FRANCE: In the name of liberty and tolerance, 496 deputies in the French National Assembly yesterday passed a law that will ban young Muslim women from wearing headscarves in public schools from next autumn. Only 36 parliamentarians voted against the law, which will be presented in the Senate on March 2nd and 3rd.
In explaining his party's motivation, Mr Jacques Barrot, the leader of the majority UMP group in the Assembly, said one of the things at stake was "the rejection of unacceptable tendencies that manipulate religion and lead to anti-Semitism, revisionism and racism".
In an interview with Europe 1 radio, Mr Luc Ferry, the minister for education, also linked the two subjects. Mr Ferry said the preamble of the law would make clear that pupils "have no right to contest the contents of a course, for example the programme on the Holocaust in history, or human reproduction in biology".
Some teachers have complained that Muslim students disrupted such classes. But the preamble makes no mention of school curriculums. Mr Ferry, who drafted the brief law, made so many errors in discussing it that Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin silenced him during 21½ hours of debate.
Mr Ferry also said the law would "keep classrooms from being divided up into militant religious communities" and noted that there had been a "spectacular rise in racism and anti-Semitism in the past three years".
For months, French officials have claimed that the new law on secularism "is not against the veil", pointing out that it bans all religious symbols, including large crosses and skullcaps. But the headscarf was the focus of all debates in the Assembly.
Mr Barrot said the UMP, the party of President Jacques Chirac, "wants to send a signal of encouragement to all educators and all parents in France who are concerned about forming minds in an atmosphere of liberty and tolerance".
The new law was "a law of clarification" which "turned the page" on ambiguous jurisprudence. It would, Mr Barrot asserted "set limits to proselytism".
One of the main arguments for the legislation was that teachers were put in the awkward position of safeguarding France's secular tradition without the force of law behind them. Yet the FSU, the largest federation of public school teachers, last week called the law banning the wearing of religious symbols "dangerous for secularism and for the Republic."
Though one-third of the communist group voted for the law, its leader, Mr Alain Bocquet, voted against it, saying: "Your text discriminates more than it integrates. It stigmatises a part of our population."
Mr Alain Madelin, one of 12 UMP deputies who voted against the law, predicted that "there will be fewer veils in schools, but more in the housing projects."
Yesterday morning, the UMP linked a debate on "perspectives for integration and equal opportunity" to the law on secularism. Mr Pierre Méhaignerie, one of 17 UMP deputies who abstained, said that disputes relating to the wearing of headscarves were the result of the Muslim community turning in on itself, because it felt excluded.
Mr Francois Fillon, the minister for social affairs, quoted the writer Emmanuel Todd, saying that the French are "ready to recognise immigrants as French when they accept, in addition to the French language, the few values which define our shared foundations".
Statistics cited by the communist deputy Mr Francois Asensi showed just how marginalised Muslims are in France. Unemployment among the children of North African immigrants ranges as high as 57 per cent.