The family of a 14-year-old girl is demanding an apology from a referee who refused to allow her to play indoor soccer while wearing a religious head scarf. But the head of referee development for Alberta’s governing soccer body says wearing hijabs can pose a threat to player safety.
Safaa Menhem arrived late in the first half of her game with the Chinook Phantom under-16 girls team at the Calgary Soccer Centre Saturday. After her first shift in the game, the referee told the coach she couldn’t play if she wore her hijab.
At half time, the rest of the team – with the support of parents in the stands – threatened to forfeit the game in protest, but Menhem urged them to keep playing. “She walked off the field with her head down in tears thinking she’d done something wrong, which she hadn’t,” said her eldest brother Hekmet Menhem, 27, who may face disciplinary action for confronting the referee on the field. “The look I saw on her face when she came off killed me. That’s when I snapped.”
“I recently attended a debate entitled ‘Is Islam good for London? … It wasn’t just me who found the title, tone and content of the debate disturbing. The liberal rabbi, Pete Tobias, described it as a ‘damaging and hurtful exercise’, sinisterly reminiscent of the campaign a century ago to alert the population to ‘the Problem of the Alien’ – namely the Eastern Jews fleeing persecution who had found refuge in the capital.
“‘A kind of aggression’. ‘successor to the Berlin Wall’. ‘lever in the long power struggle between democratic values and fundamentalism’. ‘An insult to education’. ‘A terrorist operation’. These descriptions – by former French President Jacques Chirac; economist Jacques Attali; and philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann – do not refer to the next great menace to human civilization but rather to the Muslim woman’s headscarf, which covers the hair and neck, or, as it is known in France, the foulard islamique.”