by Jessica Reed
The proposal (...) is clearly an attempt to once again make political capital by seeming to heroically challenge Islamic "backwardness" even when it entails a miniscule group of women with no lobby and no (international) collectivity to effectively, much less disruptively, challenge others' interpretations of facial veiling - openDemocracy contributor Markha Valenta.
Today in the Netherlands parliamentary elections are being held, with governing Christian Democrats running against the Labor party. If the country is well-known for its social liberalism, the conservative government currently in power has had in the past few years one of Europe's toughest attitude towards immigration. Last week the government announced that it planned on banning burqas in public, justifying the decision on 'security grounds', underlining the fact that 'people should always be recognizable'.
I'm with columnist/blogger Dan Savage on this one: I hate burqas, and find them to be highly dehumanizing. And if they are offensive and threatenning, it is not on security grounds, but on human rights grounds. I however doubt that forcing communities to abid to this new law will do good, especially since such a law, focused only on security and order issues and not on women's rights, sounds unpleasantly hypocritical. As Savage says, burqas should be able to die a natural death, instead of being violently put to sleep by assertive authorities whose actions accomplish very little: such laws on immigration tend to aggravate the debate by providing justifications to separatist attitudes, instead of feeding tolerance and common understanding on each side of the debate.
picture via janjochem's flickr page.
