Amnesty International has issued a statement on the case of Fatima Afif, sacked from her job as a nursery assistant for wearing a headscarf.
Category Archives: Left Wing
15-year-old girl expelled from French school for wearing a headband and long skirt which were considered ‘too religious’
A 15-year-old Muslim girl has been expelled from school in France for wearing a headband and long skirt combination which was considered “too religious”, her teachers confirmed today.
Sirine Ben Yahiaten is now set to launch a criminal complaint for discrimination and harassment following her exclusion from the Prunais college in Villiers-sur-Marne, a Paris suburb.
It comes as President Francois Hollande pledges to reinforce the controversial ban on full-face Islamic veils introduced in 2011.
Islamic headscarf debate rekindled in France
BBC News reports on the new assault on the rights of French Muslim women following the recent court ruling that the “Baby Loup” creche discriminated against nursery assistant Fatima Afif when they sacked her for refusing to remove her headscarf.
See also “Hijab ruling exposes Islamophobia in French politics—on right and left”, Socialist Worker, 2 April 2013
French ‘Socialist’ government targets hijab
Because of her choice to wear a headscarf, Samia Kaddour, a Muslim, has all but abandoned trying to land a government job in France. Soon, some private sector jobs could be off limits, too.
French President Francois Hollande says he wants a new law that could extend restrictions on the wearing of prominent religious symbols in state jobs into the private sector. His new tack comes after a top French court ruled in March that a day care operator that gets some state funding unfairly fired a woman in a headscarf, sparking a political backlash.
Hijab controversy dominates Le Bourget
French Muslim leaders opened on Friday, March 29, the Bourget’s 30th annual gathering in a climate of anxiety resulting from the recent controversy about hijab ruling.
“There is a real sense of unease among us,” Ahmed Jaballah, the president of the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), told Agence France Presse (AFP). “The latest statements on secularism show that there is a drift away,” he added.
Ahmed was referring to the recent controversy which followed a ruling by France’s top court that the dismissal of a Muslim woman from a private nursery school for refusing to remove her hijab amounted to “religious discrimination”.
In an unusual move, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls criticized the ruling against the nursery school as putting “secularism into question”.
France: Nursery worker wins court case over hijab sacking
A French creche assistant who was famously fired for refusing to remove her Islamic head-scarf had her dismissal annulled by France’s highest appeals court on Tuesday. The court judged the sacking was “religious discrimination”.
Fatima Afif, a nursery assistant sacked in 2008 by the ‘Baby Loup’ creche for refusing to remove her Muslim headscarf at work, won an appeal against her dismissal on Tuesday.
In delivering their verdict judges at Paris’s ‘Cour de cassation’ – France’s highest appeals court – said her firing “constituted discrimination based on religious convictions and must be declared invalid.”
Newham People’s Alliance protest, Saturday 23 March
France to ban website documenting police violence against Muslims
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7swHkq4XrXw
Alleging defamation, France’s interior minister Manuel Valls is trying to shut down a website which gives a voice to the victims of police harassment. The site has become especially popular with France’s Muslim population, who often claim that police target, harass and even kill them with impunity.
Manuel Valls’ double standard on religious headwear
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hERkZGLl_L4
Via Loonwatch, here is French interior minister Manuel Valls demonstrating the double standard he applies to religious headwear, in a video put together by the Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France.
‘Sharia Law has no place in Britain or anywhere else’
Left Foot Forward offers assistance to the Islamophobic right in promoting sharia hysteria. (Note that the author of the piece declares herself to be a co-thinker of Maryam Namazie, whose latest contribution to rational thought has been to wonder why World Hijab Day is not being followed by days celebrating other supposedly Islamic customs such as female genital mutilation and child marriages.)