It may be because I'm too English for Gallic high rhetoric but it's very difficult to take seriously France's impassioned debate about banning the burka. It's something that affects, at most, a couple of thousand people amongst a couple of million Muslims in France. For the average citizen a covered female face is a lot less obtrusive, and certainly less threatening, than a hooded youth, of which there are tens of thousands in the city, even in summer.
And yet here we have France's National Assemblée voting this week by 335 to a single objector for a bill that would make it an offence punishable by fine to appear in public in the full veil, and could send a man down for a year if it was then found out that he had insisted his wife or daughter wear it. A "walking coffin" one French MP described it, "a sign of alienation on their faces" said a member of the ruling party, "a threat to French values" declared another. To which the English response is "come off it" (the declamation not the veil).
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