France Bans Female Head Bagging

Somehow this seems more to me like an act of protest than a virile defense of French sovereignty. But as I said, we’ll see. Maybe it signals the beginning of something sensible. Maybe not. It depends on what comes next.

Ms. Habchi, speaking from her insider knowledge of the Islamic scene, raises an interesting question:

How can we allow the burqa here and at the same time fight the Taliban and all the fundamentalist groups across the world?

How indeed. One cannot fight a hostile ideology overseas effectively, while surrendering to it at home. It is a contradiction that we face here in the US as well. We are on the hook to do a better job with Islam than we did with Communism. The Soviet Union fell, or at least was forced to reconfigure itself. And for a long time we maintained military superiority against the communist forces (we’ll see how long that lasts). But here at home Marxism is the standard ideology inculcated by our schools, and to a large extent, implemented by our legislature. Not what I call a perfect victory. What would be the point of defeating the jihaddists in Afghanistan and Iraq, only to transform into a semi-sharia state anyway?

Is that the modern form of resistance? “Tell you what, I’ll meet you half way.”

Just a side note, NPNS, Ni Putes Ni Soumises (discussed here by Phyllis Chesler) is an interesting organization of Muslim women, whose name presents an interesting problem in translation. It is most frequently rendered into English as “Neither whores nor doormats.” Which gets the point across pretty well. But the word soumise (lit. noun fem. subjected, submissive) has a couple of other dimensions  that English doesn’t touch.

Soumise, in the sense of submissive, also carries in colloquial French the meaning of sexual submissive, especially in the context of prostitution. Which touches darkly on the very apparent role of woman as property, disposable property, in Islamic cultures. And don’t imagine for a moment that the ladies in that group are not perfectly aware of that.

Perhaps even more interesting than that is the implicit statement, “I will not submit.” And what do we know about the meaning of the word Islam? That’s right. Submission. It piques my curiousity and interest to see an organization of Muslims who declare “I will not submit.”

It is a far stronger statement than anything coming from official France, or official America for that matter. As is often the case, the dissident Muslim insider knows the landscape and the contest of values far more clearly than any go-along-to-get-along outsider.

It will be interesting to see how that develops as well.

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