Press TV interviews Naima Bouteldja, who interviewed niqab-wearing French Muslim women for the recently published study Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Women Wear the Full-Face Veil in France.
Category Archives: State Oppression
Pope ‘plotter’ still traumatised after arrest
A street cleaner arrested on suspicion of plotting against the Pope last year has told the BBC he is still traumatised by his ordeal.
Last September, when the Pope was visiting London, Sami, who has asked the BBC not to use his full name for fear of reprisals, was one of six men arrested under anti-terrorism laws. The 26-year-old from Algeria was the youngest.
The men, all street cleaners for Westminster Council, were detained after a tip-off to police. All were released without charge less than two days later – police said they posed “no credible threat” to the Pope.
Sami is now considering legal action against the police for false imprisonment. He accepts the police had a duty to protect the public from any potential threat but says the affair has had a profound affect on him.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme through an interpreter, Sami said that when police first detained him he had no lawyer or interpreter and did not really understand what was happening.
“The first interview – yes, it was me alone,” he said. “I was there and was being subjected to all sorts of questioning. At one stage the person interrogating me started saying ‘If anything happens to the Pope, anything at all, then you will be held responsible.’ Until now I am still traumatised by what I was subjected to.
“I felt my entire world crumbling around me. And I felt this is the end of my life. I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that I started thinking about Guantanamo Bay – you know, being transported over there.”
Earlier this year, BBC Radio 4’s Face the Facts programme reported on concerns that many negative newspaper stories about Muslims turn out to be untrue. Sami says he is shocked at the way one newspaper in particular distorted the facts.
The day after the men were arrested, under the headline “Muslim plot to kill the pope“, the front page of the Daily Express accused them of being “Islamic terrorists… with links to al-Qaeda”, plotting a “double blow to the infidel” by assassinating the head of the Roman Catholic Church and slaughtering hundreds of pilgrims and well wishers.
The Press Complaints Commission received numerous complaints about the paper’s coverage. But it is powerless to act because the Express group has withdrawn from the PCC. So Sami would have to go directly to the newspaper itself – and he is not confident of success.
“Of course I would like to make a complaint and the end goal for me would be like they alleged this against us – and me personally – on the front page: I would like them to reprint another front page saying ‘We got it wrong and we apologise’. I don’t think they will be fair.”
A report is due out in the next few weeks over whether the Metropolitan Police were justified in arresting the men. It is being carried out by the new independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson QC.
The Daily Express and Scotland Yard declined to comment.
Tennessee Muslims gather at state Capitol for hearing on anti-sharia bill
Hundreds of Muslims thronged the state Capitol Tuesday morning for a hearing on a bill that once targeted adherents to Islamic law.
Muslims from across the state packed a committee room and corridors to hear testimony a bill that supporters say would help Tennessee law enforcement stop terrorist plots but opponents believe targets Muslims by targeting their beliefs. The bill has since been amended to remove any references to Islam and Shariah, the basic set of Muslim religious laws that covers everything from the rules of warfare to inheritance.
But opponents said in brief testimony that the bill is inherently flawed because it was written by an Arizona organization that has been described as a hate group. They urged the House Judiciary Committee and the measure’s sponsors, House Speaker Pro Tempore Judd Matheny, R-Tullahoma, and state Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro, to withdraw the bill.
“If a bill was written by the KKK, would you consider it even if it was amended?” said Sabina Mohyuddin, a youth coordinator at a Nashville mosque, who testified. “The intent of the bill remains the same.”
Unveiling the truth about the niqab
The Open Society Foundation’s At Home in Europe Project has published a new study, Unveiling the Truth: Why 32 Women Wear the Full-Face Veil in France. Naima Bouteldja, who conducted the interviews with French niqab-wearing Muslim women, has a piece at Comment is Free.
So whose liberty, equality, fraternity is really at stake?
A decent article on the French veil ban, in the Daily Telegraph of all places (and no, it’s not by Peter Oborne). There’s a good editorial in the Financial Times too, which states:
“The ban’s defenders, who range across the spectrum of French politics, pretend the veil is a threat to France’s republican values. But this republican bigotry is in reality a cheap populist ploy, in large part dictated by the electoral calendar at a time when the xenophobic National Front is again scoring well in the polls.”
(The cartoon is from the Telegraph as well, via Inayat’s Corner.)
