THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XII, Issue # 76, May 17, 2010
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
QUEBEC SAYS "NO" TO THE NIQAB
By Barbara Kay
COMBATING ISLAMIST LEGAL & CULTURAL INROADS IN CANADA & THE WEST: QUEBEC'S RESISTANCE TO
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS & MULTICULTURALISM -- QUEBEC'S DEFENSE OF ITS CULTURE AGAINST THE CULTURE WAR
BEING WAGED BY THE ISLAMISTS -- THE PROPOSED LEGISLATIVE BAN ON USE OF THE NIQAB IN PUBLIC PLACES
FULL STORY:
Whether they admit it or not, virtually all Westerners hate the niqab and burqa for the anti-democratic ideology and
misogynistic gender relations they signify. Many are increasingly willing to say so.
Why does political correctness fall away when it comes to the niqab? Because other Islamist inroads, like Shari'a banking,
happen offstage, so to speak. They are not "seen" by the public. But the niqab is open to the collective public gaze.
Individuals responding to their own discomfort observe that discomfort mirrored in other people's faces, which in turn
emboldens them to protest. Politicians know grassroots support when they see it, and several Western leaders have
seized the moment for legislating partial or full niqab bans.
Parallel to the parliamentary efforts now advancing in France and Belgium, Quebec Minister of Justice, Kathlene Weil,
recently presented in the Quebec National Assembly a proposed new provincial law, Bill 94, which, if enacted by the
Assembly, will ban the niqab — or any face cover — when extending and receiving public services in such institutions
as courts, hospitals, schools, and licensing bureaus.
It is no accident that Quebec is leading the way in North America on this file. Quebec, apart from multicultural Montreal
and its diffuse northern native populations, is the last bastion of ethnic homogeneity on the continent (with a
not-unrelated tendency amongst ethnic Québécois to politically incorrect candor), a province where obsession with
cultural preservation drives the political agenda.
Since the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, cultural preservation has become synonymous with the linguistic hegemony of
French. But Catholicism, however vestigial in terms of practice and influence, still rallies the loyalty of Québécois in the
face of perceived challenges to their cultural security.
Because the controlling hand of the Catholic Church fell particularly heavily on women in the past, Quebec is also the
most militantly feminist of Canadian provinces. Female politicians exert a powerful influence over all social and cultural
policies and disbursements here. The galling sight of veiled, depersonalized women in this women's rights stronghold
arouses far more animus than any multiculturalist ideal can counter.
The decisive move, approved by 95% of Quebecers (a rare moment of political accord uniting federalists and nationalists)
and 75% of all Canadians, followed a cultural tipping point, arrived at in November, 2009, when a niqab-clad Egyptian
woman, Naema Ahmed, was expelled from a government-run French class. This was done for pedagogical reasons, not
religious ones; hostile to suggested compromises in advancing phonological competencies for which the teacher's direct
observation of her mouth is crucial, she exhausted the administration's patience. Notable in her case, however, is the fact
that the school felt so hamstrung by political correctness and dithered so long, the government stepped in to order the
expulsion.
Ahmed's indifference to the sensibilities of her classmates and her general belligerence were helpful in reinforcing the
public's impression that she was making a political rather than a religious statement. That she later tried to re-enroll, still
veiled, in another French course — unsuccessfully — and promptly filed a complaint with a human rights commission
gives the whole caper the earmarks of an Islamist shot across the bow.
Ahmed's rebarbative [irritating] attitude happily precluded the kind of public sympathy elicited by another Montreal case
in which a veiled Indian Muslim woman, "Aisha," was removed from a French course. Aisha tried to cooperate and was
heartbroken, not angry, when expelled. Her story served to make a reasonable law seem draconian to
sentimentalism-driven commentators.
Quebec has been poised, for some time, to draw a line in the unstable sands of "reasonable accommodation." Justifying
the Ahmed expulsion, Quebec Immigration Minister Yolande James was forthright in making it plain that "if you want to
integrate into Quebec society, here are our values. We want to see your face."
The road to Bill 94 can be said to begin in Hérouxville, Quebec, a tiny rural hamlet of 1,300 souls, with nary a niqab in sight,
or likely to be. In January, 2007, following a number of controversial cases involving the reasonable accommodation of
religious sensibilities in Montreal, one of its outspoken councilors, André Drouin, published a "code of conduct" for
immigrants including bans on the stoning of women and female circumcision, while privileging in public institutions the
Christian symbols that are familiar to the 95% of Quebecers who identify themselves as Catholics. The retired engineer
was pilloried as a racist at the time, but, today, he feels vindicated by Bill 94. The manifesto served to reveal the fault lines
between elite theorists and the population, as well as to kindle passionate debate on the limits of reasonable
accommodation.
Embarrassed by the worldwide attention the manifesto received, with its attendant images of Quebec as a redneck
backwater, Premier Jean Charest instituted the costly ($7 million) yearlong Bouchard-Taylor Commission in February, 2007,
its mandate to investigate and make recommendations on the treatment of religious minorities in Quebec. The expressed
goal was to avoid French-style minority ghettoization and encourage integration.
The Commission, headed by earnestly paternalistic academic multiculturalists who were totally out of sync with the mood
of the population and visibly affronted during public hearings by outspoken expressions of resentment against religious
minorities — chiefly Hasidim and Muslims — arrived at their foreordained conclusion that Quebec culture was not
threatened by minorities and that their pet concept, "interculturalism," which maximizes tolerance for individual choices,
deserved further study. The public was not buying any of it.
Is Quebec racist? Polls indicate Quebecers admit to racist attitudes disproportionately to other Canadians, but there is no
hate crime evidence to suggest heritage Québécois are more racist in practice than other provinces. Is Quebec xenophobic?
Yes, somewhat, although it is a mild version that asserts itself in grumbling, not in organized vituperation, vandalism, or
violence.
Quebec is a distinct society, culturally isolated in North America and understandably defensive around realistic threats of
cultural dilution. Elevated xenophobia relative to other provinces has not, however, made inroads on Quebec's record as a
peaceful, democratic, and behaviorally tolerant society.
Xenophobia is reflexively condemned as a cultural sin amongst our intellectual bien-pensants. But what if another cultural
group really is out to dominate your own group? In that case, benign xenophobia — the kind that aligned with feminism to
produce Quebec's Bill 94 — is what one might call an atout, a trump card in the grim cultural war games to which all
democratic societies have been co-opted, where victories that do no harm to democracy, like the niqab ban, are few and
should be regarded as precious.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Canada: America's Northern Neighbor & Ally
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Lawfare -- The Use of Law as a Weapon in War & Politics:
Islamist Lawfare & the "Legal" Jihad Against America & the West
Barbara Kay is a weekly columnist in the comment pages of Canada's National Post newspaper. This article was
sponsored by Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
The foregoing article by Barbara Kay was originally published in the Pajamas Media, May 13, 2010, and
can be found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks to
define and promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam,
working for Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote
constitutional democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly
asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(Article URL: http://www.meforum.org/2655/quebec-says-non-to-the-niqab)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
May 17, 2010
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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