A Muslim teacher has been dismissed from work in France for refusing to remove her Islamic Hijab or shake hands with male colleagues due to her religious beliefs. The school’s disciplinary committee which expelled her says it was defending secularism in public schools. The teacher had just started apprenticeship at a primary school in Toulouse.
Category Archives: Secular
Secularism treats faiths unequally, Canadian conference told
Secularism penalizes practitioners of some religions more than others, a conference on a bill to ban the niqab face veil from schools, hospitals and government offices was told yesterday.
“It works best with Protestantism. It’s a little more awkward with Catholicism. It’s quite a poor fit with Judaism and Islam,” Wendy Brown, Heller Professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, said at the meeting at Concordia University. It was organized by the Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires sur la diversite au Quebec, a non-profit research institute.
Secularism is based on the belief that the state should be neutral toward different religions. But in fact, it favours those whose cultural heritage is Christian, she said. “All religions don’t comport equally well with that model. Muslims who might consider themselves secular are not perceived as such simply because of the clothing they wear or the fact that they might pray in public. If a Christian were to do that, we might think of them as a zealot,” Brown added.
She was among academics from the U.S., Belgium, France and local universities at the conference on Bill 94, which will require citizens to uncover their faces when giving or receiving government services, whether in hospitals, schools, day-care centres, universities, social services or government offices.
Brown added that it is a mistake to equate secularism and women’s equality. In a presentation yesterday, she contrasted fashion photographs of four-inch heels with images of modestly clad Muslim women to cast doubt on the assumption that western women enjoy greater freedom from male influence. “Much of the debate about burqa and hijab casts us as free, equal, and emancipated and them as un-free, unequal, and living by the rule of religion, and that’s nonsense,” Brown said.
Joan Smith harps on about the burqa – again
ENGAGE replies to Joan Smith.
Bill Maher stands by anti-Muslim remarks
Bill Maher showed up on CNN to talk about comments he made on Real Time regarding the “alarming” number of “baby Mohammeds” in England. Maher told Wolf Blitzer that he felt no need to “apologize for being a proud Westerner”, or for being worried that “Muslim people in these [Western] societies are having babies” at a faster clip than non-Muslims.
He clarified: “And when I say Westerner, I mean someone who believes in the values that Western people believe in that a lot of the Muslim world does not. Like separation of church and state. Like equality of the sexes. Like respect for minorities, free elections, free speech, freedom to gather. These things are not just different from cultures that don’t have them…. It’s better…. I would like to keep those values here.”
See also “Bill Maher’s anti-Muslim fixation”, TPM, 1 November 2010
US TV host fears Western world will taken over by Islam
http://youtu.be/IBAG58aHwOo
Those who accuse the once libertarian Bill Maher of becoming too much of a liberal apologist might want to clean their ears. Maher made a Juan Williams-esque confession on his program when he apprehensively noted that Mohammed has just become the most popular baby name in Britain.
“Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that?” Maher asked his panel. “Because I am. And it’s not because of the race, it’s because of the religion. I don’t have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam in 300 years?”
“If you’re with NPR,” the conservative Margaret Hoover chimed, “You’d be fired.” Hoover further stoked Maher by claiming that the U.K is saddled with a “far bigger problem” than baby names: Sharia law, which she said is creeping into England.
“Then I’m right,” Maher said, taking her for her word. “I should be alarmed. And I don’t apologize for it.”
National Secular Society backs Wilders
“In Amsterdam, the Dutch MP Geert Wilders is on trial for daring to criticise the Koran and comparing it with Mein Kampf. To some people this may be an extreme opinion, but why is he on trial for expressing it? It harmed no-one (being offended is not the same as being harmed) and is shared by many.”
National Secular Society president Terry Sanderson on the NSS website, 8 October 2010
Even The Spittoon recently posed the question: “Is the NSS pushing anti-Muslim bigotry as ‘secularism’?”
NSS warns against Muslims ‘turning schools into madrassas’
Action is needed to prevent people with “extremist religious or political” views taking over academies, a board member of the country’s largest sponsor has warned. Geoffrey Davies, on the board of the United Learning Trust (ULT), which sponsors 17 academies, called for new rules that would stop an academy trust passing to groups “alien” to a school’s original ethos.
The news comes as schools minister Lord Hill said in a letter to the National Secular Society (NSS) that the Government will not legislate against proselytising in schools as more academies and free schools are established.
Lord Hill said in a letter to the NSS that he “did not think it appropriate” to legislate, as parents will choose a school based on its ethos. Lord Hill wrote: “That ethos may be Christian, Muslim or Jewish or it may have no faith ethos at all. Parents should be free to choose schools on the basis of their ethos.”
Terry Sanderson, president of the NSS, said: “We are alarmed at the prospect of extremist religious groups taking control of these schools and using them to brainwash children. What is to stop a Muslim group taking over a school and turning it into a madrassa at public expense if that is what parents want?”
Be honest: arguments about halal slaughter aren’t really about food, are they?
Henry Dimbleby, who runs the Leon restaurant chain, has a good piece at the Telegraph countering the hysteria about halal meat.
The majority of the meat we are talking about here is intensively farmed chicken. Both halal and standard birds are raised in exactly the same way and most of the harm inflicted on them will be done so over the course of their miserable short lives. The extent to which halal slaughter adds to this grief is debatable. As with traditional slaughter, it can be done well and it can be done badly.
The standard chickens are either gassed in pens or hung upside down by their feet and dipped in a bath of electrocuted water – a plastic bar being placed on their chest to keep them calm. Halal chickens have their throats cut when they are alive – albeit in many cases they are stunned in a water bath first.
So are the complaints from the National Secular Society to do with animal welfare or religion? The answer is probably in its name.
French Senate backs veil ban
France’s Senate has overwhelmingly approved a bill that would ban wearing the Islamic full veil in public. The proposed measure was already backed by the lower house of parliament, the National Assembly, in July. The ban will come into force in six months’ time if it is not overturned by constitutional judges.
See also Guardian, 14 September 2010
Pamela Geller joins NSS and Richard Dawkins in promoting Pat Condell’s Islamophobic rants
Pamela Geller is evidently to be counted among the admirers of British “comedian” Pat Condell. She has posted his latest rant against the “Ground Zero mosque” on her website Atlas Shrugs to help promote the Stop Islamization of America demonstration in New York next week at which Geert Wilders will be a featured speaker. So has Jihad Watch, the website of her fellow right-wing Islam-basher and co-leader of SIOA Robert Spencer (“Condell’s commentary is passionate, articulate, wide-ranging, and hard-hitting”). And today David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine follows suit (“Don’t miss Pat Condell’s new hard-hitting video on the stunt Islam is trying to pull off in America”).