Terrorist attacks throughout Europe

I have nothing personal against you. The way you consistently call other posters cunts with almost no provocation is not a personal beef.

I should say “my problem with the way you call other posters etc etc”

next some clueless showboating prick want's to call me "fucked up" I won't it as a provocataion, if i haven't had a few drinks. But if I do - well it's all part of the game i'm afraid!

I'm very calm most of the time. But if I feel like I'm being wronged/misrepresented by some other prick I will stick up for myself.

You can stick up for yourself without calling people names and cursing them out all the time. It’s a thing.

I mean I absolutely do the same shit sometimes, I’m not innocent here. But blasting Simon as a “tedious cunt” right out the gate seemed a bit much, he was just taking issue with your phrasing.

the manner in which you have just derailed this thread over personal beefs (and yes I am at fault myself as a mere fucked up poster as well). If I was a mod I would resign in discgrace. You fight fire with gasoline. If someone wants to criticise another poster in a quite arsey + lame fashion and not except some lively pushback on a saturday night, then fuck this board and it's shitty moderators tbh.

this is about France right now, right? Euler, hope things are ok where you are

fwiw folks, if you feel you’re being detoured from the topic at hand when people are actually dying, by all means take it to another thread

as for the issue of allowing children who did not want their religious beliefs denied, allowing them to leave the room — this reminds me of a high school spanish language teacher who was very religious who showed us a movie that implied off-screen sex was going on, who thought it was a good film but decided not to continue it the next day because of a conflict of beliefs

any kids who didn’t want to watch for religious reasons likely already got the point. they’re very aware of what those cartoons entail, because it’s a part of being a muslim in france. I could see where it could be interpreted as “bully these students because they’re the bad muslims” but the articles make clear that was not the framing

I mean, ffs, there were kids whose parents opted out from the simplest sexual education when I was young and I have no idea who wasn’t in those class sessions, because who cares? This is just how parental and social controls in classes flush out, and it’s always awkward and there is no easy way to present material and start conversation without a minority opting out

I can’t remember anyone opting out from sex ed at my high school, including the more evangelical types.

thanks mh. yeah, things are ok where I am. The attack was in a suburb of the city, whereas we live in the city proper. The suburbs are a different story, because while the government officially requires integration, in practice minorities are allowed to form their own subcommunities. Islamic immigrants are numerically the most important of these. In the case of the present murderer, a Chechen of a Muslim family, his mother was rarely seen outside the home, and was veiled when seen. The veil is a key issue in French life today, because it seems to contradict the liberty of women. In the clash between religious liberty and women's liberty, I think the Republic stands and will continue to stand more with women than with religious people. For instance, Macron banned homeschooling last week, in order to prevent Islamic separatists from continuing to have their children avoid French public school "indoctrination", but also to make sure that women are not forced to stay home to attend to their children. It does not surprise me that most of the discussion I've been involved in over the last few days has been with mothers who want to make sure that nothing like this happens again.

There are other fault lines exposed. One of the 10 people who is currently being held by the state in connection with the murder is a man, Abdelhakim Sefrioui, who has run a pro-Palestinian organization for some time (his organization is named after one of the founders of Hamas who was murdered by the Israeli military). Sefrioui is active in anti-Islamophobia and in anti-Semitism. He produced a video this week decrying the teacher who was murdered, a video that was widely distributed. The investigators are trying to determine if the murder was inspired by the video.

Paywall warning, but this is a good summary (in French) of the timeline leading up to the murder:

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/10/18/attentat-de-conflans-comment-un-incident-mineur-est-devenu-hors-de-controle_6056460_3224.html

Yes, that's a terrific article.

Tbh, the way that Islam and its adherents are racialized in the West makes any attempt by the West to curb Islam a racial attack, IMHO, even if it isn't meant to be.

And I write that as someone who both finds religiosity more than a little unpalatable AND has worked at an Islamic burial ground, digging graves and helping with services.

Is the exercise of the right to liberty of expression against a religion, an attempt to curb that religion, in your view?

prevent Islamic separatists from continuing to have their children avoid French public school "indoctrination"

Teaching the equality of women and the political beliefs of the Enlightenment as social norms is a form of indoctrination. Having grown up in a society that accepted these norms, I find them to be beneficial doctrines.

It is a thorny problem to settle the question of how much of a foreign culture and its norms immigrants are able to retain, when those norms contradict the norms of the host society. There is an inherent friction there that cannot be remedied, but only managed to some degree. Ghettoizing immigrant cultures has been one traditional answer to this problem, but it brings a raft of new problems with it. Assimilation is the other obvious path, but not all immigrant communities can accept assimilation, because it entails the loss of their core identity and is as unthinkable as self-mutilation or suicide.

Good luck, France.

Euler, since adherents of Islam are racialized in the West, much of what amounts to freedom of expression against Islam amounts to vile racism, in my opinion, and should be sanctioned. The West and not the adherents of Islam made it about race, so either the West continues to racially persecute Muslims via denying religious expression, or the West owns up to the racial element of its denial of religious expression and makes it clear that it's about freedom from religion, not race. I'm not counting on the latter happening.

