Persecuting the ‘victims’
THE MAROIS GOVERNMENT has not condoned the increasing harassment of veiled women, but it has done little to deter it
The Parti Québécois and its supporters argue that the Muslim veil is a symbol of not only religion, but also women’s oppression.
So how come it’s the so-called victims of oppression that we see being persecuted in Quebec, in the name of women’s equality as well as secularism?
The PQ’s anti-hijab “Charter of Pants” — “we’re putting our pants on” by making women take off their veils, the PQ boasts — would deny public-service jobs to women who wear veils.
And there has been an alarming increase in recent months in physical as well as verbal assaults of women wearing veils in public.
The PQ charter is not a response to these attacks, too numerous to be dismissed as isolated incidents, but rather the inspiration for them. For the increase was observed after the leak in August of the initial charter proposal.
The Marois government did not deliberately incite this harassment, and has not condoned it. But it has done little to deter it, either.
It shouldn’t have been surprised by it, after last year’s similar incidents of language vigilantism against people overheard speaking English in public.
Those incidents could have been blamed on anxiety over the former Liberal government’s “lax” enforcement of language legislation.
This year’s bullying of veiled women, however, appears to be in response not to something a government has neglected to do, but rather to an initiative it has taken.
Some people have apparently felt authorized to appoint themselves as “values vigilantes” to enforce what they interpret as the spirit of the not-yet-adopted law.
An incident involving one such vigilante was widely reported this week.
An anonymous woman, taking offence at the sight of two women in niqabs, the Muslim veil that con- ceals the face, escorting some preschool children across a street, took a photo of the group.
She then had the photo posted online, where it was widely circulated.
(Let’s pause briefly to appreciate the irony of a woman offended by the sight of others with covered faces concealing her own identity.)
This incident was especially disturbing because it involved children, and because the photo could be used to locate the daycare where the women obviously worked.
The women have already been attacked while they were out with the children, parents of the children wrote in a letter to La Presse. Alarmed by comments online, they said they feared for their children’s safety.
The response of the PQ minister sponsoring the charter, Bernard Drainville, was that the incident was “shocking, disturbing and unacceptable” — not because the women and the children had been exposed to danger, but because of the niqabs.
The government then proceeded to harass the daycare. Surpassing even the legendary zeal of the “language police,” the families department made it a priority to send two inspectors to the daycare the very next day.
They were unable to find any infractions, which must have come as a disappointment to the government, but not as a surprise to the parents. All of those interviewed, most of them non-Muslims, have said they are happy with the daycare, and with the educators there.
The argument of the PQ and the charter’s supporters against the veil is that it sends a message that women are not equal to men.
I’m not sure, however, that that’s how the preschoolers in this daycare, who after all go home to mothers who do not wear veils, interpret the “message” of the niqab.
When the educators are inside, with the children alone or with their mothers, they uncover their faces.
That’s when something is revealed to these preschoolers that many grown-ups in Quebec refuse to see.
It’s that beneath the symbol is a person.