NDPers tying themselves in knots to defend the niqab
The religious accommodation genie has come out of the bottle again.

thestar.com
By ROSIE DIMANNO
Aug. 29, 2017

Jagmeet Singh wears a turban as mandated under the code of conduct for Sikh males.

It is an article of faith, sacred, steeped in tradition and martial history, essentially intended to protect hair that must be kept in a natural, unaltered state: Uncut.

(It should be noted that in India, home to 22 million Sikhs, roughly half the male population do not wear a turban.)

A far cry from the face-concealing veil for Muslim women, the niqab - in Arabic, naqaba: Meaning to pierce, bore a hole or perforate.

As in the netting panel that allows women to at least see, if not their own feet.

There is no Muslim religious commandment compelling adult females to cover their faces, though it’s the law of the land in ultra-patriarchal regimes such as Saudi Arabia.

Intriguing then - and distressing to many of us - that Singh, the apparent front-runner for leadership of the federal NDP, has wrapped the vile niqab in a chimera of charter rights and freedoms and Quebec human rights law.

Last week, before the only French debate of the NDP leadership race, Singh told the Star he is unequivocally opposed to Quebec’s Bill 62, tabled two years ago, which would require anybody offering or receiving public services to do so with faces uncovered. The bill is admittedly confusing in proposed amendments, one of which might extend the face-covering ban to public transit.

Quebec is formally a distinct province where, given its past subordination to the Catholic Church, secularism is now vigorously embraced. The National Assembly has the authority - unless the Supreme Court of Canada would dare to say differently - to pass laws enshrining secularism.

Normally, hardcore NDPers talking to other hardcore NDPers would hold minimal interest for me. But the religious accommodation genie has come out of the bottle again - it never really went back in, even after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pulled the plug on a four-year legal fight by the previous Conservative government to force removal of the niqab when taking the citizenship oath, withdrawing a Stephen Harper request to the Supreme Court to hear an appeal on an issue lost in Federal Court.

Equally dismaying are those Canadian women, including NDP leadership contender Niki Ashton, who either waffle over the niqab as a woman’s dress choice that should not be dictated by any government, or outright defend its virtues as a feminist protective against sexual objectification.

This is absurdist, revisionist twaddle.

How very disheartening that even highly intelligent people, when women’s rights clash with multicultural rights - religious accommodation - would cleave to the latter, which makes them precious little different from burka enslavers in Afghanistan.

I’ve said it before and will repeat it again: Any woman who wears a niqab, purportedly because she chooses to do so and isn’t doing a man’s bidding, contributes to the erosion of all women’s rights in a secular society. A woman who opts not to show her face in public perpetuates the hideous concept that the rest of us are less virtuous, that our faces are so intimate a feature they should be hidden. She renders us lesser beings and thus unequal.

There is enough ghettoization around. These women want to ghettoize their faces.

Any society that buys into this fallacy is inheritently anti-woman, paternalistic and inside-out reactionary. As Trudeau famously said about his gender parity cabinet two years ago: “Because it’s 2015!”

Canada did not invent civil rights nor perfect them, though we’ve arguably aggrandized multiculturalism beyond any reasonable doctrine. Trudeau prattles endlessly about “Canadian values” but goes berserk at the suggestion that those values might actually be even marginally codified.

Perhaps we should pay heed to what other countries, with much longer histories of democracy, have decided on the niqab.

Belgium, hardly a retrogressive nation, has banned it as incompatible “with social communication and more generally the establishment of human relations, which are indispensable for life in society.”

That was the argument put before the European Court of Human Rights, which last month unanimously ruled a niqab ban does not violate human rights.

The European court, if anything, is often criticized for its over-weaning vigilance on human rights. The panel that heard this case included judges from Iceland, Estonia, Turkey, Montenegro, Monaco and Moldova. It is not a European Union institution; rather part of the Council of Europe, a 47-member state international organization founded in 1949 with the aim of upholding human rights, democracy and the rule of law.

They concluded the Belgium ban did not break any international rules forbidding discrimination.

The decision noted the ban was “necessary in a democratic society” trying to protect “the rights and freedoms of others” and seeking to guarantee the conditions of “living together.”

Belgium, as a state, had argued that it considered a full-face veil incompatible “with social communication and more generally the establishment of human relations, which were indispensable for life in society.”

Whether a full-face veil is acceptable to the Belgian public, the court concluded, is a matter for state authorities to decide and not an international court. The woman who brought the case can appeal the decision to the Grand Chamber of the Court.

The European court decision follows a rejection of a similar challenge against the veil ban in France. Two years ago, the court upheld the French ban in a country that is home to an estimated 5 million Muslims, but where only about 1,900 (according to 2009 research) women were affected by the proscription, a figure reportedly dropped by half “thanks to a major public information campaign,” French officials told the judges.

Lawyers for the complainant insisting outlawing the full-face veil was contrary to six articles of the European convention; that forcing its removal was “inhumane and degrading, against the right of respect for family and private life, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of speech and discriminatory.”

The European Court of Human Rights has also upheld France’s ban on head scarves in education establishments and a regulation requiring removal of scarves, veils and turbans for security checks.

It’s ironic that some of the same people who passionately insist there should never be any curtailment of religious rights in the public realm simultaneously justify limiting free speech that is hateful.

The niqab is hateful.

Blinded by fervency, the NDP - and, to a considerable extent, the Liberals - have turned themselves into doctrinal pretzels.

Outgoing NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s defence of the niqab during the last federal election contributed to the party’s plunging fortunes at the polls. He told the CBC Radio this year his niqab stance “hurt us terribly . . . the polling that we did showed we dropped over 20 points in 48 hours here in Quebec because of the strong stand I took on the niqab.”

The party lost most of the Quebec seats it had gained during the “Orange Wave” 2011 election under Jack Layton.

Canadians have made it clear over and over in public polling that face veils are an affront to our values: 82 per cent of respondents favour removing the niqab during citizenships oaths, according to a 2015 Privy Council Office poll, one among many such pulse-takings with the same general results.

That does not make an overwhelming majority of Canadians bigoted or intolerant or Islamophobic. It makes the NDP tent and the Liberal tent on this particular issue much too small and insufferable.

Jagmeet Singh doesn’t care much for majority opinion. He told the Star last week: “Human rights shouldn’t be a matter of popularity. (Rights are) not supposed to be subject to the whims of the majority.”

The sentiment is not wrong. But its application in this niche controversy is.

But one reason why the NDP will never form a majority Canadian government.