerner said.
Lerner identified the man who had traveled from Britain as Anjem Choudary, the head of Islam4UK until it was banned earlier this year by Britain’s government for glorifying al-Qaida. Several people associated with the group have been linked to terrorist acts.
The protest was called by a group known as Unicite Tawhib, which has been linked to Internet sites that call for Islam to dominate France and the world, Lerner said.
Secular France has been in the throes of a debate about the role of religion in its society. Many Muslims have felt stigmatized by a 2004 law that banned Islamic headscarves in classrooms and during the intense debate that preceded the adoption of the face-veil ban last year.
The measure forbids women to hide their faces in public places, even in the streets. Violators could face a fine of euro150 ($215) or a citizenship course — or both. Anyone found forcing a woman to cover her face risks a year in prison and a euro30,000 fine ($43,000), and possibly twice that if the veiled person is a minor.
Authorities estimate at most 2,000 women in France wear the outlawed veils. France’s Muslims number at least 5 million, the largest such population in western Europe.
Sarkozy steps up attack on French Muslims | Nabila Ramdani - Guardian
A week before the burqa ban, French Muslims find themselves accused of violating republican values
Claude Guéant, France’s interior minister, was in typically conciliatory mood when he described the growing number of Muslims in his country as a “problem”. Pointing to the fact that this community had grown from “very few” when the republic became a secular one in 1905, to 5-10 million today, Guéant highlighted the sight of many of them “praying in the street” as particularly undesirable. Guéant’s government has chosen a period of unprecedented tension and volatility in the Arab world to launch a debate about the negative influence of Islam on French society. As his own pilots attack Libya with a ferocity so far not displayed by other coalition members, President Nicolas Sarkozy will settle down on Tuesday to watch the epic discussion unfold at a Paris hotel.
The debate will nominally be about the changing nature of the French model secular society, but don’t be fooled by the grand euphemisms. If such a subject can be discussed by Sarkozy’s lieutenants without further references to assorted “Muslim-related problems”, then “collateral damage” has nothing to do with civilian body counts.
A whole catalogue of perceived horrors will be discussed, ranging from halal meat in schools to those prostrate worshippers blocking boulevards in major cities because there aren’t enough mosques to go round. All will be described as distinctly Muslim factors that “violate” republican values.
Less surprisingly still, the debate comes just a week before next Monday’s introduction of the full-blown burqa ban – legislation ensuring prison sentences and fines for crimes related to intimidating Islamic headwear. It will, in many ways, be a rerun of last year’s national identity debate, when town halls and internet chat rooms across the land teemed with racist invective.
The rhetoric employed is one means by which Sarkozy hopes to win over those who usually place their trust in the National Front, a party that has been revived by Marine Le Pen, daughter of France’s best-known postwar xenophobe, Jean-Marie Le Pen. With the latest opinion poll showing that 72% of French people do not believe Sarkozy can win next year’s presidential election, there’s no doubt that he needs all the support he can get.
Feelings are running so high that the leaders of France’s six major religions have joined François Bayrou, the centrist former presidential candidate, in branding the debate “poisonous”. They say it will stigmatise the country’s 6 million Muslims, spreading hatred and distrust. Even François Fillon, the prime minister, agrees that his government’s lurch to the right is alienating huge swaths of society. As Gilles Bernheim, the grand rabbi, told Le Monde: “It’s often difficult to be a Muslim in France. This difficulty is worse today in this unhealthy climate, aggravated by talk that divides rather than unites.”
Along with the other leaders, Bernheim suggested that a national debate about France’s secular model, which has been in operation since church and state were separated at the beginning of the 20th century, was particularly cynical at a time when the country should be concentrating on showing “dignity and respect” to people from every background.
Guéant clearly doesn’t think so, and that’s why Le Pen has already invited him to join her National Front. Extremist policies aimed at attracting disillusioned working class voters are seen as the key to winning the 2012 presidential elections, with assaults on “problematic” Muslims as desirable within mainland France as they apparently are in the country’s theatres of war.
(via kadalkavithaigal)
Photograph by Shaun Egan.
Fragrant fields of lavender are common in French provinces such as Provence, where lavender festivals help stimulate tourism.
