Of Veils and Burqas

I thought I knew where I stood on the question of the wearing of full-body veils or burqas in France, that is to say, I thought I was against it. But having read fellow blogger Jerry Hawthorne's thought-provoking article on the subject, I am no longer quite so sure. This is what Jerry wrote:

http://maytreesmusings.blogspot.com/

On balance, I still think the burqa (or should that be the niqab?) should be banned in public, but how can I justify this point of view? Partly because, leaving aside issues such as freedom of worship, freedom of expression and so on, the fact is that with the burqa you haven't the faintest idea who you're talking to. That may seem a trivial point, but it seems to me that there's a difference between various other outwards signs of religious affinity and a veil which effectively cuts you off from all meaningful contact with the outside world, and vice versa. Think of all those bank robberies going unpunished ...

On top of that, there is the fact that France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe (an estimated 5 million), enough to turn the question into one of some political importance. There is also some evidence to suggest that numbers are on the increase and that the women concerned are, increasingly, young girls who may have been indoctrinated by out-and-out Islamists. Here is what Nicolas Sarkozy has to say on the matter:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8112821.stm

On the other hand, proud proclamations about the primacy of laicité and valeurs républicains are not much good unless they are reflected and given expression in a fair and non-racist society. And here, it has to be said, there is still a lot of hypocrisy and discrimination in France. The country has brought a lot of the present grief upon itself by dragging its feet, at a purely practical level which is almost impossible to combat, and by not giving Muslims a fair crack of the whip in terms of, among other things, access to employment and housing.

The dangerous thing about the French approach, its insistence of "all equal in the Republic", is that problems tend to get swept under the carpet until they explode violently, as they did in the autumn of 2005.