Category Archives: State Oppression

Islamophobia divides the left in France

Posted on by Eddie Truman

The new school term in France is the first under the new law which bans Muslim girls from wearing a Muslim headscarf to school. The vast majority of the young women involved (in general between fourteen and eighteen years old) have agreed under duress to remove the headscarf in school. The hundred or so who have refused have been separated from their fellow-pupils and kept in a separate room (often with separate break-times, no right to use the library and no attention from teachers, despite the legal obligation to provide teaching). Over the next three weeks they will be called to disciplinary committees and expelled from schools. They will join an unspecified number who have been too intimidated to turn up at school since the passage of the law.

John Mullen (LCR Montreuil) on Socialist Unity Network website

Why exclude a Muslim voice?

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Two weeks ago I heard Condoleezza Rice say, ‘We must expand dramatically our efforts to support and encourage the voices of moderation and tolerance and pluralism within the Muslim world.’ Yet, such a person, Swiss Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, slated to teach at Notre Dame this fall, was denied entry to the United States by the Department of Homeland Security.”

Diana Eck in the Boston Globe, 4 September

Liberals can also be fundamentalists

Posted on by Eddie Truman

“The secularist arguments behind the hijab ban in France amount to nothing more than a denial of freedoms of expression and choice. Those who look upon the hijab with disdain will now feel at liberty to abuse those who wear it, given that the state legitimises their feelings. This state oppression will alienate the Muslim population in France. It will result in Muslim women being stigmatised. Secular fundamentalism is as abhorrent as religious extremism.”

Yasmin Ataullah writing in the Guardian, 3 September 2004

Daniel Pipes and Tariq Ramadan

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Readers of my previous comment on Tariq Ramadan will no doubt have come away with the impression that I don’t much like Daniel Pipes. This is not an entirely accurate assessment of my opinion of him. I think Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even the lowest standards of scholarship, whose career has been built on politically driven attacks, and who has set up with his ‘Campus Watch’ as a terrorist front designed to intimidate academics and ensure that there is as little debate, discussion or rational thought on Israel, US foreign policy or Islam as possible. His research and scholarship are not intended to better inform action but to support specific agendas, usually revolving around hating some foreign force or people. Instead of fostering debate, his work is intended to intimidate. Pipes advocates religiously targetted surveillance, he supports making federal university funding conditional on ideology, and he has helped to terrorise professors who are named on his website. In short, I think Pipes is swine.”

Scott Martens demolishes Daniel Pipes.

Fistful of Euros, 31 August 2004

Scholar under siege defends his record: Tariq Ramadan refutes Daniel Pipes

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, without offering an explanation, has revoked a visa that was granted to me to teach at the University of Notre Dame. In Sunday’s Chicago Tribune on the Commentary page, Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, provided his ‘explanation’ for this action. In what follows I respond to his unfounded allegations.”

Tariq Ramadan in the Chicago Tribune, 31 August 2004

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