Category Archives: Hijab

New Zealand: Woman fined for abuse of Muslim student wearing veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A foreign student had nightmares after a shopper in a Dunedin supermarket told her to either take off her burqa or leave New Zealand.

Farm worker Yuet Rappard appeared before justices of the peace in the Dunedin District Court yesterday and was found guilty of offensive behaviour and fined $500 for telling a student to remove her burqa on May 17.

Rappard, representing herself, did not dispute that she told a University of Otago student to take off her burqa at Gardens New World, but told the court she was expressing her freedom of speech. “I said, ‘Shame on you, you should take it off. When in Rome you should do as the Romans do’.”

Rappard, who moved to New Zealand from the Netherlands when she was a child, believed burqas should be banned and felt “intimidated” when she saw people wearing them.

The student, whose identity was suppressed, said being shouted at, first when she was at the checkout and then a few minutes later outside the supermarket, left her shaken. “I was crying and shocked. I just felt lonely and scared,” she told the court. She had since had nightmares and the incident had affected her studies.

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Newcastle nurse attacked while wearing Muslim headscarf

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Khadija MohamedA Muslim nurse has spoken out after a religiously-motivated attack in the grounds of the Freeman Hospital. The incident happened in May 2013, just two days after the murder of drummer Lee Rigby, but Khadija Mohamed, 22, has now chosen to speak out.

She said: “I felt a tug on the back of my scarf and noticed I was on the floor. A middle aged man was standing over me saying ‘You’re one of them, you’re one of them,’ really aggressively.”

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Diverse group protests against PQ’s values charter

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Montreal anti-Charter protestSeveral hundred protesters took to Montreal streets again Sunday to express their opposition to the PQ’s proposed Charter of Quebec Values, legislation that would ban provincial workers from wearing certain symbols of religious adherence at work.

The march was organized by a group that called itself “Together against the Xenophobic Charter” and attracted demonstrators from a wide swathe of the political and demographic spectrum, including anarchists, devout Muslims, Jews and people of many other stripes.

“I’m here against the charter because it’s depriving people of their right to human expression,” said demonstrator Norman Simon. “It doesn’t matter if you’re an anarchist, a separatist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Canadian, a Communist, I don’t care. But what I do care about is deprivation of rights. There’s the right to choose in this world and the Marois government isn’t honouring that, so we have to insist on co-existence,” said Simon.

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Politicians blamed for public hysteria over veil

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A woman who wears the niqab has accused UK politicians of whipping up public hysteria against the Islamic face veil.

Sahar al Faifi says comments such as those by Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, Liberal Democrat MP Jeremy Browne and Labour MP Jack Straw are irresponsible and make women who cover their face a target of anti-Muslim sentiment.

The 28-year-old said: “We are the victims in the street because of these politicians who made it so normal and so ok to be anti-Muslim.”

When asked about the kind of abuse she had received, Ms al Faifi said: “They will call me funny stuff like ninja or even Batman, or say go back to your country. Sometimes it’s physical and they’ll try to take it off.”

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Canadian actor apologises for derogatory comments about Muslim women

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Quebec veteran actress and film personality Denise Filiatrault apologized Thursday night on Facebook and Twitter for derogatory comments she made about Muslim women who wear hijabs in an interview Tuesday on radio station 98.5 with Paul Arcand.

“Some of the words I used to describe veiled women … were clearly inappropriate and went beyond my thinking,” wrote Filiatrault, 82. “I apologize to anyone who was offended. I’ve always been very colourful in my way of expressing myself but I admit that this debate requires a more measured choice of words.”

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CCIF takes on L’Express

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Express front coverThis was the front of last week’s edition of the French weekly L’Express. The Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France points out that it was just the latest in a series of shock covers about Islam, and not only in l’Express.

It shows a shop window with mannequins with headscarves, accompanied by the headline “Islam, the danger of communalism”, which as the CCIF points out suggests that the mere act of wearing the hijab represents a threat to social cohesion.

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French veil sacking case goes back to court

Posted on by Bob Pitt

A long-standing legal row over France’s laws banning the wearing of religious symbols in public places takes another turn Thursday as the Paris appeals court considers the case of a childcare worker sacked for wearing a headscarf.

In 2008, Fatima Afif was fired from her job at the private Baby-Loup nursery school in Paris suburb Chanteloup-les-Vignes after she refused to remove her veil while at work.

In April 2013, after years of legal wrangles and appeals, the Court of Cassation (France’s highest court) ruled that Afif was unfairly fired and was a victim of “religious discrimination”, arguing that because Baby-Loup was a private institution, France’s strict secularism rules did not apply. It also ordered the nursery school to pay Afif a fine of 2,500 euros.

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Québec inclusif replies to Janette Bertrand

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The Quebec writer and feminist Janette Bertrand has published (in four different newspapers) an open letter “To the women of Quebec”, co-signed by 19 other women (“the Janettes” as they have become known), which bizarrely claims that the proposed law banning the hijab is equivalent to the law granting women the right to vote. The letter reads:

All my life I have fought for equality between men and women and I have always thought that if we want to keep this equality we have to be vigilant. At this point the principle of gender equality seems to me to have been compromised in the name of freedom of religion. I would like to remind you that men always and still today use religion in order to dominate women, to put them in their place, that is to say below them.

Faced with the prospect of a step backwards I feel the need to speak out. So I agree that there should be a charter of Quebec values ​​– often rightly called the charter of secularism – and that the government should legislate. In this regard, we would never have had the right to vote, we would still be under the domination of men and the clergy, if the government of the time had not legislated. At that time, I recall, many men and women did not want this law, yet without the right to vote, where would we be today?

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