Two recent riots against police forces in France have once again brought to the forefront the thorny issue of the integration of marginalized minorities. In response to this violence and with an eye on the 2012 elections, President Nicolas Sarkozy has seized on the law-and-order issue that helped him win office three years ago. This time he has gone even further, announcing plans to strip their French nationality from naturalized immigrants convicted of attacking police or other authorities in France. His new stance combines tougher repressive measures with rhetoric lumping together crime and immigration, even legal. (In that sense, his view is more radical even than that of the Arizona governor who wants the police to detain illegal immigrants involved in an incident with the authorities.)
The French law banning Muslim full-face veils from anywhere outside private homes and mosques was passed by the lower house of parliament Tuesday, with only a single dissenting vote. The ban is a move supported by a large majority of people in other west European countries, polls show. But the measure is seen as controversial and intolerant by Americans.
Once again the US Congress is mystifying the world and seriously muddying US-Turkey relations by trying to pass a resolution declaring that it was “genocide” when over a million Armenians were massacred in 1915 by Ottoman Turks. The proposed U.S. measure was passed out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in early March.
Substantial Shift in Attitude Reflects Cumulative Reforms, Pollsters Say -- Not Just Obama Effect
African-Americans have become remarkably more upbeat about their personal prospects, according to a major national poll conducted at the end of President Barack Obama’s first year in office.
Fifty-three percent of African-Americans say life for their community is improving while only 10 percent predicted things getting worse. As recently as 2007, polls of the African-American community showed that 44 percent said things would get better and 21 percent expressed pessimism – nearly double the new figure.
Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State and Public Space
by John R. Bowen
Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford (2007) 290 pages
Reviewed by Lauren Zoebelein
In France, questions about the assimilation – or lack of it – of the country’s large and often problematic Muslim minority are encapsulated in a debate about whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear headscarves in state schools and other public institutions. The issue erupted in 2003 when two French Muslim girls – Lilia Levy, 18, and her sister Alma, 16, – wore Islamic-style headscarves to their lycée. Such attire (not veils covering the face but partial head coverings that hide a woman’s hair) have taken on powerful symbolic and political importance in France because some Muslims have started to wear them as a sign suggesting their special feeling of Muslim identity.
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