Lawmakers in Belgium recently approved a draft law to ban the wearing of the Muslim full-face veil in public places

Barcelona plans to be the first large city in Spain to ban the use of the full-face Islamic veil in public buildings, its mayor announced Monday.

Jordi Hereu said he will sign a decree which will apply in all public spaces such as the city hall and municipal covered markets and creches.

“It should not be possible that someone enters into a place without being identified,” the Socialist mayor said.

He said the measure is not aimed at “any particular religious group” and would also apply to people wearing crash helmets and balaclavas.

Two other towns in the northeastern region of Catalonia, Lerida and El Venrell, have recently imposed bans on the use of the Islamic veil in public buildings.

Two more, Tarragona and Gerona, are considering similar measures, as is Coin in the southern region of Andalucia.

Spain’s conservative opposition Popular Party has said it plans to present a proposal in Catalonia’s regional parliament to ban the full-face veil in public places throughout the region.

Authorities in 11 mosques in Catalonia have vowed to challenge the bans in Spain’s Constitutional Court.

Immigration from Muslim countries has grown dramatically in Spain since the 1990s, with Catalonia in particular being home to a large community of Pakistani origin.

There are now about one million Muslims among Spain’s population of 47 million.

Last month, lawmakers in Belgium approved a draft law to ban the wearing of the Muslim full-face veil in public places, including streets — creating a controversial first for Europe, although it is still subject to a senate vote.

Debate is raging in France as well, where the cabinet has approved a draft law to ban the Muslim full-face veil from public spaces, opening the way for the text to go before parliament in July.

Chrystelle Khedrouche is 36 and lives in a suburb just outside Paris. She has been wearing a burka in public for around 12 years. She is French-born, has five children, and is married to an Algerian. She is a convert to Islam.

These are her views about the proposed ban on wearing the burka and niqab in public places:

“I’m really very sad about this, but I’m not so surprised because it is part of the French mentality, but it makes me sad and it’s hard that this is the stage we have got to. It’s been several years that we live like this and we have been perfectly fine, but then I’m not so surprised because the French like the idea of everyone being of the same mould and that mould must be ideal. Everything that is not part of their ideal model doesn’t suit them.”

Polls suggest that a sizeable majority of French people support a ban.

“This is a political strategy. It is always easier to knock the Muslims because all French people are in agreement about it.”

Isn’t it through the face that human beings relate to each other? It is the most basic way of communicating?

“Do you think we do not have contact with people? No, I don’t agree with that at all. Throughout this debate we have heard lots of excuses. I disagree. I did my studies in communication. I know that if I smile on the telephone a smile is heard. For me, we can have human contact and a piece of cloth will not stop this contact. I don’t agree that human contact is established through the face. I still have human contact, it doesn’t change anything.”

Many Muslims say that nothing in Islam requires women to wear the full-face veil.

“It saddens me a lot because our community is not united enough. For me there is no difference between myself and other Muslim women who show their veil, their hair or show their full head; there is no difference between us. But to say that it is not part of our religion I find very difficult, because we know that the wives of the prophet were dressed like this, they were fully covered.

“When God ordered that women be veiled we know that they were already veiled. Look at the mother of Jesus, Mary, she wore a veil and I have never seen an image of her where she is not veiled. So we know that women were veiled at that time and if God ordered that women be veiled it was to add something more to what there was already.”

What would you do if the ban becomes part of French law?

“Am I ready to break the law? It’s been 12 years that I have been like this. Yes, I am ready. In fact I can’t accept the fact that the French fight for the freedom of women. I believe a woman should be able to dress as she likes, so I do not understand why they want to stop me from dressing as I want. I have made a choice to dress like this and I have made the choice not to be unveiled, so to force me to unveil – that’s not freedom.”

What happens if you are fined for breaking the law?