Right, so you are against the liberty of expression against Islam, but not necessarily other religions. I’m just trying to get your view right, so correct me if I’m mistaken.

There's been a lot of bullshit posted on this thread, over an attack that really sickened me (my sister is a teacher), and I just want to address this specific point and go:

The veil is a key issue in French life today, because it seems to contradict the liberty of women. In the clash between religious liberty and women's liberty, I think the Republic stands and will continue to stand more with women than with religious people. For instance, Macron banned homeschooling last week, in order to prevent Islamic separatists from continuing to have their children avoid French public school "indoctrination", but also to make sure that women are not forced to stay home to attend to their children. It does not surprise me that most of the discussion I've been involved in over the last few days has been with mothers who want to make sure that nothing like this happens again.

Oh well of course no women are religious, nor are they capable of thinking for themselves. Amazing how acceptable it seems to be to paint such a big group of people as these thoughtless drones.

When I lived in London, I would occasionally see veiled women, and it was something really new to me, and I won't lie, I understand why people find it a bit offputting. I started going to a pharmacy near where I lived, where occasionally the pharmacist was a veiled woman (this in itself was very unusual as iirc veiling is far more common among Arab women in London and I was in the Kurdish/Turkish bit of town where you almost never see it), and that made me think about it a lot. Pharmacists are extremely highly qualified, she was hardly some little woman sitting in the corner afraid to speak or leave the house. If she wanted to wear a veil, if doing so made it more easy for her to do her job, how was it my problem to say otherwise? (Frankly, I started buying all my embarrassing stuff from that pharmacy cos if she was laughing at me, I didn't know, lol). The attitude of why-do-women-wear-veils is very strange and has definite misogynistic overtones to me; the demand that one should be entitled to see a woman's face or body is at the root of a lot of attitudes to it. And the hijab ban is even worse, for God's sake, it's a hair covering. Nuns used to cover their hair! I thought that decision was one of the worst, because it's explicitly saying, you're not welcome if you do this, you're not one of us and you never could be.

Laicité originated with the state's need to strip power from the Catholic Church, and I can fully understand the strength of the French attachment to it, having been raised in a country where the health and education systems were run by the Church, where you couldn't get divorced til 1996. But I do very much still - still! - consider myself a Catholic despite all that, and so I think I have some insight into how fucked the Church/state relationship can be, and then when I think of things like the hijab ban, I think of what Riz Ahmed said a few years back about 9/11:

Ahmed was 18 years old on 9/11, and he saw it change everything for his community. “In the ’80s we were called black, at least politically black,” he says. “In the ’90s we were ‘Pakis.’ But after 9/11, suddenly we were Muslims.” It did not surprise him that hatred toward Asian immigrants spiked after the attacks, but what happened among his friends and family did surprise him. “What you start getting is this rising conservatism of the Muslim community in Britain. People’s parents used to watch Zee TV” — an Indian entertainment channel — “now they’re watching Islam Channel. I saw so many people who used to be D.J.s, rude boys. They chopped up their vinyl, grew beards. So you had the retreat of British Muslims from culture post-9/11. Because people all have to pick a side.”

How is something like this not pushing French Muslims to do the same, to pick a side? You say they're not allowed in public schools or buildings if they wear a headscarf, how is that not forcing people who would like to belong into a conflict they didn't choose to be in? And for that matter, a French Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in public, wearing the veil in public, is not being submissive, she's being defiant - of the state's ability to tell her what she can and can't wear. If a religious woman wants to cover her hair but the state forbids it, how is that not taking her liberty from her?

Laicité was designed for the Catholic Church, to be a wrench from centuries of influence and control. Its use to prohibit minority religious communities from freely practicing their religion in public is inappropriate in my view, and let's be honest - tons of people with no interest in any women's rights or freedoms are very happy to use it against French Muslims. If you look at just the headscarf ban in isolation, it's saying to girls and women and their families that they have to pick a side, and if they pick the wrong one then they're choosing society's margins. How can that be freedom? Freedom for who, exactly? If Muslim children aren't attending public schools because of the law, where are they going? Private Muslim schools or homeschooling, for example. What's that doing for integration?

Also, I have searched and searched for a piece where a teacher was talking to Muslim students about the history and context for laicité and its cultural importance, but I can't find it.

