Blame The Victim - Again

France has a real problem with a sizeable proportion of its immigrant population which has seemed to be unable to, or disinterested in, assimilating French culture and traditions, values and customs into the lexicon of their established system of beliefs and societal interactions. Those huge ghetto-tracts of first- and second-generation immigrants from Muslim countries that inhabit the public housing projects termed banlieues which have given birth to socially-disruptive and violently anti-social youth have ensured that French society is no longer to prepared to ignore obvious differences.

So authorities flirted with outlawing traditional Muslim head coverings for women. Like other countries in Europe, alarmed by the rise of Muslim extremism, and hardly knowing how to handle the kind of fundamentalism that has emerged as a challenge to their home-grown systems of justice and governance, through a growing demand for the acceptance of shariah law, France is reacting. Not that a country like Turkey, although Muslim, hasn't continued to insist through its modern history of separation of church and state that headscarves are illegal.

The backlash from a growing social insurgency throughout Europe and elsewhere in the world, where a restless and aggrieved Muslim population has begun to concern itself with the perceived insult to Islam by a world increasingly nervous as a result of militant and violent jihadists has proven to be more than a trifle inconvenient. But through the malaise of neglect and suspicion, Muslims have indeed faced the indignity of fragile mistrust and lesser citizenship and economic advancement opportunities.

Solutions to intractable problems of non-inclusion and societal discrimination aren't easily solved. Especially when the downtrodden and scorned have decided they no longer have much to lose in societies where full acceptance has been denied them. Not that they're entirely innocent in the process, maintaining their own preferred separation, and refusing to accept the cultural mores of the countries they've migrated to.

Still, it's just a little hard to take when news comes out of France that a woman of Moroccan descent, living in France, married to a French citizen, who speaks perfect French and has given birth to three children who are themselves French citizens, is denied her request for citizenship on the basis that she customarily clothes herself in a full black burka. Even though, while living in Morocco this was not her practise; she was acting in compliance with her husband's orders.

The woman lives a reclusive lifestyle, but that too has been imposed upon her by her controlling, Wahabbist-Muslim husband. Her request for the granting of citizenship was refused on grounds of "insufficient assimilation". Not, one would imagine, a moral crime, but also not necessarily indicative of an individual suitable for life in a free democracy. Still, refusal of national identity through citizenship makes sense when Muslims are known to be militant extremists, consort with radicals, advocating to overthrow the social order.

This mean-spirited decision doesn't make much sense. She has been accused of isolation from French society. "She has no idea about the secular state or the right to vote. She lives in total submission to her male relatives. She seems to find this normal and the idea of challenging it has never crossed her mind." A sad state of being, to be sure, but not a crime, social or moral. It is a human-rights offence which her family and her religion have imposed upon this woman.

And, it's the truth that there must be many native-born French who have no intention of voting, no interest in politics, who live out their lives in ignorance and complete indifference to civil society. The woman is being punished for being complicit with the culture and the traditions into which she was born. But she has given France three new citizens.

Perhaps, instead of penalizing her, France should give thought about what the future promises those three new citizens. And the many others just like them. If human nature can be accurately judged, as they mature and grow into French society they may just feel a great deal of umbrage at a society that saw fit to insult and denigrate their humble mother.