“If we are stopped we do not have any intention of paying fines – that is sure. I personally will not pay a fine and I think there are lots of women who will not pay. I find it terrible to stop someone for the way they dress and it is against European laws. First they say they will introduce a law, now it is a decree, a resolution…

“They know that it will go against the European constitution. I don’t know where this will lead, but they cannot arrest us in front of our children, we have done nothing wrong.”

 The proposal to ban the wearing of any kind of “full veil” in public approved by the House of Representatives should now in theory go to the Senate. But Belgium does not have a government at the moment so the procedure will begin again after elections next month.

So why did the vote take place at all? Because enough politicians wanted to be seen to approve this largely symbolic measure because of the impact they hope it will have on public opinion, especially a few weeks before elections.

 The proposal was initiated by the Liberals (centre right) and received backing from every political party, because it gave the kind of signal that they believe Belgian people expect. The general population is becoming increasingly anxious – if not downright hostile – to an expanding Muslim community and the supposed growth of fundamentalism. These fears are fed by headlines predicting that Brussels will be a “Muslim city” by 2030 or alleging that state schools are being corrupted by Islamic fundamentalism.

 This surge in hostility is in turn driving Belgium’s Muslims towards introverted ways of asserting their identity, and to a religious revival that can be observed by the numbers of females wearing head scarves. The hijab is a common sight on Belgian streets, but burkas and niqabs are seldom observed, another sign of the pointlessness of the ban. Belgian politicians have been arguing among themselves for a long time about banning Islamic headscarves from schools and other public buildings.

 Progressive forces are themselves sharply divided among those who favour the French model (banning all public expressions of religion and safeguarding the neutrality of public offices and servants) and those who prefer the Anglo-Saxon model of religious tolerance and would like to see a reasonable accommodation, of the kind we see in Canada.

 A real debate about the kind of model that multicultural Belgium should promote has yet to take place. Unfortunately, populist moves such as this week’s vote do nothing to build the atmosphere of trust among our different communities in which such a debate could take place.

By  Caroline Sagesser:The writer is a social policy expert at the Université Libre de Bruxelles

Why does Europe hate Israel? That’s the question asked in Robin Shepherd’s A State Beyond the Pale, which I’ve reviewed in the Catholic Herald this week. The book came out some months back, but with Helen Thomas’s recent outburst (Shepherd also includes the American Left in the growing league of Israel haters) it’s more timely than ever.

I tend to avoid the subject of Israel-Palestine because there are already a billion people expending measureless energy discussing it on a million internet messageboards and social media outlets, probably costing the world economy trillions of dollars a year in lost production.

It’s also a very complex issue that seems to attract the most ironic and absurd partisans: on the one hand feminist or gay and lesbian organisations that support the violently reactionary Islamists of Gaza against one of the most gay-friendly states on earth; on the other, Christian religious nuts who support the settlement of Jews in the West Bank at the expense of the Christian community there – and not just any Christian community either, but one founded by Jesus Christ himself.

And those on both sides who paint this as a simple clash of civilisations between Jews/Christians and Muslims ignore the fact that Israel’s arch-enemy, Syria, has a large, well-protected and equally anti-Israeli Christian minority (indeed if and when the current dictatorship falls the Christian community may well face the same fate as their brethren in Iraq). The Syrians also have an attitude towards Islamists that makes the Israelis look like Birkenstock-wearing pinkos in comparison – 53 Palestinians (mostly combatants) were killed during the IDF’s attack on Jenin a few years back; anywhere between 25-40,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed when the Syrians stormed the town of Hama to crush an Islamist revolt. How many of the flotilistas have even heard of Hama? None, because no one in Europe cares about 40,000 dead Arabs if it’s Arabs doing the killing – it seems if you can’t blame the Jews, it ain’t news.

Zionism is now a dirty word in everyday parlance in our continent, and yet it is perfectly justified on liberal nationalist grounds, as is Palestinian self-determination. The only possible solution – it seems – is some sort of reversion to pre-1967 borders, with a demilitarised zone around the Holy Land and a fully independent (but disarmed) Palestine.