I just find it utterly confounding to look at France's approach over the past few decades and think that it's working. I can't pretend I have any answers but I do want people to read and consider that Riz Ahmed quote.

gyac, judith butler wrote about this dynamic particularly well imo:

In this context, I want to point to a few sites of political debate involving both sexual politics and anti‐Islamic practice that suggest that certain ideas of the progress of ‘freedom’ facilitate a political division between progressive sexual politics and the struggle against racism and the discrimination against religious minorities. One of the issues that follows from such a reconstellation is that a certain version and deployment of ‘freedom’ can be used as an instrument of bigotry and coercion. This happens most frightfully when women's sexual freedom or the freedom of expression and association for lesbian and gay people is invoked instrumentally to wage cultural assaults on Islam that reaffirm US sovereign violence. Must we rethink freedom and its implication in the narrative of progress, or must we resituate? My point is surely not to abandon freedom as a norm, but to ask about its uses, and to consider how it must be rethought if it is to resist its coercive instrumentalization in the present and have another meaning that might remain useful for a radical democratic politics.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2007.00176.x

Thank you, that’s really interesting, I’ll have to check out her writing on that. :)

There’s a lot to respond in your post, gyac, but I’ll stick with just a couple of things. One, the veil ban is against all religious symbols in public institutions like schools, not in the streets generally. If you come to my neighborhood you’ll see the streets full of headscarved women, and a few neighborhoods over, many men in kippah. They just have to take them off in public school and the mairie. Two, this isn’t why so many Muslim children in France have not been inscribed in public school: rather, it’s because their parents want their children taught Koranic Arabic and rather little else. Laïcité was not established just to have another religious take a protected place in French life.

What I said:

You say they're not allowed in public schools or buildings if they wear a headscarf,

And for that matter, a French Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in public, wearing the veil in public, is not being submissive, she's being defiant - of the state's ability to tell her what she can and can't wear.

Laïcité was not established just to have another religious take a protected place in French life.

Which other religious symbols (loose definition imo since veils etc aren't directly prescribed by Islam as I understand it) was the ban set up to deal with Euler and do you think you can argue with a straight face that this ban wasn't intended to be an act of enforced assimilation dressed up as a general prohibition?

France has a long history of imposing uniformity on its populace through coercion - see the drive towards French over the various minority dialects - but it's an approach with tons and tons of negative externalities, and I don't think it's ever fully accounted for its colonial past and treatment of those subjects to be able to have an honest conversation about France today.

It is an open question whether every proscription aimed at "enforced assimilation" is ethically impermissible.

We're not talking about every proscription tho, we're talking about this specific, divisive, racist one

Is Islam a race?

It's treated as one by most racists.

xp. ^ Strike my comment. I retract it after a bit of thought.

“Race” and “racialised” aren’t the same thing, and it’s probably not a coincidence that most Muslims in Europe aren’t white either.

What is conspiratorial and racist about what I said? Laïcité was aimed, as you said gyac, at ending the legal domination of French public life by the Catholic Church. No other religion should dominate public life either. Like Christianity, Islam is an proselytising religion, in the sense that it seeks to covert non adherents; gathering new adherents is viewed as a goal of these religions. Like Christianity, Islamic adherents want to use states to further their proselytising goals. Is it conspiratorial and racist to say that? Is it conspiratorial and racist to want to prevent that political aim for all religions, including Christianity and Islam, as I do?

Noodle Vague the ban was aimed at all religious symbols. My Jewish students don’t wear kippah in class. I’ve never seen a crucifix on a student.

xp I think you’ve crossed quite a few lines into racist conspiracy theories when you’re saying Islam is trying to take over France and when you insinuate that it’s comparable with the previously hegemony the Catholic Church held over France, yeah. Do you honestly not see how this sounds?

I didn’t say it was yet comparable with the dominance of the Catholic Church through the 19th century. I think no religion in France should be able to strive for such dominance again.

Is that a danger with less than 10% of the population being Muslim?

and what the hell does it have to do with headscarves

Eep sorry, you’re talking about Läciteé, my bad. I’m just not going to do this.

xxp guess it depends on whether or not you're a history teacher

Great book on the veil in the Bloomsbury 'Object Lessons' series by Rafia Zakaria.

while i agree with a lot of your post gyac, as a general point it's perfectly possible to be an intelligent woman that thinks for herself while at the same time living in a system that punishes women for certain choices or behaviours. so i don't think it's as clear-cut (not just in these circs) as being thoughtless drone vs capable woman.

Yeah, the idea that Islam could achieve "dominance" on the level of the catholic church in France just seems insane to me - it's a minority religion whose adherents are marginalized and racialized within French society, its penetration into government and business elites is minimal. Follow the money, as always with these things.

Noodle Vague the ban was aimed at all religious symbols. My Jewish students don’t wear kippah in class. I’ve never seen a crucifix on a student.

This seems dishonest, too - the ban was clearly created to target Islam, it wasn't christian or jewish symbols being used in class that triggered its creation (or else it would have existed ages ago). The fact that the law itself includes all religious symbols doesn't change that.

it seems to me that such a blanket ban quite deliberately ignores the differences between the cultural meaning and importance of different symbols and the extent to which they're cultural markers as well as religious ones

and the extent to which this doesn't create a cultureless space but a space containing only state acceptable cultural signifiers, including but not limited to brand logos for example

as well as the acceptable dress codes that women of all cultures are surrounded and pressured by

So we agree that laicite is western chauvinist bullshit, then?

Not necessarily, I fully acknowledged the need for it and why French people value it. Sadly we’ve had a couple of examples itt how people can use it as a wedge for bad faith or just utterly mad arguments.