TELEGRAPH BLOGS – James Delingpole: Almost every idea that ever came out of France has been bad for America, from the structuralist philosophical gibberish which has poisoned US academe to the grotesquely over-regulated tax and spend socialism which is now ruining the US economy. But if there's one area where the French do get it SO right it's in their uncompromising approach to Islam. President Sarkozy once again showed the way yesterday when in a presidential address to France's two houses of parliament, he said the burqa is not welcome in his country and should be banned.
As he rightly went on to say the full-body garment which makes women in Afghanistan look like a cross between a prison cell and a walking tent is "not a sign of religion" but a "sign of subservience." He added: "We cannot have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social ife, deprived of identity."
Compare and contrast, the appalling cultural appeasement of President Obama's speech in Cairo on June 4 when he boasted that the United States prized freedom of religion and would not "tell people what to wear." And there was I thinking it was the French who were supposed to be the surrender monkeys, not the Americans.
Was there ever greater proof that, where the great clash of civilisations is concerned, President Obama is turning out to be the Islamists' useful idiot par excellence?
Does Barack Hussein Obama really not understand that supposed "freedom" he is granting US Muslim women to wear the veil is in fact the most surefire way of guaranteeing their continued subservience to their men folk and their failure to integrate with the broader society?
It's for precisely this reason - would that the rest of Europe had the courage! - that France bans religious head coverings in state schools. France understands, as so many in the pusillanimous, multi-culti West do not, that female Muslim girls of school age need protecting from the heavy pressure put on them by male relatives to wear the veil. Banning the veil in French schools is not the sign of an oppressive state taking away religious freedom. It is a rare example of a government setting a moral example and standing up for freedom: a girl's freedom to choose whether she wants to spend the rest of her life in a kind of religious apartheid or whether she wants to integrate more closely with the host culture. >>> James Delingpole | Tuesday, June 23, 2009