But England will win the World Cup before that happens. In the meantime what’s interesting and disturbing is the intensity with which Europeans increasingly hate Israel, with many otherwise sensible people convinced it’s the main obstacle to world peace.

Here is the full review of Robin Shepherd’s book:

Why does Europe hate Israel? That is the question asked and answered in this powerful and forceful polemic. Shepherd is a former director of Chatham House and a Slavic linguist who spent many years in Russia and eastern Europe. He is not Jewish, which he feels the need to point out, since the views of pro-Israeli Jews are so readily dismissed. He has visited the Holy Land many times and, like most visitors, found he liked both Israelis and Palestinians. It is his fellow Europeans he has a problem with.

Europe, he says, should be berated for “dishonouring the memory of the Holocaust, for making common cause with tyranny, for lacking a moral compass, for hypocrisy, wickedness and appeasement. It is accused of succumbing to an obsession, of giving in to irrationalism and anti-intellectualism, of hatred, scorn and contempt.”

Europeans mostly see Israel as the aggressor, view its treatment of Palestinians as tantamount to genocide, and claim it is a “racist” state akin to apartheid South Africa, with no right to exist.

On the contrary, he argues, Israel has the legal right to exist, like any other state, laid down by the British Mandate under the League of Nations as well as UN Resolution 181, which offered a two-state solution in 1947.

The “racist” argument is based on the fact that Israel is a home to the Jewish people. But, he argues: “Just as France has a right to exist as a state for French people, China for Chinese people, Egypt for Egyptian people and so on.” In fact: “Just as dozens of states define themselves as Christian or Muslim, so Israel has a right to define itself as Jewish.”

There are 56 members of the Organisation of Islamic Conference, and most make sharia law an aim. Israel’s status as a state identified by its religion is not exceptional.

The Palestinians also have the right to national self-determination, but their leaders have repeatedly rejected it, starting with the 1937 Peel Commission and the UN partition, and more recently Yasser Arafat at the Oslo talks.

After the 1948 defeat Palestinians left en masse in what became known as the Nakba (catastrophe), and Europeans now back their “right to return”.

Yet, he argues, Israel had simply won a war that “could quite possibly have resulted in the massacre of large sections of the Jewish populations”, and pressed home their advantage. Who could blame them? “Certainly not the European Union or most of the nations of Europe which have long accepted the reality of the almost contemporaneous German refugee problem following World War II.” No one cares about the 12 million Germans forced out in 1945. Here he is on shakier ground, since Palestine did not start a world war that killed 35 million, nor kill 11 million in genocides – were it not for those factors, the ethnic cleansing of eastern Germans would be considered Europe’s worst atrocity.

His argument that anti-Zionism is largely re-shaped anti-Semitism will also anger the pro-Palestinian lobby. The existence of anti-Zionist Jews does not contradict this, just as the existence of black slaveholders in the Deep South does not mean slavery was not racist.

Indeed, this is merely the third stage of an old European disease. “In anti-Semitism’s first stage, when the hostility was based in religion and expressed in religious terms, the Jew always had the option of changing sides,” he writes. “During the medieval and early modern periods, Jews persecuted by Christians could convert. Not only could they escape the persecution; they could join the persecutors if they so wished, and some indeed rose to high rank in the Church and the Inquisition. Racial anti-Semitism removed that option. The present-day ideological anti-Semitism has restored it, and now as in the Middle Ages, there seem to be some who are willing to avail themselves of this option.”

As for the endless comparisons with Nazi Germany, this trope was invented by the Soviet Union’s Anti-Zionist Committee of Soviet Public Opinion, formed in 1983 to blacken the name of Jewish anti-Soviet dissidents flocking to Israel, and also to curry favour with Arab governments.

Shepherd’s book is a powerful defence of an unpopular cause, and a perhaps even more ringing condemnation of our continent’s enfeebled and infantilised political culture.