For those of you who understand French, you'll find this video of Tariq Ramadan speaking to the parliamentary commission on the burqa quite interesting. He told the 32 members (from both the right and left) of the commission that France was skirting the main problems it has with Muslims by focusing on extreme cases like wearing the burqa. This commission, Ramadan said, would be more productive if it tackled real problems of structural racism and social inequalities in France's suburbs. The mandate of this commission is to inquire whether there is a need for a law to ban the burqa, and you'd think you need facts and statistics for a fact-finding mission to complete its task. Not in France. President Sarkozy said that the burqa was a growing problem in France and that it was a sign of subjugation of women. Maybe it is in some instances and maybe it's growing, but can you prove it with statistics? Is there credible evidence that the burqa is spreading to warrant setting up a full commission with 32 deputies to hear dozens of testimonies over the course of a few months? This reminds me of the Stasi Commission in 2003 which produced the ban on religious symbols (meaning the veil). That commission met for 6 months and after 140 hearings decided the veil was a threat to France's sacred law of laicite without proving once that veiling was on the rise or just how many young Muslim women wear the veil in France. The answer is simple: going down the route of statistics would undercut the argument in favor of a ban because a small minority of young Muslim schoolgirls wear the veil and an even tinier minority of women in France wear the burqa.



This kind of populism has a clear purpose, of course. To divert people's attention from real issues and get them emotionally invested in debates governed by fear and paranoia, like the ongoing national debate on what it means to be French today. We all know the debate is a direct response to the place of immigrants in French society, particularly Muslims whose Frenchness is increasingly questioned through sensationalist episodes of veiling and burqa wearing. The Burqa is becoming what the minarets are for the Swiss who voted to ban them: an obsessive fear of cultural incompleteness, but this obsession is worse in the case of France because prominent politicians there as important as the president of the country openly endorse it. We'll wait for the commission's report on the burqa due in January 2010, but one thing is sure, its arguments will be animated more by fear than reason.