France veil row sparks Trappes unrest

[Deep13]

140. When MLK and his folks marched on Selma...

...the police used fire hoses to repel completely peaceful citizens exercising their 1st Amendment rights. This was for the equality and freedom of all Americans, especially those persons who historically had been treated like an outcaste society in their own country.

Here we have a country that actively promotes secularism and integration into the whole of French society. To that end, there are certain religious practices that they prohibit. I will point out that far more onerous regulations of dress and conduct exist in many majority Muslim countries, but no one is rioting about that. I concede that it was boorish for that cop to physically accost that woman, regardless of the law. Having said that, however, the reaction to this ham-handed attempt to enforce actual, French law is violence and outrage.

First, I suggest to French Muslims that if you want your (in many cases adopted) countrymen to treat you as equals, this is not the way to do it. Rioting only reinforces the popular perception that you are outsiders, a threat, and that you do not belong there. Second, as stated there are far more onerous insults to Muslim people being perpetrated by Islamic governments everyday and no one is rioting over that. If, like me, you are worried about the continuing enforced inequality between men and women in those countries, I urge you to make that disapproval known more clearly than you have so far. Having cast aside theocracy, you cannot expect the rest of the French people to accept a customary segregation of sexes in that country. You may see veiling as honorable. The other French people see it as a way of dehumanizing and marginalizing women. In the Middle East, women wear veils for all sorts of reasons (among them are legal or customary requirements). In France, the only reason to cover ones face in public is because that person intends to commit a robbery. The fact that you are rioting only reinforces that perception. Finally, the French authorities will crush you.

So, these rioters are using wrong methods to pursue a dubious argument. I'm not going to worry when the state sends out the fire trucks or the tear gas.