[Again, a re-post, merely and purely to deprive the evil Web-bots of their landing-site, which now has been deleted.]
Headline in Le Figaro (Paris):
Marine Le Pen espère que la grande
majorité des Français, devenus indifférents aux religions, ne lui tiendront pas
rigueur de son idée d'interdir le voile ou la kippa dans la rue.
There is no word for this in English; a good translation would be “supersecular”. Even that will still not give the
flavor, to Americans who have never lived with an established State
religion.
Marine Le Pen, who inherited the mantle of her father
Jacques, is France’s most prominent …. what? I was going to say “right-wing politician”, or perhaps
ultraconservative, but again, in an American context, where those tendencies
are associated largely with Christian evangelicals, her initiative will sound
baffling. For what she is
proposing is to ban the wearing of a head-scarf or a yarmulke in the street.
Yes, you read that right. Not making it up -- toleja, I’ve retired from satire, the
world is just too weird. A state
ban on private citizens displaying religious symbols is the sort of bogeyman
that keeps American conservatives up at night.
You picture the headlines:
Cops Nab Bar Mitzvah Boy
Bicycle chase through the crowded
streets of Paris
In the context of Old World history, such a proposal is not
as far-fetched as it sounds to us here.
Ataturk implimented much more drastic sumptuary laws when he took power
in Turkey.
*
Pour d’autres
friandises
de la confiserie
du docteur Justice,
consultez:
*
The readers’ comments upon this article are not the sort of thing an American
would expect; I’ll quote a few of
the most colorful.
La kippa est, malheureusement pour
elle, le Cheval de Troie des communautaristes de toutes natures.
À choisir entre interdire la kippa
et accepter les diverses sortes de cagoules, le choix est malheureusement
clair:
Il faut interdire la kippa.
Ce serait d'ailleurs une
interdiction toute provisoire:
La disparition de ce Cheval de
Troie priverait de carburant une grande partie des jusqu'au-boutistes
musulmans.
Ils se retrouveraient en slip, ou
plutôt: en burkini.
--
Marine Le Pen a tout à fait raison,
au grand dam de notre journaliste qui cherche à mettre les propos de MLP à
tort. Elle n'a jamais interdit le port de la soutane, ou De la croix (qui font
parti de notre patrimoine et de nos coutumes). Ce qu'elle veut dire surtout
c'est qu'il faut arrêter ce communautarisme du à l'immigration musulmane qui
mine notre pays et qui met en grave danger notre façon de vivre. Ces minorités
sont constamment en conflit avec notre république et essayent de nous imposer
leurs Us et coutumes
--
Ma fille est religieuse et je
trouverais inadmissible qu'elle soit obligée de retirer son voile.
Et je préfère voir une femme musulmane avec son voile, qu'une autre qui montre
ses fesses ou exhibe sa poitrine comme une prostituée.
Marine a poussé son bouchon laïcard un peu loin...
--
Le FN, parti laïque et franc-mac,
c'est le monde à l'envers…
I won’t undertake to translate these; culturally, they are untranslatable.
*
Si cela vous parle,
savourez la série
noire
en argot authentique d’Amérique
:
*
~
In the Netherlands, the most prominent right-wing
anti-immigrant hardliner is the flamboyant bouffant-bottle-blond Geert Wilders, -- digne héritier of Pym Fortuyn (who, however, as badge and emblem of one knows not
what subvariety of paraphilia, sported a shaved pate) -- whose most recent
proposal for keeping the riff-raff in their place is to flood Holland’s streets with police-dogs, since
Muslims don’t like them:
Les chiens et la circoncision
(Actually, I know what it is like to live like that, since when I was there as a graduate
student, Berkeley was flooded with dogs:
only, it was the riff-raff themselves that brought them.)
That radio essay, by journalist Fouad Laroui, also touches
upon the bizarre anti-circumcision campaign in Germany, likewise directed
against the Other. It all reads
very strangely for an American of my generation: in my age-cohort, babies were routinely circumcised. My best friend for a while was a
Norwegian-born boy, who felt quite weird and isolated, since he didn’t look
like anyone else in the showers.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Relief for
beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
[Encouraging update!] Two weeks later, M. Laroui offers
another radioessay:
Turns out the Dutch are not that crazy.
~
For more wild ‘n’ wacky words, click here: logophilia.
Pour davantage à propos de l’Hexagone, cliquez ici: francophonie
