Last weekend’s kidnapping of two French journalists by Iraqis
protesting Jacques Chirac’s government’s head scarf ban caught many
Frenchmen napping. Nothing unusual about that, except the French
had hoped their opposition to the War in Iraq, and their continued
and blatant mooning of the Bush Administration, would give them a
sort of righteous immunity from acts of terror. This despite
repeated warnings of mayhem by Islamic militants, at home and
abroad, if the ban were enforced. The French haven’t been this
naively taken in since they allowed Hitler to militarize the
Rhineland in 1936.
Journalists Christian Chesnot of Radio France Internationale and
Georges Malbrunot of Le Figaro went missing August 20,
after leaving Baghdad for the holy city (more like black hole) of
Najaf, where U.S. forces were battling insurgents holed up (as
usual) in a mosque. Their captors, Muslim fanatics calling
themselves the Islamic Army in Iraq, are the same cutthroats
responsible for the murder of Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni last
week. The so-called Army’s spokesman told al-Jazeera television
that the French head scarf ban is “an attack on the Islamic
religion and individual freedoms,” with an emphasis on the former.
Few Iraqis would go to such extremes over mere “individual
freedoms.”
The kidnappers appear to have an unwitting ally in the Bush
Administration, long a proponent of Christian prayer in public
schools (though not Catholic crucifixes), which criticized the
French proposal to ban head scarves and other conspicuous religious
items from schools, telling the New York Times that such
displays constitute “a basic right that should be protected.” John
V. Hanford, the administration’s voice on issues of religious
freedom, recently told the Times, “A fundamental principle
of religious freedom that we work for in many countries of the
world, including on this very issue of head scarves, is that all
persons should be able to practice their religion and their beliefs
peacefully, without government interference, as long as they are
doing so without provocation and intimidation of others in
society.”
But intimidation, particularly of French Jews, is becoming
commonplace in the land of Liberté, Egalité,
Fraternité, so much so that some Jews are voluntarily
returning to the ghetto for their own protection, while others are
immigrating to Israel in numbers not seen since the aftermath of
the Holocaust. Meanwhile Chirac’s government has been desperately,
if ineffectively, attempting to clamp down on a decade of
anti-Semitic attacks chiefly carried out by teenage Muslim thugs.
Scarcely a week goes by in which there isn’t some report of an
anti-Semitic attack. French Interior Ministry figures show no fewer
510 reported anti-Jewish acts or threats in the first six months of
2004. More, the French Muslim attackers have been emboldened by
continual anti-Israeli rhetoric from France’s intellectual left and
the half-spirited half-measures of the French government. But this
latest kidnapping will doubtless cause many Frenchmen to rethink
their opposition to the Israelis.
Opinion polls suggest 70 percent of the French population — a
population increasingly concerned with the religious violence
within its borders — supports the ban. France is home to Europe’s
second largest Muslim population (5 million) as well as the
continent’s largest Jewish population (600,000). By imposing the
ban French officials hoped they might at least keep their public
schools with their volatile teenage populations relatively secure.
But again the French exposed their naiveté when Fouad
Alaoui, secretary general of Union of Islamic Organizations in
France, immediately urged schoolgirls to defy the French head scarf
ban. Since the scarf ban is seen as a direct attack on Islam, it
was only a matter of time and opportunity before militants struck
back.
SO IS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION correct in labeling the religious
symbols ban as a case of French intolerance toward Muslims, in
which case vengeance is at least understandable, or is it instead
another episode of religious fanatics trying to break down the
flimsy barrier between church and state?
Considering how the new law bans all religious symbols,
including the Sikh turban, the Jewish skull cap and the Catholic
crucifix, and applies solely to public schools, and was imposed in
hopes of reducing religious tensions, it is difficult to see how
the law can be construed as anti-Muslim. Predictably, the crucifix
and skullcap ban has not caused a wave of kidnappings by French
Catholics or Hassidim, who mainly view the law as reasonable given
the conflicts currently tearing apart much of the world.
Still many suspect the ban is simply another underhanded attempt
to make Muslims feel unwelcome in their adopted homeland. The irony
is that most Muslims flee to a secular society like France or
Belgium because only there can they hope to build a decent and
peaceable future for themselves and their families, and yet many
immediately set about undermining that future by refusing to
integrate into the secular society.
Muslim immigration, mostly from former colonies of Algeria,
Tunisia, Morocco and Senegal, is larger than any other influx
France has experienced. According to USA Today, the new
immigrants are young and have a higher birth rate than the French.
The Muslim population in France could grow from 8% — 5 million of
France’s 60 million people — to a majority in 25 years. It is not
beyond the realm of possibility that in a generation or two French
Catholic women could be required by law to don the hajib or face
finding themselves lashed to the whipping post.
SUCH NIGHTMARISH SCENARIOS have many Frenchmen seriously
reconsidering just how tolerant their government should be toward a
religion that has a popular militant strain seemingly at odds with
the values of their Republic. And while most Muslims publicly
portray themselves as peace-loving and nonpolitical, there is more
and more evidence that even the mildest of these secretly privately
support the militants’ terrorist campaigns against Israel and the
West, as documented in Jonathon Randal’s new book on Osama bin
Laden.
This latest kidnapping will likely cause the French to stiffen
their resolve, rather than cave in like Philippine government did
recently. But whether France backs down or not, the militants may
have achieved at least one of their goals. Before the kidnapping
Belgium and a majority of German states, including Berlin,
announced plans to pass similar bans on religious symbols. It will
be interesting to see whether these nations carry through with
their plans to reinforce the wall of separation between church and
state, or whether the wall is dangerously undermined.
