You know what, Le Pen objected to the hijab ban, not out of any sympathy for Muslims or immigrants but he thought that taking hijab off makes Muslims blend into the native population all too well and therefore makes them more dangerous.
In short, Muslim immigrant communities confronted three anti-immigrant views (of the far right, the center right, and the center and far left). The beneficiary of this law was Chirac and his party, because they succeeded in triangulating: they stole an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant thunder from the far right and took over the mantle of defense of secularism and Enlightement from the center and far left.
> Religiously social conservative types have been trying (with
> some success) to undermine one of the basic principles of the bourgeois
> revolution since the late 18th Century: separation of religion from the State.
The separation of religion and state is an American creed, not a European creed. European governments -- including the French government -- make no bones about directly subsidizing and regulating religious private schools, while the US government wants to do so through vouchers and charter schools.
The separation of religion and state would lead the government not to make any laws about what students wear based on their religious beliefs.
Moreover, it must be pointed out that the only victims of the ban will be Muslim girls (as well as Sikh boys, some Jewish boys, etc.), not Muslim boys. Muslim boys, however fundamentalist, don't necessarily wear anything that would strike anyone as conspicuously religious symbols. Thus, a law passed in the name of defending Muslim girls' right actually victimizes them. Ironic.
>I was allied with
> a lot of Iranians who opposed the Shah from the left, but who made the mistake
> of underestimating the power of politically charged, religiously inspired
> social conservatism. They're either dead or in exile now.
Many of my Iranian friends are also liberals and leftists who left Iran either during or after the revolution of 1979. One can speculate what might have happened if Iranian leftists made a different choice than what they did, but since a majority of Iranians then -- and probably still now though much less so -- are religious, I doubt we can say for sure that things would have happened very differently if they allied with the Shah or stayed neutral or allied with religious revolutionaries till the overthrow of the Shah and then turned against the religious revolutionaries (this last one seems difficult to pull off).
On 5/26/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Yoshie:
>
> The Holocaust and American settler colonialism are not the same, as no
> two events in history are exactly the same, but there are enough
> similarities between them to make analytical comparisons worthwhile,
> even while clarifying differences between them.
>
> [WS:] And what would be the analytical purpose of such a comparison other
> than attaching the emotionally charged label "fascist" to certain historical
> events in the US?
>
> Wojtek
As Ravi might say, that would be a question for a write-only LBO-yak.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>