Allison Pearson supports French niqab ban – now there’s a surprise
“The burka and the niqab should be banned in Britain. They are a barrier to integration, a statement of hostility to the host country. Poor women who have been brainwashed into hiding their faces are victims, not martyrs. The burka is a not a sign of religion, but of subservience.”
Allison Pearson in the Daily Telegraph, 14 April 2011
Still, at least we’re spared references to Muslim women “wearing nose-bags over their faces” or to Pearson’s sense of “burkha rage” against veiled women who are “taking the mickey out of our country and its tolerant ways”, or her more general complaint that Britain has done “too much” to “accommodate its immigrant groups”.
Update: The EDL are impressed by the article: “Allison Pearson seems to have started to understand the nature of the 7th century Islam that has taken hold in our towns and cities”.
Further update: See also ENGAGE, 15 April 2011
Islamophobia on the rise
Two letters in today’s Guardian on the French veil ban. One is from Liz Fekete of the Institute of Race Relations who writes:
The observation of French niqab wearer “Anne” (Facing the ban, 12 April) that the debate on the ban on the full-face veil has led to stigmatisation and hate is also true here.
On Monday I attended an anti-racist rally in London outside the French embassy, where peaceful demonstrators protested against the ban on the grounds that Muslim women should not be criminalised for what they choose to wear. We were attacked on two sides by members of the English Defence League.
Over the last few years we have seen how Islamophobia breeds a culture of suspicion. As that morphs into a culture of hate, one must fear for the future.
French burqa and niqab ban: ‘Muslim women are being scapegoated’
The Guardian interviews “Anne”, a French Muslim woman who converted to Islam at 18 and has worn the niqab for five years.
France: first Muslim woman fined for wearing veil
Police have fined a woman in a shopping centre car park outside Paris for wearing a niqab, or full-face Islamic veil, in the first enforcement of France’s burqa ban.
The 28-year-old woman was stopped by police in the car park in Les Mureaux, north-west of Paris, at 5.30pm on Monday, the day the niqab ban came into force. Police said she was stopped “without incident” for a few minutes and given a €150 (£132) fine. She has one month to pay.
Under the law backed by Nicolas Sarkozy, it is illegal for women in full-face veils to go anywhere in public, including walk down the street, enter shops, use public transport, attend doctors’ surgeries or town halls. They face a fine or a citizenship class.
On Tuesday morning another woman in a full-face veil was stopped by police after she tried to enter a town hall in Saint-Denis, north of Paris. Followed by a French TV crew, she had brought some paperwork to the town hall for a bureaucratic issue just before 11am. She was refused by officials on the grounds that she was wearing a niqab. On the way out police asked her to remove her face-veil to check her identity.
When she refused she was taken to a local police station, where she lifted her veil but insisted on putting it back on again. She was not fined but Le Parisien reported that she had been given a written reminder and a leaflet explaining that full-face veils were no longer allowed in public and she risked a fine.
After police warned that the law banning niqabs was “infinitely difficult” to enforce and would not be a priority, the interior minister Claude Guéant insisted the law would be fully applied in the name of “secularism” and gender equality.
‘Call for UK burka ban grows’ claims Express
Police made the first arrests yesterday of women flouting France’s new burka ban amid fresh calls to outlaw them in Britain too. Anyone who appears veiled in public in France can now be fined £130 under a law that came into effect yesterday. The move sparked calls for a similar approach in this country, with surveys showing there was widespread public support for a law that would make it illegal for anyone to cover their face in public.
Tory MP Philip Hollobone has tabled a private member’s bill that would ban veils in public, while UKIP has won public support for its policy on outlawing the burka. Mr Hollobone announced his bill last year, saying: “This is Britain. We are not a Muslim country. Covering your face in public is strange, and to many people both intimidating and offensive. We are never going to get along with having a fully integrated society if a substantial minority insist on concealing their identity from everyone else.”
Last night, UKIP’s Gerard Batten said: “UKIP is opposed to the burka because it is a physical manifestation of extremist Islam which is intolerant and incompatible with Western liberal democracy. UKIP policy is to ban it from all public institutions, buildings and public transport; private organisations and buildings must have a blanket ban on all face-coverings or no policy at all.”
Quite how two notorious Islamophobes reiterating their views on the veil demonstrates that the call for a ban is “growing” is unclear.