French Feminists attack Obama over Islamic veil

It takes feminists all the way from France to finally say what American feminists ought to have been saying for years.

Saturday, 06 June 2009
French feminists attacked US President Barack Obama's defence of the Islamic veil yesterday, accusing him of dealing a blow to the rights of millions of women in order to appease religious sentiment.

Obama was due to arrive in Paris later in the day, after a Middle East tour in which he gave a speech in which he accused countries like France of hiding "hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism."

France bans girls and young women from wearing Muslim headscarves in state schools, and women's rights campaigners here see its widespread and sometimes compulsory use in the Islamic world as an abuse of women's rights.

One French women's rights group, Ni Putes Ni Soumises ("Neither whores, nor submissives"), said: "Reducing the dialogue between civilisations to a dialogue between religions is once again to instrumentalise women.

"By attacking secularism and defending the veil, the President of the United States [...] has hurt the struggle of millions of women, some of whom pay with their lives every day to escape fundamentalist violence," it said.

Anne Saugier, president of the International Women's Rights League that was founded by Simone de Beauvoir, accused Obama of seeking to reconcile the United States with Muslims "on the backs of women."

"What a slap in the face for those women in Algeria, Iran and Afghanistan who died in atrocious conditions for having refused to wear what they consider the most radical sign of their oppression and segregation," she said.

Wearing some variety of headdress – whether a scarf over the hair, a veil or face mask or a full length "burqua" – is compulsory in some Muslim majority countries and common among Muslim communities in others.

It is considered by some a sign of women's subjugation and repression, and banned in some public institutions in some countries, but in his speech in Cairo on Thursday, Obama went out of his way to defend it on three occasions.

"It is important for Western countries to avoid impeding Muslim citizens from practicing religion as they see fit – for instance, by dictating what clothes a Muslim woman should wear," he said.»