Tifanta World

The French senate voted to ban the burqa, 246-1. I don’t think it’s possible for a public, political body to be more hateful than when it singles out a group for such arbitrary punishment, on clearly xenophobic grounds. The message of the burqa ban is that people who practice a specific Islamic tradition are not welcome in France. It’s about keeping out anybody who may, egads!, change ”authentic French culture,” whatever that would mean.

Americans often look to Europe for good examples of what public life is should be. And certainly there are some good things, present in countries like France, which we’d do well to borrow for ourselves (true public health insurance, for example, which is largely considered uncontroversial over there, as I understand it). But when it comes to individual rights, it seems that France is no less willing to bring out a heavy hand than, say, China or Russia.

I think that America sometimes is seen by outsiders, or even skeptical natives, as the world’s primary bastion of nationalism. But it would seem to me that, all told, European democracies like France and the UK are actually far more pent up about national identity. They seem incapable of absorbing difference in the way America always has.

In America, we take in authentic difference and spit it back out as “American culture,” a culture that is in a process of constant invention. Only the most radical right-wing fringe truly harps on a stable, concrete “American” identity being lost, or whatever. But it seems that these issues of national identity are very much mainstream in nations like France. The influx of foreigners is treated universally as a threat, and there are far more significant barriers to social mobility if you’re not “French”-French (the ghettos of Paris being a prime example).

The very idea of doing something like banning the burqa (or the minaret, as they did in Switzerland) is an idea that I think the vast majority of Americans would find repulsive, pointless, and absurd. Even at the height of American Islamophobia, the best you can do is get about half of Americans to say that a planned Islamic community center should think about relocating further away from Ground Zero. Oh yeah, and some far, far right-wing, attention-seeking yahoos threatening to burn the Koran (but never doing so).

These are bad things, certainly. But at least in America there’s an actual controversy, as opposed to senate votes that overwhelmingly favor hatred, xenophobia, and the stripping away of simple individual rights.