Madam, – In your Editorial (July 12th) you suggest that “integration can, and should, be a two-way process about both encouraging a commitment to and engagement by immigrants with their new home culture while, in return, embracing and respecting their cultural diversity”.
It is precisely the fact that the wearing of burqas and niqabs show a total lack of commitment and engagement with their new home culture that the French are planning to ban them. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The banning of the niqab and the burka in France and Belgium is a triumph for the most deplorable forces of coercive majoritarianism. It is the product of base political calculation and very little else.
This attempt to dictate modes of dress to followers of a particular religion bears an eerie resemblance to the Nazi use of the Star of David. The paradoxical effect of this “liberating” statute will be to limit the movements of burqa and niqab-wearers, excluding them from all public spaces and reinforcing their already-entrenched ghetto status.
Under these new laws, freedom will no longer mean the freedom to be different. Failure to dress the same as everyone else will be punishable with the full force of the criminal law.
Freedom, on these terms, is hardly worthy of the name. – Yours, etc,