The French law

AT PENPOINT

The ban on face covering in France has more dimensions than a mere new piece of legislation. As the first connected arrest, which occurred on the first day of the ban, indicated, the new French law is not about France but all of Europe, and about its relationship to Islam. The war on terror, and the extent to which it is a war on Islam, and thus a continuation of the crusades, has also been brought into focus. One development which should be kept in mind is the return of racism to French politics. Then there is the recent decision by Italy to let through North African migrants, a decision which opens up the whole of the EU to the migrants.

The reason these migrants are on the whole unwelcome is that the other North Africans are unwelcome - racism. The connection has been made in France, where President Nicholas Sarkozy’s UMP lost ground in the recent local body elections to the Front National, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, and now led by his daughter Marine.

Europe has long been xenophobic, with Hitler’s hatred for the Jews being legendary. However, once the Jews became firm European favourites after World War II, they were replaced by migrants. These migrants, mostly economic, came from former colonies to do the jobs the natives found too hard to handle. Attracted by the possibility of earning more than they could at home, the migrants poured in. In addition, high population growth rates at home, coupled with demographic decline in Europe, heightened this trend.

One result was that the migrants brought over their own cultures, which were no longer merely to be derided at a distance, in the colonies, but were to be mocked at home. The migrants tended to be from Muslim countries mainly because they had occupied those lands. Thus, if the UK took Muslim migrants from South Asia (India, Pakistan and Kashmir), the Netherlands received Indonesians, France North Africans (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia), and Germany Turks (though it had formally colonised Turks, it had allied with Turkey in World War I). A large number were Muslims, in some countries, were migrants. In France, the migrants were all Muslim apart from some Africans. In fact, only in the UK, where Sikhs and Hindus from India, and West Indians also migrated, were there significant numbers of non-Muslims. The migrants included those who were willing to be assimilated, but though the original motive of migration was economic, they also saw that the mother countries provided better facilities than at home, and a more defined ideology of freedom. This led to a desi