France's burqa ban: Has Europe forgotten the gas chambers?

[Editor's note: The headline on this article, like all headlines on opinion essays, was crafted by Monitor editors, not the writer. Please click on the "Comments" section below to read a note by Stefan Simanowitz outlining his objections to the headline, which he feels does not reflect the tone or content or his article.]

Writing during a period of great religious conflict, John Locke stated that the “toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to ... the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it.” Over 300 years on, this most basic tenet of European Enlightenment thought – the freedom of religious belief and practice – is increasingly under attack.

In France, a nation where the far-right, nationalist National Front party polled almost 12 percent of the national vote in last year’s regional elections, legislation has come into force this week that makes it a crime to wear the burqa and niqab in public.

In Belgium, similar legislation is also in the pipeline. In Holland, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), whose manifesto includes a ban on the Quran and an end to all immigration from Muslim countries, became the third-largest party in last year’s general election. Even the traditionally liberal Swedes saw the far-right Sweden Democrat party win representation in parliament for the first time in their 2010 elections.

Far right, often anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim, parties have experienced a resurgence in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Romania, and Slovakia. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron have both recently dismissed multiculturalism as a failure.

US anti-Muslim fervor is political

In the United States, where there is a much smaller proportion of Muslims – about 1 percent of the population compared with about 5 percent in Europe – Islamophobia is also on the rise. While incidents such as pastor Terry Jones's decision to burn a Quran or the furor over the “Ground Zero mosque” might grab the global headlines, they are at the extreme end of a much wider movement.

1 | 2

Next