It was always going to be a slippery slope when France, amongst others, banned women from wearing a burkha. It has now probably come back to bite the French on the backside - for the notorious leader of the French National Front has now called for widening the ban. It goes to show, not for the first time, that banning things has a knock-on effect, and not necessarily a positive one.
"Marine Le Pen's call for a ban on headscarves, Jewish kippas, and even the djellaba in public is not some new low in the long and abject story of France's failure to come to terms with itself. We have been here before, and unfortunately we will be again. That is the tragedy of modern France, a tragedy that entered a new absurdist phase the day Marine Le Pen recast herself as the protector of the values of the Republic.
You need to suffer from a very particular kind of historical amnesia not to find banning the kippa in France grotesque, particularly as Le Pen used it to kickstart her party conference just as Holocaust survivors were gathering at Drancy to remember the 60,000 Jews who were deported to the death camps from there by French police. The blocks in which they were held now house mostly north African immigrants and their children and grandchildren, some of whom wear headscarves and, on very rare occasions, djellabas.
It was them that Le Pen had in mind when she threw in the kippa to appease her party's hardcore antisemites horrified by her courting of Jewish groups in the runup to last May's presidential elections, in which she took one in five of the votes.
Marine Le Pen is not her father, who described the Final Solution as "a detail of history"; she is a far more dangerous animal, with an acute sense of what irks the French – much like the Daily Mail has for the English. As the new, "reasonable" face of the Front National, who last year declared herself a "life-long Zionist", she claims she has no problem with the kippa, yet she knows that a certain rump France – including those on the left most attached to its republican principles – does.
"Marine Le Pen's call for a ban on headscarves, Jewish kippas, and even the djellaba in public is not some new low in the long and abject story of France's failure to come to terms with itself. We have been here before, and unfortunately we will be again. That is the tragedy of modern France, a tragedy that entered a new absurdist phase the day Marine Le Pen recast herself as the protector of the values of the Republic.
You need to suffer from a very particular kind of historical amnesia not to find banning the kippa in France grotesque, particularly as Le Pen used it to kickstart her party conference just as Holocaust survivors were gathering at Drancy to remember the 60,000 Jews who were deported to the death camps from there by French police. The blocks in which they were held now house mostly north African immigrants and their children and grandchildren, some of whom wear headscarves and, on very rare occasions, djellabas.
It was them that Le Pen had in mind when she threw in the kippa to appease her party's hardcore antisemites horrified by her courting of Jewish groups in the runup to last May's presidential elections, in which she took one in five of the votes.
Marine Le Pen is not her father, who described the Final Solution as "a detail of history"; she is a far more dangerous animal, with an acute sense of what irks the French – much like the Daily Mail has for the English. As the new, "reasonable" face of the Front National, who last year declared herself a "life-long Zionist", she claims she has no problem with the kippa, yet she knows that a certain rump France – including those on the left most attached to its republican principles – does.
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