French President Jacques Chirac recently announced that his government would introduce legislation banning the wearing of the hijab, the headscarf worn by some Muslim women, in state schools and public institutions.

This is the culmination of a prolonged campaign of racist scaremongering, after two young women were excluded from school for refusing to remove their headscarves last September. Not surprisingly, the proposed ban was applauded by the right, who lost no time in defending the new law as a matter of national security in the context of the global 'war on terrorism'. Indeed the conservative newspaper Le Figaro made no bones about declaring that 'the problem is Islam' and the 'archaic, sexist, brutal lessons' of the Koran, which, it claims, undermine the 'civilised' French virtues of secularism and 'gender equality'.

Just what form this vaunted 'gender equality' takes in a country where, as in Australia, women systematically earn less than men, still bear the burden of childcare and unpaid labour at home and are continually subject to sexist abuse, is unclear.

Despite recommending a ban on all 'ostentatious' displays of religious or political belief, there can be no doubt that in a country where one-eighth of all students attend heavily subsidised private schools - 95 per cent of them Catholic - this is a racist attack on the five million Muslims who live in France.

Similar laws already exist in southern Germany, while Belgium recently announced plans to follow suit. And the racist hysteria is by no means confined to Europe. Only last month, Fairfax feminist columnist Pamela Bone argued that while it would be impractical to ban it here, the veil, when worn by Muslim women in Australia, is a 'dangerous affectation' which encourages the idea that women are responsible for controlling men's sexual urges.

But scratch this 'progressive' veneer, and it comes as no surprise that this is the same pundit who consistently represents Islam as intolerant and dangerous and who supported the invasion of Iraq and the ongoing occupation. Clearly Bone's feminist sympathies do not extend to Iraqi women killed or wounded by US bombs, or those unable to work or to feed their children.

Yet while the hypocrisy of the right's sudden 'concern' for women's rights is hardly surprising, support for the ban has also come from the Left. Lutte Ouvrière, one of the far-left parties to poll nearly ten per cent in the 2002 Presidential election, has shamefully bought into Chirac's rhetoric, welcoming the ban, 'not only out of respect for secularism, but also and especially in defence of women's rights'.

Perhaps more understandably - given their first-hand experience of the oppressive practices of Islamists in the Middle East - the women's section of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq has also hailed the proposed ban as a victory for women's rights, even writing to the Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to express their 'great enthusiasm and pleasure' should it go ahead.

But no matter how sincere their motives, the logic of both groups' support for Chirac's policy is mistaken. To begin with, how do you liberate a young woman from her oppression by forcibly excluding her from an education unless she dresses a certain way?



Neither the French government's proposed ban nor Bone's feminist critique of the veil have anything to do with concern for women's rights. The real motivation is racism, pure and simple.

This ban is merely the latest attack by the Chirac government against a Muslim minority which already experiences institutionalised daily discrimination and harassment. Governments worldwide, including in Australia, will doubtless seek ways to drive a wedge between ordinary people to stop them uniting to fight back against attacks on their standard of living. Not only should socialists unequivocally defend the right of women to dress however they choose, but they should also defend the right of people to freedom of religion, particularly that of minorities against racist governments.

Support for the ban plays into the hands, not only of the Chirac government, but also of the resurgent far right, which is planning a comeback in regional elections in 2004. Already Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, like Australia's One Nation, accuses the conservative government of attempting to win back votes by stealing its racist policies, including the banning of Islamic veils in schools.

In this context, it is only too clear that any concession to the idea that a ban would be progressive is not only wrong, but also a gift to the racists and warmongers. It can only lead to an increase in anti-immigrant racism and authoritarianism and will further alienate ordinary Muslims from getting involved in left politics. This last would be a terrible tragedy, as it is only a united mass movement of both Muslim and non-Muslim men and women that can succeed in beating back the racists for good.