Today France introduces a ban on the burqa. A similar ban is already in operation in Belgium, likely to be implemented in the Netherlands, and under discussion in Canada, Denmark and Spain.<\/p>\n
Bizarrely, in a French population of 64 million, the number of women who cover their face is a tiny figure estimated at between 350 to 2,000. Many Muslims, therefore, see such ban as Islamophobic which I believe it is.<\/p>\n
I am a libertarian. I believe that people should be free to behave as they wish unless their behaviour curtails the freedoms of others. The burqa is no threat and the banning of it threatens community relations.<\/p>\n
As the British politician Ed Balls, once put it:<\/p>\n
“I wouldn’t want to be part of a religion myself where we said to women and girls, ‘You have to wear a veil.’ But I also would not want to be in the kind of society where people were told how to dress when they walked down the streets.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today France introduces a ban on the burqa. A similar ban is already in operation in Belgium, likely to be implemented in the Netherlands, and under discussion in Canada, Denmark and Spain. Bizarrely, in a French population of 64 million, the number of women who cover their face is a tiny figure estimated at between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5390"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5397,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5390\/revisions\/5397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}