Over the last decade or two, while other barometers of order and civilization have slipped, the American home-school movement has grown. American kids in general may have a shakier grasp of science, economics, literature and math; TV reality shows may advance from strength to strength; the North Pole may be melting; governments from Eastern Europe to Mexico might be caving to organized crime. But home schooling in the United States has thrived. The movement's most recent victory was a decision this year by a U.S. immigration judge to grant political asylum in Tennessee to a German couple ... Read More
Sometimes a Cross Is Not a Cross
June 23, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
When a European court ruled last year that Italy should remove crucifixes from public classrooms, a wave of anti-EU protest spread from Italy to neighboring countries, where people worried — again — about an assault from EU eggheads on their national traditions. The case belongs to Europe's ongoing struggle between a rising, quasi-federal government in Brussels and the national identities of EU member states. "The European court has trodden on our rights, our culture, our history, our traditions and our values," is how one Italian minister, Roberto Calderoli, from the unsavory Northern ... Read More
Eurabia, Eurabia
June 16, 2010 • By • 4 Comments
The political climate this year in Europe was foreshadowed by an uproar in France over fast food. Months before burqa hysteria boiled over, a restaurant in the Quick burger chain decided to replace the bacon burger on its menu with an acceptably Islamic offering: smoked turkey on halal beef. That was in November 2009. Four months later, the local mayor swung into action. (An American politician would have said he "hit the ground running.") He criticized Quick for discriminating against non-Muslim customers and emphasized the importance of sharing France with the French. "Yes to diversity, ... Read More
Anti-Semitism Keeps Rising in Europe. Why?
June 9, 2010 • By • 10 Comments
Anti-Semitic attacks spiked in early 2009, particularly in Europe, just after Israel's brief but brutal war to punish Hamas and stop the steady drumbeat of missile fire from the Gaza Strip. "Operation Cast Lead" had awkward ripple effects around the world, but particularly in Britain and France, where anti-Semitic incidents apparently multiplied by three or four. Someone drove a car through the gates of a synagogue in Toulouse and set it on fire, burning the gates; synagogues and Jewish community buildings in Britain and France have been daubed with graffiti. There were problems with arson ... Read More
Mixing Prayer and School
June 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
Last week a Muslim student in Berlin called Yunus Mitschele lost the right to pray during school hours. He'd won the right to a quiet prayer room for about 10 minutes a day last fall, in an earlier decision, but an appeals court has overturned that ruling and said a student's right to religious expression was not absolute. "This is a good day for Berlin schools," Brigitte Burchhardt, headmistress at the Diesterweg Gymnasium in Berlin, told reporters after last Thursday's decision. The case is new in postwar Germany, which is just starting to struggle with American-style complexities of ... Read More
A Modest Proposal: Outlaw Retrograde Mormon Dress
May 26, 2010 • By • 9 Comments
The recent hysteria in Europe over burqas and other full-face veils may have a salutary effect if it convinces both Americans and Europeans to think a little harder about their own parallel societies. Evidence that it's hysteria is simple: Christopher Hitchens and other pundits weren't calling for unprecedented Western laws against certain types of clothing, say, three years ago. But starting last year, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy first proposed a law restricting Muslim veils, Hitchens jumped on the French bandwagon and said the U.S. should "consider banning the burqa." Oddly, ... Read More
Big Love Soaking the State
May 19, 2010 • By • 5 Comments
Last month a Muslim woman in France, driving her car in a niqab, was pulled over and fined $30 for wearing clothes that blocked her vision. A niqab is a full veil with just an eye slit, and the traffic stop has become a comedy of unintended consequences, in part because it's not clear that driving in a veil transgresses any French law. But the unnamed woman is married to Lies Habbadj, a halal butcher in Nantes who appears to be a polygamist in every sense but the French legal one. He lives in a house with his wife, surrounded by houses where four other women raise a total of 12 children, ... Read More
Data Seizure at the Airport
May 12, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
Two years ago a freelance journalist named Bill Hogan returned home to Virginia from a trip to Germany and had his laptop seized at Dulles International Airport. U.S. Customs agents reportedly told him he'd been selected for a random investigation. The agents went through photos on his digital camera, he said, and impounded the computer for two weeks. He was especially angry because "they knew I was a reporter," he said at the time. "They did not seem to give a rat's patootie." One underreported aspect of border security in America since 9/11 is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection ... Read More
Banning Burqas on Both Sides of the Atlantic
May 5, 2010 • By •
A fad for outlawing Muslim veils has swept northern Europe this spring. France is on the verge of following Belgium with a bill to force veil-wearing Muslim women to uncover their faces in public or government-managed areas. President Nicolas Sarkozy, who's backing a bill the French parliament will consider this month (May), has claimed the ban is not in any way an attack on Islam. The veils "do not pose a problem in a religious sense," Sarkozy spokesman Luc Chatel said in April, "but threaten the dignity of women." Most Americans might see this European trend as a strange encroachment of ... Read More
Banning Burqas in Europe
April 28, 2010 • By • 6 Comments
Last week, Belgium almost became the first European country to ban wearing full-face veils, before the prime minister attempted to resign and the government collapsed. "We cannot allow someone to claim the right to look at others without being seen," parliamentarian Daniel Bacquelaine, a member of the Reformist Movement party, argued in the weeks before a government crisis in Belgium took everyone's attention off the law he had proposed. "It is necessary that the law forbids the wearing of clothes that totally mask and enclose an individual. Wearing the burqa in public is not compatible ... Read More
