The veil

Efficacy and REASONABLENESS and fairness.

If some of you ladies have got it fixed into your heads that female Islamic dress traditions are subjugating that is no reason to condemn them with vituperative invective. Your condemnation is based on nothing but your own ideas and is therefore circular and meaningless and betrays racism.

Your own dress codes probably look demeaning to women in their eyes and these days they very often are.

The French government are perfectly entitled to pass the laws they want and enforce them.

In either case words like "detest" and "disgust" are uncalled for.

I had business dealings with two Islamic families recently and in both cases the wives wore the full covering but with eyes exposed, but not all the time. Also in both cases the wives handled the money and gave the orders. And didn't have jobs.

Western female dress gives an advantage to good looking women, body fascism it is known as, and that makes the majority of average lookers feel a loss of self-esteem which they seek to address by recourse to so-called "beauty treatments" which in the main make them look ridiculous.

So the invective displayed here has the effect of driving the average western woman into the hands of the "beauty" industry and sending billions of dollars to a bonfire of the vanities. All to no purpose.

I think you are spouting nonsense for your own reasons.

Indeed, and everyone is perfectly entitled to express their opinions about the laws and consider if they would support or oppose them in their own country.

I do agree with your point that Westerners (male and female) are projecting their cultural mores when they attack the garb on the basis of how it demeans or oppresses women, but so what?

Shouldn't generally accepted cultural values inform our laws?

Immigrants move to a foreign land for personal advantage. This is perfectly fine, but it's unreasonable for them to believe that with their persons they can also transport all of the laws and customs of their native lands. Some degree of assimilation is always required even if it’s only something as prosaic as driving on the side of the road opposite of where they drive in their native land.

The French law, it seems to me, is intended less to empower Muslim women as it is to assimilate them into French culture. Not such a bad idea considering that a not insignificant number of Muslim imams in Europe promote the idea that the natives of their new homes should be assimilated into their culture.

There is nothing wrong with immigrants wishing to preserve some sense of cultural identity, but apart from issues of personal freedom, there is a very real and legitimate incentive for the welcoming lands to ensure that if the newcomers plan on making their stay prolonged or permanent, that they, obviously, obey their laws but also adopt, in some measure, their cultural values.

I don't think any of us can say with any certainty that all or even most Muslim women secretly wish to see headscarves and veils outlawed, but I don't think this is a relevant consideration. Western women in Muslim nations wear headscarves in public, not because they have been converted to Islam, but because they're are guests of those nations and it is proper to respect the customs of one's host.

Muslim immigrants choose to live in Western nations and if they will not obey the laws of those nations or cannot abide their customs, they are free to leave and return to a homeland where the laws and customs are more to their liking.

Of course the situation becomes a bit more difficult when the welcoming nation grants citizenship to the immigrant. That the French law applies to native French citizens is not a persuasive argument of fairness when very few native French citizens would even think about wearing burkas. Perhaps these countries should have considered these issues before they granted citizenship, but they did not and should not now be prohibited from addressing them because they didn't exhibit incredible foresight in the past.

One can debate the magnitude of the threat of unassimilated Muslim immigrants, and whether measures like the French law are necessary, but I don't think it's realistic or reasonable to argue that creating such measures is improper.

Seeing Finn's pov too. It may also be mine. It's like a circle of 'yes, buts' for me.

On the other hand (yet again) I think immigrants have virtually always enriched the culture they move to, at least in some ways. I don't like the "if you don't like it here, leave" stuff, said by the 47th person in line to the 256th..

But back to the nijab business. Francis was pretty convinving.

Immigrants do usually enrich the cultures they come to, and, again, there is nothing wrong with their wanting to preserve some aspects of their cultural identity. They cannot, however, become well functioning contributors to their new societies if they do not, to some extent, assimilate. They certainly will not be successful over the long run if they demand that their new homeland's culture transforms itself to suit them.

I don't know why you don't like the "if you don't like it here, leave" stuff in the context of immigration. Immigrants move to new lands because they "like" certain aspects of the culture of their new home: educational opportunities, freedom of religion, economic bounty etc. If when they arrive they find there are aspects of their hosts culture which they don't like or can't abide, what are their legitimate choices? Learn to live with what they don't like or leave. It certainly isn't appropriate for them to insist that the new culture purges the elements they don't appreciate.

How often do the folks who decry insisting that immigrants assimilate also decry the antics of so-called Ugly Americans who visit foreign countries and insist that their ccultural whims be accomodated? How many would move to Saudi Arabia or Iran and demand that they be able to continue practices and behaviors that Saudis or Iranians find objectionable?

Any immigrant that might actually enrich his or her host's culture must respect that culture and the people who are welcoming them to their home.

taking a paragraph at a time - oops, trying to sequence..

"Immigrants do usually enrich the cultures they come to, and, again, there is nothing wrong with their wanting to preserve some aspects of their cultural identity. They cannot, however, become well functioning contributors to their new societies if they do not, to some extent, assimilate. They certainly will not be successful over the long run if they demand that their new homeland's culture transforms itself to suit them.

I don't know why you don't like the "if you don't like it here, leave" stuff in the context of immigration. Immigrants move to new lands because they "like" certain aspects of the culture of their new home: educational opportunities, freedom of religion, economic bounty etc. If when they arrive they find there are aspects of their hosts culture which they don't like or can't abide, what are their legitimate choices? Learn to live with what they don't like or leave. It certainly isn't appropriate for them to insist that the new culture purges the elements they don't appreciate.

How often do the folks who decry insisting that immigrants assimilate also decry the antics of so-called Ugly Americans who visit foreign countries and insist that their ccultural whims be accomodated? How many would move to Saudi Arabia or Iran and demand that they be able to continue practices and behaviors that Saudis or Iranians find objectionable?

Any immigrant that might actually enrich his or her host's culture must respect that culture and the people who are welcoming them to their home."



I figure there are burrs on both sides, and people learn to get along, as long as they are not decimating each other.

"Immigrants do usually enrich the cultures they come to, and, again, there is nothing wrong with their wanting to preserve some aspects of their cultural identity. They cannot, however, become well functioning contributors to their new societies if they do not, to some extent, assimilate. They certainly will not be successful over the long run if they demand that their new homeland's culture transforms itself to suit them.

I mostly agree with this and somewhat do not. Usually folks just want to be left alone.

In the southwest, the land was "not owned" by native americans, since that was not their view, as I understand it. New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, new homeland?

It's cultural dystrophy.

Gee, I've barely made a dent in Finn's last post.

Back later.